Book Club Resources — randykwriter

BOOK CLUB RESOURCES - Perhaps Joy is the Reward

Hello Book Club leaders, members, and Podcast Hosts!

Perhaps Joy is the Reward is a book worth dissecting in various ways. Here are three different approaches to discussing its contents.

Big Story Discussion.

This approach analyzes PJR at a high level to discover how it moves readers (runners and non-runners alike!) through the physical and mental stages of completing the biggest challenges of their lives. Rather than deal with detailed chapter content, the Big Story Discussion translates the broad experiences and lessons learned by the author, through the progression of his journey, into the readers’ personal experiences, motives, hardships, and joys on their progression through difficult things.
Example questions: In the first four chapters, as the author’s distances and time on feet increased, he learned numerous new things about his body. Have there been times in your life when new challenges pushed your limits? Did unanticipated physical problems arise at those times? How did you deal with them?

Specific Details Discussion.

The questions in this section walk the group through an in-depth discussion of the key events, learnings, and discoveries in PJR, with all the questions tailored to draw out the readers’ personal stories as they relate to the details of the book.
Example questions: Early in the author’s running journey, his stronger neighbour, who always chugged by him on their climb home, said, “This hill is your friend.” That moment was game-changing. Who is “that person” or “that guy” in your life? Do they get under your skin? Have their words and actions been motivating or deflating for you?

Stand-Alone Chapter/Seminar Discussions.

The book contains a few chapters that stand alone as focused topics of discussion. The Seminar Discussions can be used if club members (or podcast hosts) see value in going deeper into these more narrowly defined seminar-style topics.

The intent of this resource material is to guide readers to reflect more on their journeys than the author’s, using the author’s stories as departure points for club members to delve into similar circumstances, challenges, and experiences that are solely theirs.

As always, the club leader, members, or podcast host can pick and choose their questions from across all three approaches if they see highlights that will be most meaningful for the makeup of their group, or if they are limited on time. The material below will yield many hours of chatter for introspective groups. Most groups and podcasts will only get through a fraction of the proposed questions. And many more can be added by keen readers.

Also, if you’d like the author (me) to participate in your book club’s discussion, tag him on the Contact Page. He’d love to be a part of your PJR dissection if he can!

Big Story Discussion

Introduction

Many readers who move through PJR at a continuous pace say at the end that they felt like the book gave them a taste of what it’s like to experience an ultramarathon. To the author, this makes sense and is rewarding, because the book was set up to take readers through the stages of an ultramarathon race and the contents were designed to give readers the varied physical and mental experiences that life’s big challenges throw at all of us.

Non-running readers have been among the most excited when personally sharing how they experienced the progressive stages of the book, and many have shared with the author their own stories of how they struggled, failed, and eventually overcame some of the most daunting challenges of their lives … while moving through the stages described in PJR.

With this rewarding outcome in mind, it’s time to dissect the book from a high level, without digging into too many specific details!

The straightforward beginning of the big challenge: 0 to 100 by 60

Out of the gate, the story moves fast. The pace is consistent. The details are there, but the author quickly pulls the reader along. This is how the opening of a long race feels. Fast, familiar, energized. The body has covered the opening distances hundreds of times in training; it moves easily over the first miles. There are few physical or mental details that require attention.

Big Story Questions:

1. Did the opening chapters gallop for you? Did you find yourself wanting the author to slow down and bit and give you more insights into the fine details and emotions of his experiences?

2. What are the familiar distances you cover in your life, where you pass over the details and skip any deep analysis? What do you move through at speed because it is all so familiar?

3. Do others wish you would share more details of that part of your life with them?

4. When you take on the big challenges in life, can the start feel deceptively easy until you hit the point where you surpass your previous limits?

When trouble starts: Falling Down

The easy start to a big challenge never lasts. Inevitably, things begin to go wrong. Most often, these are new, unanticipated problems. Falling Down is where PJR shifts gears, and the author dives into the harrowing details of difficult events briefly described in the quick-paced opening chapters. Here, he starts to take you deeper inside his journey.

