Just (Un)Believable Enough: Part Ⅰ

Fictionalizing parts of adulthood

Photo by Krivec Ales.

Hello, and here’s to the lies we tell ourselves.

All the best lies are created for children. “A magical bearded stranger is going to come down the chimney and give you presents.” “This spoon of nondescript mush is an airplane.” “THIS WON’T HURT.” Charming deceptions for innocent minds, designed to delight, protect… and crumble forever upon contact with the skepticism and critical thinking skills required to function in a world where there are no magical strangers, spoons are really rather disappointing, and things most definitely hurt.

I’m thinking about this a couple of days before my first race of the season. It’s just a training race—a glorified long run in the buildup to my goal race later in the year. As is the accepted convention, I’ve made a T-shirt for myself with the words “It’s just a training race, lol” on it, and plan to verbally reiterate this to anybody and everybody on the day of the event.

Grown-ups get lied to, too, the thought continues. But, setting aside the obviously bad (as in, “malicious”) deceptions, even the white lies of adulthood simply aren’t as good. “My phone died.” “This looks good on you.” “I’ve read Infinite Jest.” Those are the sort of snoozers we start getting after we turn seven.¹

The thing is, the race is much too long to be a training race, and it’s too close to my goal race. And, if I’m being honest, I do have a time goal in mind—achievable if I floor it on the runnable sections. That’s not how you do a training race.

I’m not, though. Being honest. Despite what it says on my awesome T-shirt, it’s not “just a training race, lol”; it’s “a big fat race-race, yikes emoji.”

But this isn’t about my race, nor is it about the little white lies we’re told as children. This is about the little white lies we grow up to tell ourselves.

‡ + †

Deceptions are only as good as the belief of the deceived. Perhaps it’s not that childhood lies are so great, but that children are great at being lied to—they’re excellent believers.

What about grown-ups’ ability to believe? Nothing against skepticism and critical thinking, they’re absolutely swell, but what if we wanted to add a touch of magic to adulthood?

It seems as if, as we grow older, more and more good things become unbelievable. But we do not lose our ability to believe, far from it. It just evolves into a different, more complex mechanism. Spoon airplanes may no longer be possible, but—perspective-taking! ambiguity! nuance! awareness of bias and cognitive dissonance!—adult beliefs are exciting in their own way (although I will forever lament the loss of utensil aircraft).

+ † ‡

Ultrarunning can make you believe a lot of things. While some of them are true, nowhere does it say they all have to be, and so I’ve often found myself believing in whatever I need to or want to on a particular occasion, regardless of its correspondence to reality. Almost as if echoing, knowingly or not, those charming deceptions I used to believe when I was this many 🖐️.

Those stories we tell ourselves, particularly while in the throes of mental or physical struggle, have always fascinated me—not least because often we don’t really believe them, not in the way a child would, yet we very much act as if we do. And such a good job we do of acting that we succeed in hoodwinking ourselves into forfeiting critical thinking in favor of a more desirable version of reality.

​

my favorite race-day self-delusions, ranked

We’ve already established that my “training race” is nothing but words intended to take the pressure off and downplay expectations, but the real hoodwinking extravaganza takes place on race day. And, while I appreciate “Looking good!” and “You’re almost there!” and the race volunteers whose silver-tongued mouths such baloney comes out of, my favorite baloney remains my own.

So, here are the top five made-up stories I tell myself at races, and the real-life psychological phenomena that are to blame.

​

5. “it’s just impostor syndrome.”

(& the Impostor Phenomenon)

This one is tricky because it can just as easily be true.

The Impostor Phenomenon has been raining on people’s parades long before the term’s coinage in 1978 (before that, it was called Gosh-Golly-I’m-a-Cucumber-in-a-Jar-of-Pickles Syndrome). Initially thought to apply only to high-achieving women,² it is a skewed perception of one’s abilities, tricking the person into attributing their success to luck and fearing they could be exposed as a fraud at any time.

Some years ago, I was standing at the improvised start line of an experimental, fat-ass-style event (no fee, no awards, no aid stations). The intimate group of 20 or so starters did not provide the anonymity of a big crowd (not to mention most of us knew one another), so everybody was free to side-eye, judge, and ask uncomfortable questions about the training of everybody else. Or that’s how I felt anyway—judged and uncomfortable—looking around at my fellow competitors and wondering who among them would be the one to figure out how wholly underprepared I was.

