by Jonathan van Geuns, August 21, 2026
I just got back from crewing Nik through the Ticino Wildlands 500, and it feels far too early to fully understand what happened over those ten days. I'm still running on the aftermath of roughly three hours of sleep a night, but these are some of the thoughts and reflections that kept returning to me while we were out there.
There are plenty of reasons why 500 kilometres around Ticino should be improbable. Nik, only 27, does not have many years of running in his legs (compared with the other runners who attempted this race with an average age of around 50). Yet, there are many reasons I believe he was successful. Here are my top 8 that mattered more than being "tough":
1. Turn something hard into something worth being inside of.
Nik wasn't there to prove that he can suffer. He wants the experience: the mountains, the uncertainty and absurdity, the people, the food, the moments in between. There is an undeniable joy underneath the ambition. That matters so much. When motivation comes from the experience itself, rather than only reaching the finish, there is always something left to move toward when the finish feels impossibly far. He performance confirms my strong believe in intrinsic forms of motivation for persistence and endurance performance.
The opening 50 km of Ticino are brutally hard. Thinking about another 450 km would have been absurd. So he didn't. He kept moving through the place he was in. The next trail or climb, the next place to eat or sleep. 500 Kilometres is impossible to hold in your head. One kilometre is not. Repeatedly returning attention to what is happening now is one of the most valuable psychological skills in any long race. Present-focused attention and acceptance can improve attentional control and performance.
2. Adapt instead of argue with reality.
A race like Ticino will never unfold according to plan. One difficult thing can be followed by another, and sometimes things genuinely get worse before they get better. We've talked about this a lot: the danger is not only that something goes wrong, but deciding it shouldn't be going wrong. Nik is capable of dropping that argument and asking the more useful question: "Okay. This is where we are. What do we do now?" That psychological flexibility matters when conditions and sensations are constantly changing. We want to choose adaptive coping rather than simple resistance to discomfort.
3. Doing something extraordinary doesn't mean doing it alone.
There is this mythology that the strongest person is the one who needs the least from anyone else. Nik is willing to be helped. To listen. He didn't need every solution to come from himself. That isn't dependence but another form of adaptability. Over those ten days, Nik asked me a dozen or more questions I didn't have a set answer to. We had to look at what was happening, think, try and adjust. Seeking social support decreases the likelihood of dropping out, while perceived support can make difficult physical efforts feel less difficult. Maybe part of being strong enough to do something this big is knowing when you don't need to be strong alone.
4. Feed your curiousity.
When something unfamiliar happens, Nik's first instinct is often to investigate rather than shut it down. What is happening? Why? What happens if we change this? Curiosity leaves space between an experience and the story we tell ourselves. Pain can be info. Fatigue can be info. Fear can be info. Not everything uncomfortable has to become evidence that the race is falling apart. How we appraise difficulty changes how we respond to it. Situations experienced as challenges tend to produce better outcomes than those experienced primarily as threats.
There is a difference between tolerating uncertainty and being drawn toward it. Nik likes finding out what is around the next corner. That sounds trivial until you imagine being so exhausted, sleep deprived, sun-burned, hundreds of kilometres from the finish. In a race like this, uncertainty isn't an interruption to the experience. It is the experience. Adventure gives uncertainty meaning. The unknown becomes something to enter, rather than merely survive.
5. No need to let fear disappear.
There have been moments of fear and doubt, even if only a few, and he has allowed them to exist. He doesn't pretend they aren't there, but he also doesn't hand them the steering wheel. You can be afraid, sit with it, understand what is happening, make the smartest decision available, and continue. That is very different from being fearless and far more useful. Acceptance-based approaches in sport are built around this idea: effective performance doesn't require eliminating difficult thoughts and emotions but experiencing them without automatically changing your behaviour.
6. Don't confuse suffering with failure.
In something this long, feeling terrible cannot automatically mean something has gone wrong. There will be hours, perhaps days, where the body hurts, motivation collapses, sleep deprivation changes perception, and the finish feels completely unreasonable. Those states are real, but they are also temporary. Nik has an unusual capacity to let a bad moment remain a bad moment rather than turning it into a verdict about the whole race. I think that distinction is enormous.
7. Don't let urgency make the decision for you.
500 Kilometres gives you countless opportunities to panic. You're moving too slowly or lost time. Someone passed you. You slept "too long." Your body feels off. There is always an urge to fix it. Nik is remarkably good at not immediately obeying that urge. He can slow down, eat, sleep, walk, change something, wait and see. The best decision for the next 20 minutes is not always the best decision for the next three days. Pacing isn't simply choosing the correct speed beforehand. It's continuous self-regulation, noticing, interpreting, adjusting. Sometimes the most ambitious thing you can do is resist the temptation to hurry.
8. Discover who you need to become along the way.
Maybe this is the one I believe in most. Nobody starts a big race already possessing every answer they will need. There are simply too many unknowns. "Success" doesn't come from arriving perfectly prepared for every possible version of the race. It comes from being teachable enough to keep changing as things unfolds. Not some extraordinary ability to ignore pain. But by ways of curiosity. Adaptability. Joy. Fear. Presence. Good decisions. The willingness to meet whatever comes next. Whether you're surviving 500 kilometres (or a few tough years at high school...) or any incredibly hard thing in life, that might matter more than almost anything.
None of this means these qualities guarantee a finish. They don't. In a big race, bodies fail, circumstances intervene, and luck matters. Nor does somebody's DNF tell us that they lacked any of these things. These are simply the qualities I watched Nik return to, every day, when the race asked something new of him.
Barely finished, this is what stays with me most now. We tend to think that doing something extraordinary requires arriving as an extraordinary person. Tough enough or experienced enough. Somehow already prepared for everything that is coming. 500 kilometres doesn't work like that. Neither does much of life. You don't need to have every answer at the beginning. But it definitely helps if you have enough curiosity to keep learning, enough flexibility to change, enough humility to accept help, enough presence to deal with what is in front of you. Nik didn't start Ticino knowing how to finish 500 kilometres. He learned how to finish it while he was doing it. Perhaps that's how we get through most things that once seemed impossible.
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