The Pants of Perspective: One Woman's 3,000 Kilometre Running Adventure through the Wilds of New Zealand

by Anna McNuff

A shocking life lesson was beginning to dawn on me – if you work hard for something, you don’t always get what you want. And that’s okay, but it stings like a bitch.

I would announce what I intended to do to all my friends and family, and then embark on a journey which I didn’t know I could complete. I was afraid I wouldn’t finish, and that made me too afraid to start.

I learned the difference between pain and injury, when to rest and when to push on.

I tried my best not to think about quite how far I had to go, and to just think about today instead. Today would do for now.

Those voices – they were the soldiers of self-doubt and they marched frequently on my castle of confidence.

Although my body was tired, it was my thoughts that were the most destructive, and so I bound them to the trees and the triangles and continued with the mantra.

‘No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way,’ and smiled.

A life lesson dawned on me: you can’t sit around waiting for the rain to stop. There may never be a ‘good time’ to go, but you just have to and hope the weather clears up.

If there was any hint of stress in his life, I’d certainly never caught wind of it and I couldn’t help but feel that this was a choice he’d made long ago. The path he’d chosen in life lent itself to fear and panic on certain occasions, but, as his tales of canoeing the Yukon would attest, not to stress.

It was a wider tantrum resulting from a dangerous dabble with the notion of expected rewards.

walking around, it struck me how cruel a thing expectation and imagination can be.

For some reason, actually admitting to myself when something felt crap always seemed to help.

My tactic for the day, as always on tough days, was to break the distance down into chunks.

‘Gravity is not your friend. Take small steps and wait for the top to come.’

I felt I knew how I would feel each day, like my mood for the rest of the adventure was a foregone conclusion over which I had no control.

As I exhaled I erased everything that had happened that day so far from my mind, and pretended once more that I was just out for a 9-km run.

From the moment you allow yourself to think that you’re almost there, well, it’s then that it becomes inexplicably difficult to keep moving forward.

I refused to spend the final month waiting for the end to come, because it felt suspiciously like those working weeks where you live only for the weekend. And balls to those weeks, I say.

‘Doing a one eighty is when you turn yourself a full one hundred and eighty degrees and take another look at the situation. You realise there must be another way to see things. Normally, a better way. As soon as you “do the one eighty” life becomes a lot more fun.’

I discovered that contentment is better than any form of ecstasy. Elation excites; contentment nourishes. It is the rarest feeling of all, and one to be cherished.