My distance from the finish line also helped, surprisingly. Back in Boulder, I might have predicted the opposite—that the unimaginably long way to go would make the pain more acute by making the journey feel impossible—but that wasn’t what happened at all. Instead, I was freed from thinking about the finish line altogether. It remained a faraway thing, an abstraction. My mind didn’t have to whirl through calculations about whether or not I could withstand all this punishment for the next X or Y hours. I had to forget about how many hours or days I had left. Why bother calculating? So I thought
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