It was February 2017 and Victorian athlete Paul Watkins stood at the 250km mark of the 580km Arctic Ultra…frozen, hallucinating, starving and broken.
Was this where his dream ended?
Mentally and emotionally he had been under siege from the very first five minutes of the race.
His nutrition plan that had looked so beautiful on paper was completely unworkable in the -40c temps he was met with.
He’d made poor sleep choices, poor pacing choices and slowly but surely had descended into physical and mental chaos. Paul withdrew from the race and returned home.
But this was not to be the end of his relationship with the Arctic Ultra. From this ‘failure’, Paul learnt he needed to have a broad and deep toolkit to draw upon – and that toolkit needed to cover mental, emotional and physical skills.
He realised that failure, whilst bruising, wasn’t necessarily durable and it left one with