Big Story Questions:

1. Were you surprised by the magnitude of the author’s falling down moments—situations glossed over earlier in the book?

2. Did your new perspective of these tribulations make his journey from 0 to 100 by 60 feel more incredible?

3. What are the falling down moments that have defined your life’s journeys? What lessons did you learn that helped you carry on?

4. Do others know how hard you really fell when taking on life’s big challenges?

5. Who do you share your painful, mistake-filled stories with—deeply?

Focusing on the essentials to physically continue: Things the Trail Taught Me

As the ultramarathon extends, the miles go by, the physical falling down increases, and the author must focus on the lessons learned in training to carry on: fueling; pacing; understanding pain versus injury; knowing when to not quit.

Big Story Questions:

1. In the first six chapters, as the author’s distances and time on feet increased, and calamities occurred, he learned numerous new things about his body. Have there been times in your life when new challenges pushed your limits? Did unanticipated physical problems arise at those times? How did you deal with them?

2. Have you pushed yourself so far that your fuelling/nutritional needs changed?

3. Have you pushed yourself to the point where your usual pace was too fast to sustain you to the end? How have you adjusted to that?

4. Have you pushed yourself far enough to have to discern between pain and injury? Quitting versus carrying on safely? (This isn’t solely about physical pain.)

5. What are some of the lessons you learned at this stage of the book? Can you relate to some of the obstacles the author faced? What have you modified in your life to increase your endurance of the suffering required to achieve a goal?

When strength is depleted and the finish remains far away: In My Mind, Not My Legs

Big Story Questions:

1. This stage of the book focuses on state of mind and mental training. Do you consciously engage in mental training in your life? Have you had to quit a great challenge in your life because you weren’t mentally prepared to endure it?

2. In the chapter, Mental Odds and Ends, the author writes about five different mental strategies for getting through big challenges. Could you relate to any of these?

3. Did the Unconscious Competent chapter offer you any insights into where you’re at with your various competencies/incompetencies?

4. Chapter 13 deals with the author’s why, and how that why stems from what the author is, in an evolutionary sense, as much as who the author is as a person. Did his journey to self-discovery make sense to you? Did his conclusion cause you to think differently about your motivations?

Enduring to the end: Far from Old

“The last leg of the ultra is when you discover what you are.” It is the agonizing culmination of the quick start, the first falls, the physical breakdowns, the mental struggles. In the final chapter, Revenge Run, the author packs all the learnings of the book together in a first-person present retelling of his two-day, August 2022, Squamish50/50 final attempt. His physical, mental, and emotional descriptions are intended to give the reader a firsthand experience of the start lines, hardships and joys of those two days.

Big Story Questions:

1. What feelings/emotions did you experience during the conclusion of the book?

2. If you’re a runner, was the author’s journey motivating or overwhelming? Could you relate to the hardships and joys he experienced?

3. If you’re a non-runner, what difficult challenges in your life were you reminded of when reading about the author’s SQ50/50 revenge run?

4. Have you found your hard-earned, sweaty, and somewhat bloodied joy? Has it been your reward?

5. What are your key takeaways from the changes and learning the author experienced while taking on the challenging decade of his fifties?

6. Over the course of the book did you get a feel for the fast galloping start, inevitable physical breakdowns, mental games, and hard-fought finish of an ultramarathon? Did you sense some of the emotion of it all? (I, the author, sincerely hope you did!)

SPECIFIC DETAILS DISCUSSION

Introduction

As noted in the intro to the discussion of the big picture, Perhaps Joy is the Reward was structurally designed to subliminally take readers through the stages of an ultramarathon race, and the contents were tailored to lead readers through the varied physical and mental experiences that life’s big challenges throw at all of us.

The questions in the Specific Details Discussion below, referencing quotes and events in PJR, are not intended focus on the author’s experiences, instead, using the stories from PJR as a platform, they are intended to draw from the reader their own stories of how they struggled, failed, and eventually overcame some of the most daunting challenges of their lives.

