“we can’t get any wetter” as sobering “inspiration”

I was a shrimpy little freshman cross country runner. A 13-year-old weighing somewhere around 80 pounds. None of the boys’ jerseys were small enough so coach gave me a girls’ one. You could tell because the shoulder straps were wider than the ones on the boys’ jerseys (to conceal the sports bra). 

It poured for a couple days before one of the first races of that first season. The 5k course was soup. Every dip and depression was full of water. Even the flat stretches seemed to have become minor lakes. You couldn’t really tell where the deep puddles were. 

By the end of the first mile, I was drenched all the way through. I could feel water squelching out of my shoe each time my foot hit the ground. My socks were heavy. Mud was all over my face.

I spent most of the first half of the race feeling sad and sorry for myself. I was not running particularly fast and I was in the badlands of a cross-country race - running alone, without teammates for solace or rabbits to chase. Also, it hurt. I wasn’t in good shape yet. I had a side stitch and incipient blisters. 

All of that was expected crumminess. Then you had all that damn water. 

Something remarkable happened though, about halfway through that race. 

It started to rain. 

What had been a lamentably bad situation became a comically bad one. I was already soaked clean through my underpants, headed for an embarrassing finishing time, and regretting everything pretty much up to and including having been born. 

Once it started raining, I had a dumb epiphany that has stuck in my memory for the ~25 years since:

“I can’t get any wetter.”

It could have rained harder. Spectators could have doused me with buckets. I could have jumped headfirst into the puddles. None of that would have made me wetter. I was as wet as I could get. I was not achieving much that day. But I had achieved saturation. 

Realizing this was freeing in the face of several bad facts that had not changed. I still had a long way to go in the race. I wasn’t going to win or achieve a personal best. I couldn’t go back and run the earlier miles faster. Also, I was deep enough into the course that if I bailed out of the race and walked to the bus, I’d have to do the same crummy thing I was already doing, just slower, with more shame.

But it couldn’t get worse. I had bottomed out and I knew it.

I finished the race with a lightness that verged on joy. It sucked, all of it sucked, but I didn’t quit. It hurt, it didn’t stop hurting, but the pain seemed to matter less. I was released from dread. I wasn’t anxious. I could look at my pain and the soaked through girls’ jersey chafing my chest and the awful muddy straightaway ahead as facts independent of me; objects to consider at arm’s length. Specimens of a shitty day some little freshman was experiencing. That little freshman was me and that shitty day was mine but somehow it didn’t feel that way for the last 11-12 minutes of that race. 

I’ve told this story to teams before when we’ve been reckoning with really bad facts of our own. When things are the worst they’ve ever been, I have not found it helpful to pretend to the team that it is otherwise. What is so may be very bad. Leaders I’ve loved most level with me on that. Then they ask, “so what?” Given who we’ve said we are here to be for each other, what are we going to do about it? What is yours to do?

Their positivity in the face of the suckiness is not false or falsifying. It’s gratitude for the discovery of rock bottom and a resolve to keep moving forward. To continue “positing” something in service to the mission. 

When you can’t get any wetter and you know it - you’ve opened a gift. 

-Eric