How do you keep going one hundred kilometers, sixty-two miles?

They lean in, expecting the answer to be a majestic secret. A perfect training cycle. The right shoe. A specific thing they can do and take home.

That’s not really the right question.

The real question is what do you do when the loop turns on you?

The Aslinger Ultramarathon isn’t just a race. It’s a carefully designed trap. Loop after loop around Arena Park in Cape Girardeau, the same trees, the same turn, the same uneven patch of pavement you’ve successfully avoided for thirty miles. Until mile forty-one, when you don’t. Every distraction has burned away. The scenery stopped changing miles ago. Just you and that loop, over and over.

The race has one job. It wants to find the bottom of you.

I’ve stood at the start of another lap knowing my hamstring is aching, my feet are on fire, my headlamp is flickering, and that reasonable voice has started making its case. It whispers. It reasons. It points at the same tree you’ve passed forty times and says you’ve already seen everything this place has to show you. Just stop.

That voice sounds like wisdom. It isn’t.

Here’s what nobody warns you about. Your body lies.

Not sometimes. Constantly. It files official-sounding reports from your legs and your lungs and your feet, and every single one of them is exaggerated. You can’t finish this lap. You have nothing left. This is where it ends. The body delivers these messages with complete confidence, the way a doctor reads a chart. Authoritative. Final. And wrong.

Because you can. You just have to stop listening. Ted Lasso knew that.

He had a sign above his office door. One word. Believe. People laughed at it. Opponents laughed at it. It looked naive hanging there in a football locker room full of professionals who’d seen how the world actually works.

The sign wasn’t about talent. It wasn’t about tactics. It was about refusing to let the loudest voice in the room be the one that says you’re done.

Your body is that voice on mile fifty-eight of the Aslinger. Loud. Convincing. Wrong.

Somewhere on that loop, probably right past the uneven patch of pavement, I decided to stop believing the reports. The pain is real. The cutoffs are real. But the moment you accept someone else’s terms for your ending, you’ve already quit.

A road race pulls you forward with novelty. New neighborhoods. Different intersections. The Aslinger strips all of that away. The sameness is the whole point. Your brain reaches for novelty and finds the same tree, the same turn, the same pavement. Until the only thing left is you and the story your body is telling and the choice to believe it anyway.

So you stand at the start of the next lap. You hear the story. You lace up.

Some people call that stubbornness. My crew calls it insanity.

But every finish line I’ve ever crossed came through that same narrow doorway, because I stopped believing every word my body filed against me.

That’s the whole five minutes.

The fractured relationship. The diagnosis. The thing that keeps looping back no matter how many times you’ve already faced it. Your body, your fear, or your grief will tell you that you can’t.

It’s lying.

Believe anyway. Take one more lap.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​