Let’s get into the forest of specific details in PJR!

0 to 100 by 60

From the Prologue to the fourth chapter, the story moves fast. The pace is consistent. This is how the opening of a long race feels. Fast, familiar, energized.

Detailed Story Questions:

1. Early in the author’s running journey, his stronger neighbour, who always chugged by him on their climb home, said, “This hill is your friend.” That moment was game-changing. Who is “that person” or “that guy” in your life? Do they get under your skin? Have their words and actions been motivating or deflating for you?

2. At age fifty, the author discovered that he could run fast for his age on the trails—something he never imagined he was capable of. Have you had an epiphany like that in your life? A hidden talent discovered. If not, do you ever put yourself in situations where new talents could be discovered, or do you play it safe?

3. After completing his first 50K ultrarace, the author writes, “Having crossed a threshold into a new world of self-awareness, the urge to explore it began to well up like a lost memory of who I really was.” After his next big distance he says, “Covering the 50-mile distance had pushed my body into new territory. My body wanted more. And my mind too.” Are their times in your life when you crossed a threshold, or consecutive thresholds, like this? How did those moments affect you? Did they pull you to something more extreme? Can you see the foreshadowing of Chapter 13’s conclusion in the author’s words here?

4. In the first three chapters the author notes how trail running gained importance as a balance to his work life, and as a catalyst for relationships. What are the balances and catalysts in your life? If they are lacking, where could you find them?

5. The author shares how the pandemic threw his work and running life into turmoil, and how setting alternative goals helped him through it. Did you have to make significant expectation modifications to get through those years? When has the word “thwarted” summed up your situation? How did you overcome feeling thwarted?

6. After three chapters covering ten years, one chapter, 100 Miles of Friends, covers two days. Where did this chapter take you? What milestone event in your life equates with the author’s experience here?

7. Community was key to the author’s success in the first section of the book. Who do you choose to surround yourself with when taking on your life’s great challenges? Can you learn from what the author did?

Falling Down

In these two chapters the book shifts gears. Here, the author dives into the harrowing details of difficult events briefly described in the quick-paced opening chapters. He starts to take you inside the races.

Detailed Story Questions:

1. “When I was a kid, way back in the 70s, I learned that I was never fully involved in a sport if I wasn’t falling down.” Do you believe this to be true? Does it only apply to sports? Is this true in your life overall?

2. The author’s Flaming DNF gave him a filter through which he was better able to view his capabilities and his ability to navigate difficulties. “Bryce revealed that I possessed a level of confidence and poise under pressure that I had never knowingly activated.” Once understood, this opened new possibilities for the author. What have near-calamitous events in your life taught you about yourself? Have they made you stronger and expanded your trust in yourself?

3. In Chapter 6 the author writes, “I got everything right … Absolutely everything. Except for the things I didn’t.” When have you been convinced that you were 100% prepared before descending into a disaster of your own making? What were your takeaways from that?

4. In that Chafing DNF chapter the author learned “I don’t have to change who I am to fix something. Maybe I just have to change the one thing I consistently do wrong to make outcomes better across the board.” Can you relate to this? Have you ever struggled to change who you are (an almost impossible quest), when all you needed to do was change a behaviour, while remaining yourself?

Things the Trail Taught Me

As the ultramarathon extends, the miles go by, the physical falling down begins, and the author must focus on the lessons learned in training to carry on: fueling; pacing; understanding pain versus injury; knowing when to not quit. These four chapters contain many of the practical insights the author gained as he undertook his greatest physical challenges.

Detailed Story Questions:

1. Did the author’s “shapeshifter” analogy for how fueling his body changed as his distances increased make sense to you? Are you a shapeshifter in any areas of your life where you push yourself well beyond your usual limits? Physically? Mentally?

2. How do you deal with the ways you change—especially when the change is problematic?

3. How and when do pace yourself? Which aspects of your life require pacing so that you can make the distance? Are you disciplined at this?

