The Two-Minute Rule I Learned at Mile Eighty

Somewhere around mile eighty of a hundred-mile race, everything stops making sense as a distance and starts making sense as a mood. My mood, at that particular aid station, was that I was done. Not injured, not out of time, just finished with the whole idea of moving forward on purpose.

A volunteer I'd never met and never saw again looked at me for about two seconds and said, "Sit for two minutes, not twenty." That was the entire piece of advice. No inspirational speech, no offer to carry my pack to the finish. Just a number, because he'd clearly watched a hundred other runners sit down for two minutes and turn into people who sat down for an hour.

I have used that rule for exactly none of my hundred-mile races since, because I quit ultras before I ever needed it again. But I have used it for basically everything else — bad weeks, slow mornings, projects that stall out. The urge to stop is fine. The urge to stay stopped is the one that gets you. Set a timer, not a mood.