How To Be Ordinary and Do Extraordinary Things

A 4-step guide for ordinary people like us

This may look like an ordinary autumn day in Montreal, but in fact it’s the start of an extraordinary 255km (158 mile) run over 5 days — more than five marathons and a whole lot of fun. That’s my friend Sarah biking with our gear. (Photo by me).

This is the story of how I ran more than five marathons in five days and hosted a dinner party at the finish — an extraordinary feat. I share it because it gave me so much joy (except for that dark moment on Day 3 past Dorval) and yet it was amazingly doable even for the likes of ordinary me.

I also share it because I sense we are in extraordinary times, where extraordinary things are being asked of many of us ordinary folk.

By going on this run I inadvertently created a little Extraordinary Playbook which I have been drawing on ever since.

It didn’t exactly happen all of a sudden. I have had a sense for some time now that we are capable of much much more than we typically ask of ourselves. Not in the pain-cave-of-suffering way that some runners describe deep into the miles of an ultra-distance contest. More in the everyday mindset way.

So if I am going to ask people around me to change — to create the shift to an economy in service of life, which is the focus of my professional work — then I better understand what it feels like to step into a different paradigm. That’s the idea that led me into a few extraordinary…