Amelia Boone
It was 4 a.m. on December 18, 2011, in Englishtown, New Jersey. The temperature read 19 degrees Fahrenheit. Close to 1,000 athletes had lined up the day before to compete in a race called the World’s Toughest Mudder, where the goal was to run as many laps of a 10-mile obstacle course as possible in 24 hours.
Twenty hours in, after hundreds of obstacles and repeated swims and submersions in icy water, all in sub-freezing temperatures, there were 13 of us left out on the course.
In one obstacle, I had to break through a layer of ice before I could submerge myself under the water. I picked up a sheet and held it up to the last remaining volunteer brave enough to stay out there. “This is fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?” I asked, laughing.
“And I’ve never felt more alive,” I added to myself.
So what kept me going on that frigid night when 99% of competitors dropped out? And what enabled me, a corporate attorney with a questionable athletic background, to win multiple world championships in obstacle racing over the next few years, repeatedly enduring conditions horrific enough that I eventually received the nickname “The Queen of Pain”?
It wasn’t my gear or some type of superior athletic ability; after all, I was the kid who came in dead last in the 100-meter dash all through her childhood. Based on that, no one would have ever predicted I’d emerge as a world-champion athlete some 20 years later.
I never really had words to describe how it was that I was able to do what I did; I couldn’t pinpoint why I was successful. In dozens of interviews over the years, I’d stumble repeatedly when the interviewer asked me how I seemed to be so good at enduring conditions that would lead others to quit. I always assumed it was some type of inherent ability that I was born with, but that explanation never really resonated with me.
But when I met Carney for the first time on a winter night in Denver and he described to me his next book project, which he was calling The Wedge, things suddenly clicked. In describing his thesis and all the exploits he undertook to test and research it, he gave a syntax and vocabulary to things that I had felt all along but could never find the words to describe.
Unbeknownst to me at the time of that first World’s Toughest Mudder, the key to my success was the Wedge: It was my ability to separate the logical human response (“Stop this miserable nonsense and get out of here”) from the stimulus (swimming through frozen ponds in sub-freezing temperatures).
That’s not to say that I didn’t feel pain, or that there weren’t times when I was genuinely miserable. But I was able to create space (a wedge, if you will!) between what was happening around me and what was happening within me. I took the inputs the environment was giving me, but I altered the outputs. Through that process, I was able to find the joy in misery and, as a result, an ability to keep going where others would give up.
The brilliant thing about the Wedge is that it’s not something that’s innate in some humans and not others. As you will see in this book, we all use it to some extent at certain times. But the coolest thing is that once you are aware of it, and once you practice using it, the applications are vast and wide-ranging. Sure, you can employ it in long endurance races or climbing shirtless to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, for example, but it’s equally applicable for use while sitting in a traffic jam at 5 p.m. or waiting in line at the DMV.
We live in a world where people are eager to be fed solutions; we all want the secret, but we don’t want to work for it. If you are like me, you may have some fatigue around the concept of “hacks.” The past decade or so has been full of so-called shortcuts to optimize your life: Eat only meat! Eat only plants! Sleep in five-minute increments! Only take cold showers! The list goes on and on. So you may be asking yourself whether this book is just another book full of them.
Thankfully, it’s not. We don’t need to be fed more quick and dubious solutions; what we need is a method and a framework to adapt to the ever-changing stimuli and problems in our lives. And this requires practice, hard work, and constant curiosity around how we experience moments in our lives. It’s been something that I’ve honed over years and years of repeated exposure to different stimuli and difficult situations — and, like all things, it’s still a work in progress for me. In every race, and every different life scenario, I’m using the Wedge.
Last year, I taped a note up on my bathroom mirror. It read as follows:
“If you expect to be miserable, you will be miserable.
If you think you will be in pain, you will be in pain.
If you tell yourself ‘This is fucking amazing and I’ve never felt more alive,’ it’s pretty incredible the joy and meaning you can find in any situation.”
The mind is powerful. The Wedge is powerful. Learn how to use them wisely, and you will learn to live.