4. The author keys on Gary Cantrell’s mental strategy, stated in Chapter 8 as, “Don’t run away from failure; run toward success.” Is this concept useful to you?

5. What strategies do you have, or wish you had for pacing yourself? Can Four-and-One for Success apply beyond the running world?

6. How do you handle pain and injury in your life?

7. Do you understand manageable pain versus must-quit injury?

8. Have you experienced breaking through the pain like the author did on his long training days in different areas of your life?

9. Have you ever stuck to a Don’t Quit mentality in a sport, business, or relationship? Has it worked out positively for you? Negatively? A mix?

10. At the beginning of Chapter 9 the author shares his logical if-then list of personal quit criteria for ultraracing, ranked in order of their importance to him. What do you think of these four quit criteria in the context of the book? Do they make sense to you?

11. The power of having defined quit criteria is the confidence they give you to say, “None of my quite criteria are breached, therefore, I will not quit!” Your Don’t Quit mentality then has a solid base. Where can you apply a formula like this in your life?

In My Mind, Not My Legs

There comes a point in most ultramarathons when the body, locked in pain and suffering, cries out for the racer to quit. This is the time when, if none of the racer’s quit criteria are met, their race becomes solely owned by their mind. This is where things really get interesting for ultrarunners. These three chapters address some of the mental skills the author developed, and share some of the insights he gained into his unconscious instinctual mind while taking on the greatest physical challenges of his life.

Detailed Story Questions:

1. The author begins this section by digging into the mental training he does to prepare himself for the mind games of ultraracing. What do you think about his choice to mentally experience the run versus have another running experience? Can this concept apply to areas in your life that require you to be more engaged?

2. Do you consistently choose the hard way home in some areas of your life to nurture growth? Has that changed you? Could it change you if you chose to do it in the future?

3. What do you think about mantras? Can you relate to the author’s use of them?

4. Do you feel a sense of loss when a hard-fought period of your life comes to an end? Do you miss the struggle? Did it define you while it happened and leave you undefined when it’s done? Can defining ourselves by our struggles become our badge of honour? Is this good? Bad? Indifferent?

5. Did the author’s four-tiered Unconscious Competent Learning Model make sense to you? Can you apply that thinking to your advantage in any areas of your life?

6. Tier two is the troublesome stage in learning model: the conscious incompetent. How did it feel to realize that you were lousy at doing something you really wanted to do, and do well? Did you quit at that moment? How hard was it to not quit? What steps did you take to get beyond the incompetency you were exhibiting?

7. At this point, the author focuses on tier two, the conscious incompetent stage, to help explain why new trail runners find running in the forest and mountains so exhausting: they are mentally exhausted from all the conscious decisions they must make in the roots and rocks that they don’t have to make on pavement to run competently. Have you experienced this type of exhaustion when you’ve moved to the conscious incompetent tier of a new activity you’re undertaking? Does knowing that your mind is tired help you understand and cope with the learning phase? Does this help you understand that resting your mind might be the best road to recovery, rather than resting your body but keeping your mind busy?

8. Finally, do you think that the author’s growing unconscious competence on the trails was key to his response when the tree thundered down on him in the opening paragraph of Chapter 12?

9. Chapter 13, Why Did I Do It, follows a circular path to its conclusion. Did the culmination of the author’s journey to discover his why make sense to you? If not, what are your thoughts on the things that drive us, or pull us, to do difficult things that life or others do not demand that we do? If so, was his conclusion a new idea for you, or something you’ve felt all along? Did his conclusion give you any new insights into your own motivations and desires?

Far from Old

Detailed Story Questions:

1. “Passing under the arch, I intimately know what lies ahead and how much I will suffer … My fight reflexes trigger at the thought of being bloodied again by this enemy. I run the first hundred metres along Cleveland Avenue and promise myself I will rage and claw my way to the end.” When, in your life, have you felt as the author did at the start of his revenge run?

2. “It’s as though I ran away from the Quest aid station and into an entirely different race, run by an entirely different me.” What are your memories of expecting a positive outcome based on current performance, to suddenly having your physical health change and deliver a totally different, and negative, outcome? How have you handled that?

