The pub was warm, loud with the usual end of day clatter, and thick with the familiar post-mortems of organizational life. A colleague casually threw a question across the table about my running, mentioning to the group that I had a race coming up. It was an easy, well-meant opening. My reply came without a second thought, quiet and unvarnished: “It’s only a 50k.”

Nobody choked on their pint. The conversation moved along cleanly, but the word lingered in my own ears long after the glasses were cleared. Only.

It was neither false modesty nor an attempt to deflect; it was an honest reflection of my internal narrative. Yet driving home, the sheer absurdity of the sentence caught up with me.

Fifty kilometres is never small. It remains hard, stubborn work every single time, demanding weeks of relentless graft, dead legs, and total respect on the day. Yet to get through the sheer volume of training without freezing in dread, the mind pulls off a quiet trick: it shrinks the distance down until it feels ordinary.

50 Kilometres across wet trails and dark hills, casually filed away under a four-letter word because thinking about the reality of it is too heavy.

This is the quiet trap of normalisation. Surround yourself with a particular kind of obsession for long enough, and the extreme quietly turns into housekeeping. You don’t set out to warp your baseline; it happens in small, unheralded increments. It’s the slow accretion of 75-kilometre training weeks, alarm clocks ringing in the pitch black, and a Sunday morning 30k being relegated to “just ticking the legs over.” After enough months of measuring heart rate trends and quietly logging sodden miles before the rest of the house has stirred, the unreasonable simply becomes the routine.

Plato’s cave works both ways. We often talk about the prisoner dragged into the sunlight, trying to explain the reality of the sun to those who only know shadows on a stone wall. But the inverse is equally true: spend long enough out in the elements, and you entirely forget how the cave looks. You lose the communal vocabulary. What feels like baseline maintenance inside your bubble registers as bordering on lunacy to anyone outside it.

Modern psychology calls it creeping baseline syndrome; the Stoics warned against losing track of the true nature of things through unexamined habit. When you normalise an extreme, you inevitably strip it of its weight.

Diminishing a 50km effort with the word “only” isn’t humility; it’s an accidental blindness. It forgets the toll, the preparation, and the stubborn physical reality of what moving a body that far over uneven ground actually demands. Discipline requires consistency to survive, but it shouldn’t cost us our perspective. Some things ought to remain heavy, deliberate, and just a little bit wild.

No matter how many times we lace up the shoes.