If you want to take the island, you have to burn the boats.

That sounds like bravado. It isn’t. It is a statement about psychology. About what happens when the mind senses a quiet exit. The half-open door. The internal clause that says, I’ll try, but only if it feels safe. We keep escape routes not because we are weak, but because the brain is built to preserve comfort. It would rather you remain intact than become something new.

Most of us live with one foot still on the boat. Sensible. Measured. Over-reasoned. We call it responsibility. Often it’s just fear masquerading as responsibility. Because I believe somewhere along the way we forget to play.

Not play as in distraction. Play as in engagement. Curiosity. The willingness to enter something uncertain and let it shape us. We stop inhabiting life and start managing it. Everything must be justified. De-risked. Optimised. Life becomes a project. The future a spreadsheet. The present something to endure.

Training for this Sunday’s GOAT has been quietly dismantling that pattern in me.

On paper, it is a race. Mountain. Distance. Elevation. Heat. All the sensible reasons to feel apprehensive. And I have felt them. The mind is excellent at building futures in which you fail. It rehearses collapse with forensic detail. It calls this preparation.

But something has definitely shifted.

Instead of rehearsing disaster, I am learning to rehearse engagement. To meet the edge not as a threat, but as an invitation. Fear and excitement are physiologically identical. The body cannot tell the difference. Only the story in the mind decides whether that energy will bring paralysis or make you feel alive.

So I am changing the story.

Each long climb becomes a conversation rather than a test. Each session a way of saying, I am here for this. Not to conquer the mountain. Not to dominate it. To enter it. To be shaped by it.

Last week my coach Lee, who is running the 100-mile section himself, said something that blew my mind.

“I’m going to play with the mountains. Not fight them. Just play.”

So here we are back at the one powerful word: Play.

It reminded me that the point of voluntary struggle is not proof. It is presence. It is the chance to feel yourself fully in the work.

The race is not there to define me. It is there to challenge me. Like life. If we move through days managing risk, dampening appetite, staying reasonable. We mistake control for maturity. We forget that growth does not come from safety. It comes from risk. From stepping into the unknown without a script. Re-learning how to play.

You do not take the island by hiding the boats.

You take it by stepping forward. By striking the match. Lighting the fire. By destroying the exit strategy.

Let’s burn those fucking boats.