3. “I can’t finish what I don’t start.” Have you ever had to tell yourself this? When starting something difficult is so overwhelming that you wonder if you can even rise from your bed to do it, what motivates you to get moving? Where does your inner strength come from to not quit before you even begin?

4. Why is the simple act starting so difficult sometimes … and so important?

5. “My finish line joy is akin to a sudden and unexpected upwelling of grief—only it’s not grief’s unanticipated sorrow that wracks my body, it is an inexplicable wave of exhilaration that comes from surviving the quest and at last being safe.” What are the challenges you’ve overcome in your life that have left you feeling like you metaphorically made it home in the end?

6. What are your key takeaways from Perhaps Joy is the Reward?

STAND-ALONE CHAPTER/SEMINAR DISCUSSIONS

Introduction

Perhaps Joy is the Reward contains a few chapters that stand alone as focused topics of discussion. The Seminar Discussions can be used if club members (or podcast hosts) see value in going deeper into these more narrowly defined seminar-style topics.

SEMINAR DISCUSSION #1

Chapter 9 – Don’t Quit—and Why that’s BS

In this chapter of Perhaps Joy is the Reward, the author digs into the commonly held notion that the sure-fire way to complete the big challenges in our lives is to push aside all the obstacles and … don’t quit. He shares how he held to this notion at the start of his ultrarunning experience, how it disastrously played out for him a few times, how he learned to set realistic quit criteria, and how sticking to those quit criteria enabled him, in the face of great suffering and exhaustion, to not quit.

Setting your quit criteria in place before you even begin may seem counterintuitive as a strategy to achieve life’s greatest challenges; this discussion is intended to lead the reader to an understanding of why setting quit criteria, and abiding by them, can be a key to success.

The Questions:

1. Have you ever stuck to a Don’t Quit mentality in a sport, business, or relationship? Has it worked out positively for you? Negatively? A mix?

2. If there was a formula you could apply to the Don’t Quit approach to achieving big goals, one that could help mitigate the negative outcomes and increase the chance for positive outcomes, would you use that formula?

3. At the beginning of this chapter the author shares his logical if-then list of personal quit criteria for ultraracing, ranked in order of their importance to him. What do you think of these four quit criteria in the context of the book? Do they make sense to you?

4. For each of his criteria, the author shares examples of how they played out in his races, both disastrous and successful. At his flaming Bryce Canyon DNF, the author had not yet defined his quit criteria. How did his nebulous approach to making a quit decision get him in trouble there? Which of his future criteria could have kept him out of the ambulance?

5. His second criterion, “If I am asymmetrically walking and it gets worse if I try to run, then I will quit,” delivered his first 100K buckle because he could still walk symmetrically with purpose even though he couldn’t run anymore, therefore, he didn’t quit even though his inability to run appeared to be an obvious reason to quit the race! Do you see the power in this type of reverse logic? How would you express this type of thinking in a context other than ultraracing?

6. The author writes, “To date, Lavender Smith’s four conditions have worked for me as the criteria for my decisions to walk off of ultramarathon racecourses and, more importantly, to stay on them, even though I was overwhelmed by fatigue, discomfort, boredom, and pain.” Now, the BIG QUESTIONS. A) Can you give a current example of how having defined quit criteria for your work life, business, or a personal relationship, could save you from disaster by getting you off the course before you flame out? B) Can you give a past example of how knowing that your defined quit criteria were not being breached would have kept you from quitting too soon for nebulous reasons?

7. To highlight the danger of not having defined quit criteria when undertaking risky challenges (everything from ultramarathons to relationships) the author concludes the chapter with a discussion of how our minds develop mental maps of our futures, and how sometimes in crisis situations, we are unable to redraw our maps to escape inevitable crashes. Do you believe that the mental map of your hoped-for future can blind you to the reality of your current, potentially perilous, situation? Have you ever witnessed someone disastrously sticking to their vision of the future when they obviously needed to reroute? Have you done it, to your own peril? If so, how would having defined quit criteria have helped you, or that other person?

