Always Ready: When Achievement Isn’t Enough
When I finished my first ultra in 2024, I expected something to happen.
The race was just outside Kelowna, BC, in late August. You’d think conditions would be beautiful, but you would be wrong.
They were ATROCIOUS. It was miserable, cold and raining at the start line and snowing at the high point of the course. SNOW. In August. On my 50th birthday, no less.
I had trained hard. I had built it up in my mind as a kind of proving ground. Not just physically, but personally. I thought there would be an “aha” moment at the finish line. Some shift. Some internal click that would say, “There it is. That’s what this was all for.”
Instead, I crossed the line, checked my watch, realised I had finished two and a half hours faster than I’d anticipated, and discovered I’d taken second in my age group.
Objectively, it was my best race result ever.
And emotionally?
Almost nothing.
It was more like, “Well. That happened,” and then, almost immediately, “So what do I do now?”
That question unsettled me more than any suffering on the course ever had.
A Race That Went Too Well
Don’t get me wrong. It was hard.
The course was challenging. The weather was brutal. On my second loop, crossing the high point alone in the cold with no one in sight, I remember gritting my teeth and thinking, Get me the hell off this mountain.
But at no point did I doubt I would finish.
For much of the first loop, I was fortunate to run alongside Serena, one of my 2023 Spartan Death Race friends and a finisher of that event. Having a friend for company helped, but even when I was alone later, there was no existential battle. No internal voice saying, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
It was steady, controlled and executed almost perfectly (well – as perfectly as a Spartan race in those conditions can be…LOL). Yet, it felt so hollow afterward.
Afterward, I spoke with a couple of my more accomplished ultra friends.
My friend Kevin, who has finished multiple 100 and 200 mile races, suggested maybe the issue was that it hadn’t been hard enough to feel meaningful.
On the surface, that sounds ridiculous, because it was objectively HARD.
But maybe he was onto something. Not because it lacked difficulty, but because it lacked struggle.
Nothing broke. Nothing came apart. I didn’t have to claw my way back from the edge. Everything went according to plan.
How messed up is it that I couldn’t take pride in that?
Somewhere in my head, I had equated meaning with suffering. Transformation with crisis. If nothing cracked open, maybe nothing had changed.
I realised I hadn’t been chasing a finish line.
I had been chasing transformation, and the race didn’t deliver it.
The First Conversation About Purpose
At the same time, I reached out to my friend Toño. Another friend from that 2023 Death Race, he was one of the Krypteia at the event (one of the people who directed what we were doing and meted out punishment for failure, but at the same time was ever vigilant about keeping us safe). When I had to quit after 24 hours due to severe cramping, the conversation he and I had while I was being seen to by medical was one of the most meaningful things I took from the experience. I knew he would have something valuable to say.
I told him about the flatness. The disillusionment. The sense that I had tested my limits and come away feeling… unchanged.
Toño didn’t talk about podiums or harder races. He didn’t suggest I sign up for something more extreme.
He talked about love.
About being in the wild. About connecting with the land. About enjoying the adventure for its own sake.
For him, the meaning wasn’t in testing limits. It was in presence.
That conversation stuck with me. It didn’t solve everything overnight. But it shifted something, and it planted a question:
What if the point isn’t to break yourself?
The Second Experiment: Removing the Finish Line
Going into 2025, I decided not to enter any races at all.
No external deadlines. No events. No medals.
I wanted to see if I could train without a finish line. Could I find drive without a container? Could I build capability without performance as the anchor?
That lasted… not very long.
The first Solstice Run became a DIY event. What started as a personal long effort evolved into something more structured. My friend Steve was training to run his first ever 50K as part of the day, less than three years after suffering a heart attack. Supporting him through that distance gave the run a layer of purpose beyond my own mileage.
It added another layer to the day that wasn’t just about what my legs and lungs could endure. It was about helping a friend prove something to himself.
At the last minute, I added a small fundraising component for a cause that mattered to me. Because of how late I put it together, I only raised a few hundred dollars. It wasn’t a huge impact. But it planted a seed.
Capability felt different when it was in service of someone else.
