This is something that’s always fascinated me. You’re getting ready for an event. Maybe it’s a public speaking situation, maybe you’re proposing to your [hopefully] soon-to-be-spouse, or maybe it’s an athletic endeavor. The butterflies are out of control, there knocking each other silly as they slam into each other and the inside of your stomach. How much of it do you try to block out and how much do you try to savor?

For most of us, the instinct is to tamp down that nervousness, to calm ourselves, to do anything we can to dial back the stress. But in retrospect, hasn’t that excitedness been part of the fun? The roller coaster ride is terrifying and thrilling at the same time, and usually ends up being more the latter in retrospect. So why not let some of it in?

Like most people, I’ve been put in my fair share of pressure-cooked, stressful, near-panic-producing moments. It’s been a while since I’ve done an Ironman– almost nine years– but the emotional arc remains familiar: The Excel Excitement as I sit at work enthusiastically charting a training plan. The plunge into actual training and the initial high of whipping myself back into shape. The doldrums of training, when life and monotony sneak their way into interrupting those best laid plans. The closing window that forces those final long workouts, or else. And then: The Day Of.

The nerves that come on race day never really fade significantly with experience, it’s just that you get better at managing them. And that’s the thing. If this were a marathon, I’d know exactly (plus or minus) what to expect. Even if I were dusting off the tri bike, I’d remember pretty quickly how the race goes. This is new territory though, and while I’ve been through the Day Of mini-arc before, I really don’t know what to expect out there in the Channel.

And yet, that’s the fun of it. I’m hoping that in the next few months and indeed during the swim, that I neither go so brain dead that I block out all emotion, nor do I get so consumed with the enormity and the unknown of the event that I completely short circuit. I hope that I’m able to let enough nervous energy in that I can funnel it into excitement and energy that will help carry the day. But I also want it to imprint itself in my brain that way, so that long after the swim I’ll remember the whole thing as a thrill, and not something that I mechanically stepped through with Drago-like detachment.

There always comes a point in an endurance race when you say to yourself, “Why am I doing this? My body isn’t built for this. I didn’t train enough. This isn’t fun anymore…no, wait– this just plain sucks and I just want to be done.” I’m sure that moment will come during the swim– from what I’ve gleaned, I should expect it at about the 8H mark– and at that point, I know you just have to work through it. Shut up and swim. It’s always darkest before dawn. When you’re going through hell, keep going. Pick your aphorism.

My only concern is that I’ve found the hardest things in life are when they’re hard in ways you don’t expect. Before my first marathon, I pictured myself in the last few hundred yards before the finish, gutting out the pain with Chariots of Fire music playing in the background. Turns out, that’s rarely if ever how it works out. The hard part is not letting yourself walk (or walk for too long) through aid stations. It’s fighting the urge to stray from your plan when your mind gets jumbled at miles 20+. It’s not letting all those negative thoughts creep in at random points during the race.

That’s all stuff you can read about, and people can tell you to expect, but if you haven’t been through it and thus don’t really know to anticipate it, it can absolutely sideswipe you. And the maybe the most nuanced part of that, is that you don’t realize you’re in a compromised situation. We tell kids all the time to do the right thing, to make the right choice, but 90% of making that work is recognizing that you’re in a situation that demands that a choice be made.

That’s the hard part. It’s not having to decide whether or not to jump into the quarry water at night when all your friends are doing it and egging you on to join in– that’s the black-and-white, ABC After School Special version. It’s the everyone’s-taking-subtle-digs-at-Timmy-and-all-of-a-sudden-I’m-doing-the-same-and-getting-laughs-which-feels-great situation you have to watch out for.

Anyway, I digress a bit I suppose, but the point is I hope to use to my advantage both my enthusiasm and my ability (such that it is) to get into robot mode wherever they’ll help best during the swim.