To quote 37 bajillion books and articles on the subject, recognizing the signs of impostor syndrome is the first step to correcting your attitude.

But you know what? It’s not always impostor syndrome, and attitude is not a substitute for proper training. That my feeling of inadequacy could, hypothetically, be attributed to trickery of the mind did not in the slightest change the fact that, in this case, I was indeed wholly underprepared. Yet I still tried to convince myself my insecurity was somehow unfounded: “It’s just impostor syndrome. I’ve got this.”

I don’t know whether I was the only one thinking that. But I was the only one who didn’t finish.

• Effectiveness: 🐒🐒

• Repeatability: Yes, unfortunately.

• Manifestation: Sweaty, ill-advised confidence.

• Spoon-airplane factor: Minimal.

• Comedic potential: Comedy is a DNF plus time.

​

4. “nope.”

(& garden-variety denial)

Pain, injuries, hunger, fatigue, poor pacing, those gunmetal-colored clouds that weren’t there a moment ago—I have denied them all their existence, and thus they have disappeared forever. Yes they have, yes they have, yes they have.

• Effectiveness: 🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒

• Repeatability: Who’s to say?

• Manifestation: Nothing to see here.

• Spoon-airplane factor: Depends on the reality being denied.

• Comedic potential: That cloud looks like a butt, haha.

​

3. “the hardest part is just starting.”

(& activation energy)

Occurring before the start and gradually eroding as the race progresses, this is the belief that once I take the first few steps, the rest will seem easier. On race morning, on the climate-controlled side of my hotel door, along with my coffee, I like to savor the thought that I don’t have to work for the hardest part—it will fall into my lap, and it will be over as soon as I get going.

HAHAHA, what? Sweet, innocent me, you think this is hard? You think marshaling your determination on fresh legs and unblistered feet and a cooperative stomach on a full night’s sleep is hard? That’s not how accumulated fatigue works, that’s not how causality works.

But it’s how activation energy works. In the field of chemistry, “activation energy” refers to the minimum amount of energy required to trigger a chemical reaction. In psychology, the term has come to apply to the motivation to begin a task. The more daunting or difficult the task, the more motivation is needed, or we might choose to do something else instead.

As a parenthetical, I think “The hardest part is just starting” is a bit misleading, and a better phrasing would be “The easiest part is just continuing.” But anyway, the idea is that maintaining momentum requires much less effort than overcoming inertia. And we’re just parroting Isaac Newton now (first law), so to chemistry and psychology, we can add physics. All in all, at least on paper, “The hardest part is just starting” is based on airtight logic.

I don’t know what to tell you about ultrarunning and logic, but there is a harder part. Much harder. Often inconceivably harder. And if you don’t believe there is, you haven’t run far enough.

But that’s not the type of thing I want my brain fixating on with the entirety of the race distance still left to cover. Convincing myself that starting is the biggest hurdle reduces the amount of activation energy required to finish that cup of coffee and get out the door. By the time it turns out not to be true, I’ll have bigger problems to deal with, such as staying awake or lifting my feet off the ground.

Yes, when the actual hardest part begins, it will be a battle of survival. Not in any real sense, of course—and that’s your sneak peek into Part Ⅱ because I have to go pack for an unnecessarily long race now.

• Effectiveness: 🐒🐒🐒🐒

• Repeatability: Somehow, yes.

• Manifestation: I’m on the race course.

• Spoon-airplane factor: It’s more like a grown-up version of “This won’t hurt.” Subsequent disappointment ranges from mild and brief to sore and lingering.

• Comedic potential: Inversely related to the level of disappointment.

† ‡ +

Make sure to subscribe to get second and first place in your inbox! I’ll give you another hint: one has to do with recency bias, the other—with willing suspension of disbelief.

Just (Un)Believable Enough: Part Ⅱ

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed your time here, please share “Just (Un)Believable Enough: Part Ⅰ” or this newsletter with a friend. Then go have great power with great responsibility.

1. Megan Zander, “The Age of Reason,” Scholastic, April 12, 2019, https://www.scholastic.com/parents/family-life/social-emotional-learning/development-milestones/age-reason.html.

2. Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes, “The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice 15, no. 3 (1978): 241–47, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006.