8. The power of having defined quit criteria is the confidence they give you to say, “None of my quite criteria are breached, therefore, I will not quit!” Your Don’t Quit mentality then has a solid base. Where can you apply a formula like this in your life?

SEMINAR DISCUSSION #2

Chapter 12 – Unconscious Competent

This chapter of Perhaps Joy is the Reward sets the “what we are” ball in motion for the Chapter 13 which fully flushes out the author’s motives for running far on unpaved trails. The setup is fully defined at the conclusion of the chapter when the author says, “I think it’s safe to say the unconscious competent in me acted that day, and the experience of being guided by my innate survival mechanisms had a profound impact. It was one of those extraordinary life events when I encountered what I was, rather than who I was, as my archaic mind took control and drove me to act on instinct; and then, having submerged to the depth of my reptilian brain, I resurfaced to emotion , and finally, once I was clear of the danger, I elevated back to my cerebral sapiens day-to-day realm of thought and reflection.”

Gulp. That’s a lot to take in. Let’s try to unpack it a bit.

The Questions:

1. The tree fall event the author references in the quote above is described at the beginning of Chapter 12. Have you ever been in a predicament where your instinctual survival instincts kicked in and took control of your physical responses?

2. The author launches the discussion of our subconscious instinctual responses with a story about running in the dark with a bucket on his head. If you’re a runner, do you get what’s going on here? If you’re a non-runner, is there some other activity in your life that equates to the author’s experience? Prior to finishing the chapter, how would you have answered the author’s question about the bucket run: “Who, or what, made the calm unconscious decision that I could do it, and why didn’t I hesitate?

3. To help get a handle on how and when we all experience our minds making subconscious instinctual decisions for us, the author lays out a four-tiered Unconscious Competent Learning Model.

a. Tier one, at the bottom: the unconscious incompetent. The author uses the example of his return to organized hockey in his thirties. Do you have an example of an activity you started with exuberance, blissfully unaware that you totally sucked while loving every minute of it?

b. Tier two, the troublesome stage in learning model: the conscious incompetent. How did it feel to realize that you were lousy at doing something you really wanted to do, and do well? Did you quit at that moment? How hard was it to not quit? What steps did you take to get beyond the incompetency you were exhibiting?

c. Tier three, where most of us exist: the conscious competent. The author describes this tier as the place “where conscious willfulness turned into physical performance with incompetence still trying to pull me down.” Can you describe the activities in your life that continuously require conscious engagement on your part to be performed competently?

d. Tier four, the pro: the unconscious competent. The author uses car driving as an example that many of us can relate to for this top level of competence. He also says, going back to his bucket-on-head story, that he experiences the freedom of being an unconscious competent from time-to-time while running on mountain trails, and this gives him athletic moments of pure joy. In your life, what do you do unconsciously and with great competence that gives you joy?

4. At this point, the author focuses on tier two, the conscious incompetent stage, to help explain why new trail runners find running in the forest and mountains so exhausting: they are mentally exhausted from all the conscious decisions they must make in the roots and rocks that they don’t have to make on pavement to run competently. Have you experienced this type of exhaustion when you’ve moved to the conscious incompetent tier of a new activity you’re undertaking? Does knowing that your mind is tired help you understand and cope with the learning phase? Does this help you understand that resting your mind might be the best road to recovery, rather than resting your body but keeping your mind busy?

5. As the discussion draws to a close, the author harkens back to the beginning of Chapter 11 and the notion of experiencing the run versus having another running experience. He says that getting into this frame of mind can help make a runner more aware of, or in tune with, their body and how it moves through nature. Do you agree with this? If so, what other areas of life can this awareness of what you are in nature benefit you and your competencies?

6. Finally, do you think that the author’s growing unconscious competence on the trails was key to his response when the tree thundered down on him in the opening paragraph of the chapter? If you revisit your personal example of acting on instinct that you shared at the beginning of this discussion, do you think it affected your understanding of what you are?