Audacious Goals

Shoot your shot...

Photo by Samuel Pagel on Unsplash

“Oh, my god. I haven’t had this many carbs in I don’t know how long. I think it has been over 15 years since I had a pancake. My kids are going to freak when I tell them,” my friend Amy said as we waited for our brunch at Pamela’s Diner. She came to visit from Knoxville, and we were eating our way through Pittsburgh’s Strip District.

“Your digestive tract must be wondering who has hijacked Amy. I bet it is very confused.”

“Exactly!”

About that time, our pancakes and Pittsburgh hash arrived at the table. The pancake looked as good as it had been billed: thin with crispy edges, perfectly browned, and a big dollop of butter in the middle. The Obamas fell in love with these pancakes, making them famous outside their local sphere. 

Did they live up to the hype? Yes. Yes, they did.

Amy and I had walked to the Strip District from my Airbnb in Bloomfield and were following the advice of her friend and colleague, a Pittsburgh native. After Pamela’s, we went to Enrico’s for biscotti, Mancini’s for bread, and wandered around Penzy’s and the Pennsylvania Macaroni Co. We ducked into Penn Avenue Pottery, and each got a mug that seemed to be made for us. Thank goodness for locals who know what they are talking about. I would have passed these gems by and missed out on the best pancakes I have ever eaten, and I would never have smelled the fresh bread in Mancini’s.

The next day, we went on an urban hike on the south side of Pittsburgh, climbing and descending hundreds of stairs and enjoying amazing views. Hungry after the walk, we went to Primanti Bros because we were told we had to. They are famous for their sandwiches. What makes them so good? As the story goes, they set up a sandwich shop in the 1930s to cater to truck drivers dropping off and picking up their cargo at the docks. The sandwiches were served with fries and slaw, which was too messy for the drivers. The solution? Put the fries and slaw IN the sandwich. What kind of genius is this? We split the Reuben, and who knew that adding coleslaw and fries could make the perfect sandwich better? The Primanti Bros. Obviously.

We had a delicious curry lentil soup from Brothmonger in Bloomfield, got a takeout pizza from Pizza Italia, and ate it at Spill, paired with some excellent Italian wine. Some restaurants have BYOB; Spill is BYOF. They supply the wine; you bring your food. Amy and I did a puzzle while watching cheesy Christmas movies in the cozy Airbnb and drank Kombucha from the local co-op. It was a great visit, even if it did shock the hell out of Amy’s GI system.

About a week ago, my son suggested I listen to a recent Rich Roll podcast featuring a runner and coach named David Roche. David is a super nerdy science-y dude who recently achieved the seemingly impossible—he broke a 19-year-old record at this year’s Leadville 100 running race. For those who don’t follow ultra running or have a son obsessed with running who keeps you in the loop, the Leadville 100 has been around since 1983, is iconic, and is a beast. The 100-mile course traverses the mountains around Leadville, CO, so the air is thin, and the climbs are steep. This guy ran it in 15:26.34, beating an up-until-then unbreakable record by 16 minutes. And the kicker to all of this is that he had never run a 100-mile race before. Most of his training weeks totaled around 70 miles. How did he do it? He is not even sure exactly what combination of ingredients created the perfect conditions for him to shatter this record the first time he ran a century race.

Months before he ran Leadville, David set an audacious goal of breaking the almost two-decade-old record. He didn’t keep this goal to himself. He put it out there on running forums. His assertion that he could break the record was not based on hollow confidence or cockiness; it was all based on his training methods and going over some numbers and making a magical spreadsheet. He had no idea if he could really do it, but he trusted his training and his spreadsheet. He went for it and in his words, ran fearlessly.

The podcast is long and contains all sorts of stuff specific to running and endurance sports, which is interesting, but it is when the conversation veers toward the emotional, psychological, and even spiritual that it begins to speak to me. At some point, David describes running an ultramarathon as stripping away all the stuff that was not him, allowing him to meet himself at his essence. The coolest part—he loved that person he met on the unforgiving Leadville trails.

Now we’re speaking my language.

At about the 2:10 mark of the podcast (I said it was long), David says that he thinks his job as a coach, and now as a runner who practices what he preaches, is to get his athletes to shoot the shot they are scared to take. “Unless you take 100 of them, then you’ll never have the one that swishes from halfcourt,” he says. He is such an advocate for this madness that he wants everyone to choose some goal that is so freakishly scary and so seemingly impossible that it “motivates daily process that is fulfilling so that at the end of the day if you don’t achieve the goal, it is okay.” He wants people to go for something beyond their wildest dreams and set an audacious goal that they don’t think they have a shot of fulfilling.

Yes. Yes. YES.

About 15 minutes later in the discussion, David makes this plea again, with a little twist. He encourages people to try that big scary thing that they are intimidated by and KNOW that they are enough as they are, so if they fail, it’s no big deal. All of us have nothing to lose. We just need to realize that. We can all run fearlessly.

Earlier this year, I set the big, scary, hairy, audacious goal of finding my new home without any roadmap that had led me in the past. I had no idea how to go about doing this, and the idea and process scared the crap out of me. (My process, if I could even call it that, did not involve a spreadsheet.) What if I failed? How would I even know if I achieved what I set out to do? These questions paralyzed me at the beginning. At times, it seemed impossible, fanciful, crazy, and impractical. But this crazy idea did what the most recent Leadville champ advocates—it created a process that has been deeply and surprisingly fulfilling. I did not expect that at all when I left Michigan in April.

Through this process, I met myself as I am over and over and over, whether it was in therapy, spending more time alone than I ever have in my life, trying new things in unfamiliar cities, confronting my thoughts and beliefs, taking the advice of locals, or walking across Spain. The more I have let the things that defined me for decades fall away, the more I love who I meet. The more I do stuff that scares me regularly, the smaller and smaller my fear becomes. The bonus—I have experienced some super cool things this year, big and small, that I would never have done if I had run for security and safety immediately. I didn’t see any of this coming. When I am in the middle of an urban hike and looking out over the dozens of Pittsburgh bridges or eating a crazy good sandwich or enjoying a delicious biscotti and coffee and wondering how the hell I got here, I am dangerously close to getting Too Blessed to Stress tattooed on my chest. Thank goodness I have friends who would rein me in!

So, as 2024 comes to a close and people are looking ahead to a new year, I echo David Roche. At the risk of sounding like a Home Goods sign, it is my wish, too, that people set an audacious goal for themselves and shoot that ridiculously scary shot. Chances are it will not be breaking the record at Leadville. Maybe it is knitting an intricate fisherman’s sweater or creating a beautiful flower garden or picking up singing again or running a 5K or writing a book or learning how to throw a pot. Maybe it is eating at all the places your friend suggests in Pittsburgh even if it means eating more carbs than seems reasonable. Anything that gets you out of your routine and creates a fulfilling process you can be proud of. Anything that allows you to try and learn and stretch and fail and have fun over and over and over and over to the point where achieving the goal itself seems secondary because you know that if you succeed or fail, you are loved. There is nothing to fear.

And who knows, whatever goal you set and the process it creates may lead you to the world’s best pancake.