The Last Great Character Test

I have met some truly admirable versions of Chris Z during races.

At CCC, I stayed with a runner whose headlamp had failed in the mist of Tête Aux Vents, high above Chamonix. We moved through the darkness together until she was safe. Leaving her behind never crossed my mind.

I have also met a complete asshole.

At Western States, I became so consumed by my own demise that I treated the people supporting me with impatience, big-headedness and anger. They had travelled across the world, spent hours driving and waiting (many many hours), prepared food and fresh coffee, solved unsolvable problems and constantly worried about me. I was the center of their entire day and I still acted as though they were failing me.

During the same race, I started too fast because I believed I was stronger than the heat, or at least better prepared than the runners who had warned me. By Devil’s Thumb, very little of that arrogance remained.

Long races do not create these qualities. They simply remove our ability to hide them. They bring out our virtues. And they expose the parts of us we deny.

Standing at a start line means accepting the possibility of failure. Months of preparation can end within hours. The body may refuse, the mind may collapse. Circumstances outside our control may decide the result.

We still start.

Courage is not the certainty that we will succeed. It is the willingness to enter a situation in which success cannot be guaranteed and our self-image may not survive.

By endurance, I mean the ability to remain present when progress becomes slow and unspectacular.

There are long periods in a race without breakthroughs, revelations or visible success. The finish remains endlessly far away. The to-do list is reduced to eating, moving forward, and enduring another stretch of time.

Anyone can feel determined while things are going well. Endurance begins when there is no longer any tangible reward for continuing.

Every long race eventually becomes a problem that has to be solved from within. The great master plan fails, the body behaves differently than expected, conditions change or something essential simply stops working.

At that point, the ability to adapt becomes more important than the ingenuity of the original strategy. Resourcefulness means letting go of the race we imagined and dealing with the one that is actually happening.

That requires creativity, but also honesty. And acceptance. Because there is little value in finding just another solution when the real problem is our refusal to accept reality.

A race lasts a few hours or a few days. The commitment behind it can shape an entire year.

Training before work, changing routines, repeating the same exercises and organizing life around a goal whose outcome remains totally uncertain require more than discipline and good planning.

Devotion means giving time and energy to something because it matters deeply, without knowing whether the investment will ever be rewarded.

It can be beautiful. It can also consume everything around it.

Extreme fatigue does not inevitably make us selfish.

Runners wait for strangers, share food, give away equipment and abandon personal goals to help someone in trouble. Friends and family sacrifice sleep, comfort and time to support a race they are not running themselves.

Compassion under pressure says more about character than any finish time. It proves that even in our own suffering, we can still see and care for others.

Sometimes a runner takes the lead through a difficult section and others fall into their rhythm. My wife Lisa calls it Zügle fahr’n. The person at the front sets the pace and takes a certain responsibility for the group behind them.

Even parts of our mandatory equipment reflect this responsibility. We do not carry a first-aid kit solely for ourselves. We carry it because another runner may need it.

A race is an individual undertaking, but it does not release us from our responsibility towards others. Mutual aid should be a basic principle of how we live together. A race simply puts us in situations where we have to act on it.

Then the darker qualities begin to surface.

Preparation creates confidence. Confidence can quietly turn into the belief that ordinary rules no longer apply to us.

We assume that we have trained harder, planned better and understood more than everyone else. Other runners make mistakes. We make calculated decisions.

This kind of pride is hard to recognize because it often feels like confidence based on experience.

Either way: sooner or later, the race corrects us.

Ahh…. my personal deadly sin. I described it in detail in my Never Enough article.

Whenever I do something faster, farther or entirely new, satisfaction lasts only briefly. Before the experience has settled, my mind has already turned it into a starting point for the next goal.

Hunger is good. It drives development and growth. Greed, on the other hand, destroys the ability to feel that anything is ever sufficient.

The boundary between them is thin, and ambition crosses it easily.

Easily explained: someone else is having the race we wanted. They look stronger. They move faster. Their preparation appears to have worked while ours is collapsing.

