Interview Question: “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?”

I got asked this recently.

Our 2nd day run, steady pace in the high altitude of Iten and me dying inside

I have a corporate answer and I have a real answer. 

The corporate answer is that I almost died when I traveled to Kenya.

I got so sick, I was certain my time had come. It was a combination of something I ate or drank mixed with the altitude sickness in Iten— where runners from all over the world come to train from national teams to Olympic qualified to me, a New York runner craving a stretch experience.

I traveled to participate in their running camp and on my first night, I crawled between my cabin bed and the toilet to throw up and lay down repeatedly. Eventually I laid down, my head felt like it was about to cave in and my insides were turning out. I was under my covers and I tried to meditate myself to sleep.

There was no cell reception unless I took my phone and stood next to the pole across the road.

I considered screaming. I knew someone would come if I did but I also felt that if God wanted me to go this way, then at 25 years old in the high altitudes of Kenya, so be it. “It wasn’t a bad life. It wasn’t a great one but it wasn’t bad,” I thought to myself. 

The last thing I remembered is laying down on my sponge mattress trying to meditate and looking up at my mosquito net in the dark. I eventually fell asleep - thank God.

Next thing, it was 6:15am and Bekele, my assigned pacer, knocked at my door for our first run. That day’s workout was a half marathon distance, any pace. I was in no condition to run but I also wasn’t going to be that American who complained. I gulped down an entire water bottle, laced up, and together we hit the hills.

If I thought I was going to die that night, I was certain I was going to go during this run.

If there’s any way I would want to die, it would be doing this.

Obviously, I survived.

No run since then has ever felt that hard in my life (yet). Later that afternoon we also went into the town center and saw a Kenyan pharmacist who gave me medicine. It was all Russian and to this day, I have no idea what I ingested but I didn’t care, I was desperate.

This story shows determination and perseverance which are personal qualities I know I have so it makes a good impression to the interviewer. 

But my real answer— the hardest thing I have truly ever done is grow up in my own home.

I wrote about this on Quora when I had to accept that I could never change my family and shared something I’ve never told anyone. 

When an interviewer asks me, “what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” I think, do I give them the corporate answer or the real answer? I read the room to follow my intuition and make a judgement call.

I don’t always give the real answer because well, it’s heavy. Not everyone can handle it well and I don’t want to bring people down but my childhood has certainly had the largest impact in the person I am today.