Go One More
I’m dropping back to one article a week. I tried doubling the pace to build a daily writing habit, but it backfired. I was writing less, not more, procrastinating until the night before, sometimes the morning of.
It’s hard to write about something meaningful when you just wrote something two days ago. Ideas need time to breathe. I’d rather take the week to observe, scribble notes, and let a topic show up uninvited.
I don’t want to force a point just because it’s Thursday. The best writing feels like it had to happen. And anyway, no one unsubscribes because they’re not getting enough email. Everyone’s inbox already looks like a garage sale exploded.
Over Memorial Day weekend, I caught myself glued to my phone, but for once it felt worth it. Nick Bare, founder of Bare Performance Nutrition, was hosting a backyard ultramarathon that bordered on psychotic. It’s called the Go One More Ultra Marathon. Every hour, on the hour, runners had to finish a 4.2-mile loop in brutal Texas heat. The faster you ran, the more time you had to rest before the next loop. Miss the hour cutoff or quit and you’re out. Last person standing wins.
After two straight days, only two runners remained. They just kept going. Into night three, they’d run over 230 miles. That’s when a storm swept in with lightning, 80 mph winds, and sideways rain. The race was called off. Not because the runners stopped. Because nature decided they’d had enough.
All they were chasing was a horseshoe that said “FINISHER.”
No prize money. No crowd. Just two people testing the outer limits of human willpower. Every hour, their legs said no, their brains said stop. And still they stood up and said, “One more.”
That’s what got me. We’re all capable of more than we think, but most people listen to the voice in their head that tells them to quit. And why not? The brain is trying to protect you. Thousands of years of survival instinct protecting you from making a bad decision that could get you killed.
You don’t need unshakable self-belief. You just need to stop believing the overprotective voice that says you can’t.
Mindset is the great separator. Chris Rock says you’ve got three options in life: be brilliant, be infamous, or be a victim. Victim’s the easiest. It costs nothing and demands nothing. Just blame someone or something else and stay stuck. But you can’t go one more and be a victim at the same time.
You will run into times when your mind tells you to stop. It’s too risky. What makes you think you can do this? It’s going to be hard. What if we could turn down that voice and overpower it with one that yells “Do one more”? What if that voice got so loud we stopped doubting what we can accomplish?
Jesse Itzler has a name for this. He calls it a Misogi. Inspired by an annual Japanese purification ritual in sacred waterfall, lakes or rivers. His version? You do one hard thing a year. One big, scary, uncomfortable thing that becomes your filter for every decision the rest of the year. to ask youself: Will this help or hurt my ability to complete the Misogi challenge?
It could be a marathon. A brutal hike. A multi-day bike race. Something ridiculous.
I’ve decided mine for 2026. I’m doing the Texas Water Safari. It’s a 200-mile canoe race from New Braunfels to the Gulf Coast in less than 100 hours. The fastest teams finish in a little over 40 hours I’ve been asked to do it before and half-committed. This time I’m in. Writing this down is me committing.
It’s scary. It’ll hurt. But it’s possible. The real challenge is learning to sit with the discomfort, hear the voice that says “stop,” and do it anyway. I’ve got a year to train that voice.
Time to practice discomfort.
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