You can do more than you think.

Sunday in October. Two weeks before we went to Baja to pre-run the course. “Pre run” means you ride the course one time. It would take five long hard days of riding. Days only; no nights. The idea is to see the whole course. How can you remember thousands of turns and a billion rocks? Amazingly, pre-running helps a lot. You know what you’re getting into. You remember some danger spots and learn what lines are better than others from your mistakes.

I had been working extra hard this year, and hadn’t had a vacation. I was looking forward to the trip, even though this would not be relaxing in any way.

It was Sunday at CrossFit. On Sundays you work as a team with two others. It was the last few seconds of the workout and I was doing “box jumps” where you jump from the floor up onto a 24” high wooden box. I picked up my pace to get more reps in to improve our team score, and I made a mistake. My toe caught the side of the box and my knee came down on the edge, with my full body weight following. I dropped to all fours in pain. A golf ball size bump appeared below my knee in 30 seconds. My race…

Your quadricep muscles run down the front of your leg and terminate to a tendon that runs under your kneecap and becomes the patellar ligament, which then attaches to your tibia. It’s a pulley system. When you contract your quadriceps, it pulls the tendon which is attached to your lower leg, pulling your lower leg up and your knee straight. Right where it attaches is where I smashed it, and I couldn’t bend my knee without using that tendon.

Tanner had assembled an eight-person team for a “Ragnar Relay” that was to start five days later. It’s a running race in the woods in New Jersey. There are three loops of four, five and seven miles each. Each team member would have to run each loop once, for a total of 16 miles per runner. Only two of our team members have ever run that far in a day. I wasn’t one of them. I did complete a half marathon twice that year, and each time I was spent, with legs like concrete at the end.

In this Ragnar Relay race, the team sets up a camp, and one team member goes out for their first loop while the others wait.  When runner one finishes their first loop, runner two takes off. You keep doing that through the day on a Friday, and all through the night, running in the woods with a headlamp. The team keeps running on Saturday until all eight members finish their three loops. 

I was looking forward to this race, but with the knee injury I could hardly walk, never mind run. I had to cancel and try to get it better for the Baja pre-run trip in two weeks. 

The team scrambled to replace me. Nobody stepped up. In fact, two other team members also had to cancel. Now down to five runners, they decided to split the missing three runners 48 miles up between them to whoever could run them. Really? That means the five of them would have to run about the equivalent of a marathon – in the woods, half at night! 

It was an epic display of determination. To make it even harder, after running two of her loops, Sydney fell downhill in the rocks and was out with a knee injury. Mike Lane, who never ran anything close to that distance, ran 16 miles! Colleen Brown ran 26 miles! Tom Matthews ran 32 miles! And team captain Tanner ran 46 miles! Astonishingly, they finished in 30^th place out of 146 teams – and they had only five team members instead of eight!

Friends…teammates…people counting on us or watching us. That’s how we can get motivated. We do it for them, and they do it for us. It’s a synergistic relationship where all parties go beyond where they would have if they were by themselves. Would Tom have been out there in the woods with a headlamp on, running his 32^nd mile if he wasn’t part of a team? “No way!” he says. 

 We want to do more and do better for our team. At work, at home, anywhere – other people make us better.

 I was so bummed I wasn’t there to participate or even see them push themselves beyond their limits.

What can you do? You never know until you try.