Envy is especially uncomfortable in a sport that celebrates mutual support (see above). We want to be generous, yet another person’s success can feel like evidence of our own inadequacy.

The feeling is shameful because it exposes how quickly admiration turns into comparison and comparison into resentment.

Sometimes our disappointment needs a target. Another runner becomes responsible for the pace we can no longer hold or the strength we cannot find. My friend David Rott once described shouting at a runner in the distance, knowing he could not hear him:

“You’re not catching me, asshole!”

The insult was never really about the other runner. Anger simply felt easier than admitting weakness.

A few difficult kilometres can erase months of confidence. Suddenly the training was inadequate, the goal was foolish and every previous success was just luck.

Self-doubt feels convincing because it uses our deepest fears as evidence.

Usually it is a lie. Yet still, it changes our decisions.

The race matters enormously to us. That can create the belief that it should matter equally to everyone around us.

We expect the weather to cooperate and the organizers, volunteers and our support crew to guarantee the experience we imagined. When they cannot, frustration searches for a target.

Entitlement turns gratitude into accusation.

It allows us to treat people badly while continuing to believe that we are the one suffering most.

But what if we avoid the test by dropping out and recording a DNF (Did Not Finish)? After all, if a race is a test of character, a DNF appears to be the clearest possible failure.

At this point, I’d like to mention that this article grew out of a conversation with my friend Christian Bruneß, who raised exactly this question: If a race is a test of character, does a DNF automatically mean we have failed?

From the outside, there seems to be little room for interpretation.

Sometimes quitting is an act of fear. A runner may withdraw because the race has become harder than expected and continuing would expose weaknesses they do not want to face.

But a finish can come from the same weakness.

We continue because stopping would damage our identity. We ignore injuries, medical advice and the concerns of people around us. We allow determination to become recklessness or even self-destruction, then call it courage.

The question is therefore not whether someone stopped. The question is why.

A DNF can be an escape from the test. But it can also be the most difficult decision the test requires.

Stopping may demand humility, responsibility and the willingness to accept a result that will hurt for months. Continuing may demand nothing more than pride and an inability to let go.

The finish line alone proves very little.

A race strips away much of what we like to believe about ourselves. Intentions matter less than what we actually do when the plan breaks and pain narrows our world. The distance between who we want to be and who we are becomes harder to ignore.

Exhaustion distorts as much as it reveals, so a race can never tell the whole truth about us. Still, it leaves evidence. Our better qualities survive pressure, while our worst tendencies lose their cover.

What remains afterwards is a more honest picture of ourselves.

The race ends. What it revealed stays with us.

Ko-fi Was a Tax Problem.

I have stopped using Ko-fi (‘Buy Me A Coffee’ kind of donations tool) because it turned supporting my writing into a surprisingly detailed accounting project. Every tiny payment had to be recorded separately, and my tax advisor came close to a nervous breakdown more than once. I need her for other things and would like to keep her alive.

So, if you would like to support my writing (which still makes me unbelievably happy) the easiest way is a paid subscription here on Substack. Every single one still makes me unbelievably happy.

A paid subscription gives you access to the Das Z [+] articles. It also makes sense if you simply enjoy the free weekly Das Z Letter and consider it worth supporting, which I hope you do.

The dream of making a living from writing is about as unrealistic as the dream of making a living from music (which I never had). I have a day job to pay my bills, like most of you. That is perfectly fine. Still, every paid subscription feels like an affirmation that this little weekly thingy matters to someone other than myself.

It is the salt in the soup, the frosting on the cake and the crema on the espresso.

Thank you in advance.

Immortal Technique has always had one foot in political rap and the other deep inside the conspiracy rabbit hole. The Point of No Return is a prime example. Secret societies, hidden histories, extraterrestrial signals: he throws everything in and does not always draw a clear line between justified suspicion and pure speculation.

I do not have to believe all of it to enjoy listening to him. His anger, urgency and complete refusal to accept the official version of anything still make him compelling to listen to. Beneath all the conspiracy material, he has a point: the story we are given is rarely the whole story.