The sun is now rising up slowly over the exposed valley of a million pine trees greeting the light. The Tahoe Forest contours the line between light and shadow as we make our way up and down the trail. We have been racing since pre-dawn 5am. The UTMB Canyons Endurance is a trail running race for elite athletes on a hallowed course made famous by its historic 100-mile race known as “Western States”. Trail running legends have left tens of thousands of footprints on these ancient paths above and across the raging American River. The names of the climbs have a hallowed ring. Devil’s Thumb, the first test of a runner’s mettle, looms ahead. Devil’s Thumb canyon requires a very steep, technical descent down a rocky single track trail; then while your quadriceps are still aching, you must turn around and climb your way out of the depths, adding calf strain to the mix. The previous night’s rain has made the footing very muddy and sticky. There are deep mud pits on the trail right before the descent. Runners quickly choose left or right of the pits and I choose left. There’s a saying amongst ultramarathoners, “Anything can happen in an ultra”. Ominously, true. I run out of dryer ground and find myself deep in the mud, and as I gingerly try to extract myself from the area, the anything that can happen happens. Just as in a previous post, I step too hard with my right foot and find myself sinking rapidly. I pull my foot up to take another step but the mud sucks the shoe right off my foot. I take another step in the goo, my sock now covered in mud. I retrieve the shoe, hobble to the side, wipe what mud I can get off, reshoe my muddy foot and laugh my way down the descent. Despite the unscheduled pit stop, I’m on track to make the 12:30pm cutoff for the next leg-busting climb, Michigan Bluff. I’ll be at the 24-mile mark and I can breathe easily for the briefest of moments when I make it.
In Part 1 of this series, I overviewed four steps needed for manifestation: dreaming, visualizing, feeling, doing. For nearly 30 years in my professional career, manifesting was essential to my success. I worked for a major oil company at their El Segundo, California refinery in the area of process control. I programmed, built, and maintained programmable logic control systems that were used in the production stages of oil refining. This has nothing to do with running but everything to do with manifesting.
As a technician, I sat with engineers designing new or improved ways to increase process flow through the use of programmable logic controllers. In other words, we were dreaming together how to make it all work. As we were fleshing out the concrete details of job design, this required a lot of visualizing on my part as to the time and materials needed to complete the various projects. The engineering staff would do the number crunching required to set budgets and schedules and I would work with my people to coordinate programming with electrical instrumentation.
Having worked on dozens of projects over the years, I had a pretty good feeling for the amount of effort involved in bringing everything together in terms of programming hours needed to complete the project. After 30 plus years of experience, I was pretty close in my project requirement estimates.
Bringing boardroom ideas into the programming lab and actually writing programs reflecting those ideas was just part of the challenge. Interfacing a controller with real life equipment such as pumps, valves, and process measuring devices for obtaining live data was the most rewarding part of the job for me. Testing and retesting through trial and error required programming changes on my part, but seeing the integration of computer software and mechanical equipment to achieve a dream gave me the most job satisfaction.
Although the steps of manifestation were there, dreaming, visualizing, feeling and doing, I had no notion of the idea of manifestation. To me, it was all part of working with programmable logic control systems. When I was learning how to program, my mentor told me something that stuck with me my entire career. If the controller does or does not do something you want it to, it’s because you programmed it that way. The computer doesn’t think for itself, you do.
If life were perfect according to my wishes and desires, every manifestation that I have ever had would work out exactly the way I planned it. This has never happened. Life is not perfect and I have had to make adjustments in everything I have ever done. The success or failure of a given task, if it can be broken down into logical steps, is all dependent on how those steps are executed in a proper sequence of events. This was my premise in all of my manifestations, but I found that events outside of my control always made their presence known in the most unwanted of ways.
I made a statement earlier that every seasoned ultramarathoner has experienced - anything can happen in an ultramarathon. There’s another truism that goes along with that statement: “It’s not a matter of if it will happen but when it will happen”. Experienced ultramarathoners are very good at manifesting. Anyone can dream of running 30 miles or longer in a single event, but it requires the visualizing of the training needed and the motivation to actually do the work to get it done. Running a successful ultramarathon requires mental and physical sacrifice, the actual doing of hundreds of hours of training for months on end to even put oneself within the probability of success.
Programming a programmable logic controller and training for an ultramarathon are two very distinct activities requiring differing skill sets. But these two activities can be successful through the use of manifestation techniques. Dreaming and taking the necessary steps to achieve the dream are common for both activities. And despite the best of efforts for both endeavors, the end goal of the dream is never guaranteed.
With the prospect of hours upon hours of personal sacrifice required for successful manifestation, without the guarantee of success, why embark on the journey in the first place?
If the ultimate goal is not achieved, what is the point of manifesting? To be explored…
dream/visualize/feel/do
great reminder
and the laugh, which rose out of the mud was inspiring!
I think this is such an interesting series, Steve, not just because I get to tag along while you run incredibly long distances (!), but because the idea of manifesting has always caused me a lot of problems. I think this has to do with living in a family that was constantly in a reactive state. We didn't plan, we just dealt with what came. If we did plan at all, it was based on reactive emotion (usually, to perceived threat). So planning for me has always felt dangerous (as has dreaming, visualizing, etc.). I am just beginning to learn how to plan and set goals and not run (no pun intended here) the other way. I am just beginning to learn to trust that my goals and plans might happen, to trust myself.
I have likened the process to learning a foreign language. At first you just try to remember what the Spanish word for the English word is, then eventually, you begin to say the Spanish word before you think the English word, but the process takes time. I'm glad that you speak this particular language more fluently than I do because then I can learn from you!