Later in the year, I volunteered as a course sweep at Fat Dog 120. I ran thirty to forty kilometres deep into the night, helping struggling backmarkers make it safely to a place where they could get off the course.
That night felt meaningful in a way the podium photo hadn’t.
Not because it was harder, but because it was useful.
(It also had the added, unforeseen benefit of reconnecting me with ANOTHER 2023 Death Race friend, Daniel, who was running in the event, and introduced Raina and I to his lovely wife, Melody, who was crewing for him.)
Sunset while sweeping the 2025 Fat Dog 120 Ultra
When Purpose Becomes Another Metric
Then came Movember. Inspired by YouTube creator and Omnia Performance founder, Fergus Crawley’s own story of fundraising for the cause, I decided to set some ambitious targets and see what I could do.
Five hundred and ten kilometres over the course of the month. A public commitment. A fundraising goal. A hope that maybe, if I’m being honest, it might also help my struggling business gain some visibility.
It was hard. It was vulnerable. It was personal.
And it didn’t hit the fundraising target I had set, or meaningfully move the business needle.
By the end, I was exhausted and quietly asking myself whether it had made any real difference at all.
Different container. Same question.
If I’m not transformed…if I don’t hit the target…if the numbers don’t move…what’s the point?
That’s an uncomfortable place to sit, because now it’s not just performance that feels insufficient. Even purpose can start to look like another scoreboard.
When I find myself falling short on dollars raised, reach achieved and business impact, the old voice creeps back in, asking “Was this enough?”
Capability, Alignment, and the Long Game
What I’m beginning to understand, slowly and imperfectly, is that increasing difficulty doesn’t manufacture meaning.
Harder races won’t fix it. Bigger mileage won’t fix it. Higher fundraising targets won’t fix it.
Purpose isn’t found by escalating the stakes, it’s found in alignment.
Alignment with what I value, with who I want to be, and with how I want my strength to show up in the world. How I can best live the ideal of “Be Strong To Be Useful.”
That’s part of why this year’s Solstice Run looks different. Yes, the fundraising goal is ambitious. Yes, the performance goal is a bit scary. But the deeper motivation is clearer. The seed planted last year is now intentional.
Likewise, pacing my friend Daniel for 132 kilometres in August isn’t about testing my limits in isolation. It’s about standing beside someone in theirs.
That feels more meaningful than simply chasing my limits for their own sake.
What I Was Really Looking For
Looking back at that 2024 Spartan Race Kelowna Ultra, I think the emptiness wasn’t about the race going too well.
It was about expecting a finish line to deliver identity.
I wanted it to tell me something definitive about who I was, but identity isn’t delivered by achievement. It’s reinforced by alignment over time.
Always Ready was never meant to be about chasing peak fitness or stacking increasingly extreme efforts on the calendar. It was meant to explore durability. Usefulness. Readiness.
The goal is not to feel epic, and it’s not to feel broken. It’s not to manufacture suffering so the story feels meaningful.
The goal is to build capability that can be used, and to use it in service of something outside of myself as fully as I can.
Sometimes that will look like chasing a big performance target.
Sometimes it will be sweeping a course in the dark for hours on end with the only reward being a volunteer t-shirt.
Later this year, it will be pacing a friend for 132 kilometres to keep him moving forward safely and see him through to his finish line, not mine.
Sometimes it just looks like being alone in the woods, on a mountain, without needing it to prove anything.
If achievement isn’t enough, maybe the answer isn’t to chase something harder. Maybe it’s to ask what you want your strength to be for.
I still don’t have my answer, and my answer will not be the same as yours.
But hopefully, through these words and through this project as a whole, I’ve helped plant the seed for you to ask that question and explore for yourself.
Follow the Always Ready Journey
Always Ready is more than just written reflections.
Long-form Always Ready videos and shorter Always Ready Extras clips are published on my YouTube channel, documenting the training, adjustments, and real-time decisions behind the ideas explored here.
If this is your first time reading the series, you can start at the opening piece, Always Ready: Building for the Long Run in 2026, here:
https://jpsiou.com/blog/always-ready-20260207
The goal isn’t to create highlight reels. It’s to document what long-term capability actually looks like while balancing work, family, setbacks, and real life.
You can find the full Always Ready video series on YouTube here: