The Words That Drive Me: Time To Get Tough
I was so close to setting a new ultramarathon cycling record that I could almost taste it.
It was the eighth day of the 1983 race, and I was in Arizona, only 488 miles from San Diego. All of the elements for victory were in place. I trained hard, assembled the right crew and did everything necessary to break my previous record. At thirty-nine years old, I was in the best shape of my life. Going faster than I ever thought possible. I would cross the entire United States in nine days if I stayed on this pace. You could hardly drive much faster.
Broken
But instead of breaking the record that year, I broke my collarbone. A dust devil blew me off my bike. It was one of those menacing whirlwinds called “ghost spirits” by the Navajo. Formed when hot air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler low-pressure air, they create a funnel-like chimney. Most are weak and dissipate within a minute of forming, but others can grow to be large and intense, with concentrated winds that become quite dangerous. When the dust devil struck me and I started falling, I knew it was bad. I hit the asphalt and heard a loud, unmistakable crack—and there I was again, splayed out on the highway.
In that moment, everything changed.
I had been there before, broken and bleeding. In 1977, a motorcycle accident nearly killed me, riding home on a damp August evening six weeks after opening Great American Cookies. My partner, Arthur Karp, and I started the cookie company with only $8,000, and it became more successful than we ever could have imagined. Then, in a moment, everything changed.
Once again, I was facing something unexpected, daunting, and larger than life. I found myself in the shadow of Goliath, the latest giant haunting me for so many years. But this dust devil would not defeat me when I was so close to reaching my goal. While waiting for my collarbone to be x-rayed, before I told my wife Donna, I started sketching out what I needed to do to prepare for the next race. The doctor told me I could start training immediately, as long as I kept pressure off my shoulder.
Time to Get Tough
When I got home, I set my bike up and started a regimen that felt familiar. It was only a few years since I first climbed on a stationary bike while trying to recover the full range of motion in my legs after my nearly fatal motorcycle accident. Now I was broken again, but I was back on the bike. It was a painful process. I needed a stool to get onto the seat. Even the lightest pressure on my right arm brought excruciating pain. So, it took everything I had to just stay upright.
I finally resorted to saying out loud, “You’ve got to do this. You can’t waste any time. It’s time to get tough.” When I finished that first session, I grabbed a piece of paper and scrawled with my left hand “TTGT” and taped it on the bathroom mirror. Later that day I told Donna that I needed to make signs with that slogan to put around the house. This was before personal computers were common, so I hired a graphic designer who hand-painted fifty of them on four- and two- inch-square card stock. I posted them everywhere, even inside the refrigerator. I gave them to my crew and placed them on all of my bikes and all over my office.
Every time I felt like giving up, the abbreviation for “Time to Get Tough” slapped me in the face. And it made all the difference.
