It was a difficult summer that, in many ways, left me spent. Two deaths in the family. A recurring foot injury. Navigating a new health diagnosis. Managing through the dissatisfaction with my day job. There came a point when it felt like I’d hit the wall—a lack of energy, difficulty focusing, increasing impatience—and that I had no more to give. Every which way I turned, I was looking for just one reason to quit…everything. But, silently, a question kept nagging at me: how much can you endure?
Push Yourself
A few weeks ago, as I was trying to pull myself out of this funk, I picked up a book I had put down several months earlier but hadn’t finished, Alex Hutchinson’s Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. In my morning and night journalling sessions, I’ve complained about work, my lack of energy and focus, and my inability to make progress. That I’m stuck. From my perspective, the tank was empty. I had endured enough, and it was time for [another] reboot.
Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory. – William Barclay
Yes, it may have been time for a reboot, but had I really endured? That was the question I began asking myself as I read about Henry Worsley’s 2009, 2011, and 2015 trips to Antarctica1. He was pushing the limits of human endurance and performance. He was, at times, putting in 16-hour days and traversing heights at 10,000 feet above sea level in subzero temperatures no ‘sane’ human would want to experience. It gave me a new perspective, really forcing me to confront that nagging question: how much can you endure?
How Much Can You Endure?
In my early-twenties, and continuing sporadically into my early-thirties, I dealt with depression. There were times when I didn’t think I’d survive it, but I endured. As I began, in the early 2000s, my journey as a writer, I suffered round after round of rejections that tempted me to quit, but I endured. During the 2023 Toronto Waterfront Marathon, pain exploded in my right foot at the 21km mark, forcing me to walk-run the remainder of the course, but I endured. When I came out—a gay, Black man raised in the Baptist tradition—to ridicule, loathing, and rejection, I endured.
While it may feel as though the tank is empty, I know, know, that I am far from having scratched the surface of the same type of relentless physical demands Worsley faced during his last solo trans-Antarctic trek. Life will try to beat me down, and I may sometimes fall into its trap and throw spectacular self-pity parties, but I also know this: I am not done. I will not give up. Whatever hell I’m going through, I will figure out a way through.
How much can you endure, Marcus? More, more, and more.
And I just want to tell you today that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And, best of all, you do not need anyone’s permission to be—unapologetically—who you are.
- Hutchinson, A. (2018). Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, New York, Custom House, pp. 25–36. [↩]
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