What Got In The Way?

Like all of us, I come across people quite often in my daily life: whether traveling or running, swimming, drinking, dining.  Often the conversation revolves around where I'm from, what I do...basically, who I am.  Practically mandatory when sitting on a plane it comes up that I'm part endurance coach, part mindset coach.  I inevitably hear "Really?" and then without much pause, "I used to think I could run a marathon, or do an Ironman, or [insert any mainstream endurance event here].”

Know that the act of intentional training, because of its difficulty and loneliness, is an act of courage. And it will change you.

And then the well-intentioned person starts telling me about their life and what got in the way.  It used to bother me, somewhat like a lawyer might be tired of discussing divorce advice, or a doctor about some random condition in the body.  But I have come to appreciate these conversations, because they are telling me about their dreams and ambitions.  They aren't looking for advice or even approval.

They still have an unresolved belief, a deep down truth they still can pursue.  They think–really believe–that they have endurance potential.  And that can plant the seed.

Put in the time

So here’s the thing, you should do that event, and do it this year.  Like all worthwhile things, it will require new demands of you, your time, your willpower, and humility.  These are very good reasons to do anything, almost the entire point of living.

And if you’re going to do it, you better start it now.  Time is short.  

Life doesn't get emptier.

In fact, time is everything, which leads to the first trick in training for that endurance event: Put in the time.  There is one bedrock truth about training, which may be just as true about everything: the only difference between an athlete and everyone else is time.  The athlete simply puts in the hours.  That’s it.  Nothing fancy.  Put in the time, and you will do your endurance event.  Everything else I have to say about it reduces to this simple fact.  If you train it, it will happen.

Get that sh*tty finish

Why do people quit reaching for endurance potential?  The short answer: it’s one of the hardest mental activities you can do, partly because people assume it should be so f-in’ fun and therefore easy.  But once you’re in it, you are so far away from the end.  So far from how it should feel.  So much patience is required.  Your training often feels terrible.  Or you can’t get past 45 minutes.  Or it feels ridiculously awkward.  Or you’re too out of shape.  Or…something.  It’s always something.

True story: my first event had me crying.  My second event had me sh*tting myself.  And this lovely image I actually thought I trained for!  The work is slow.  So you gotta do the work.  Put in the time.

An athlete I knew in college said that training for endurance events is one of the hardest things, because we start thinking we know better, and so we have to crash and burn to clear the memory banks.  We have to fail, learn to go slow in order to be fast.  We have to break down, go backwards in our fitness in order to get ‘endurance fit.’  

I liken it to a sh*tty first finish.  And the sooner you get it done, the better.

Be merciless

The constant desire to quit because you are discouraged is an obstacle to completion for sure.  It’s also the sad truth: you should probably quit.  We all should quit.  If you fail to complete that endurance event, you still have enough other events, fun projects, hobbies, and activities to fill out your days.  Who the hell do you think you are, doing an endurance event?  ‘I don’t got time for this sh*t.’

When asked whether endurance events portrayed in popular media discouraged athletes more than helped them, most experienced elite ultra runners said, ‘Not enough.’

It’s the sad truth: you should probably quit. We all should quit.

I don’t mean to sound harsh, but as an athlete, you have to be merciless about your work, and I am often deeply disappointed that so few of my fellow athletes are.

Even be merciless with how you look at yourself.  It’s a wonderful thing to know how great you aren’t.  It was a breakthrough for me.  Even if I was delighted by my own abilities, my daily rhythms and efforts, we all inevitably get sick of our own self-congratulation.  I did.  

Don’t get discouraged. Just grind it out.

The game inside the game is The Game.  There will come many, many times when you will need to trick yourself into pressing on.  Your mantra needn’t be 'I suck and always will.'  But one of the surefire ways to get discouraged is to think that training only happens when you’re delighting yourself, when it feels good.

The musician & songwriter Tom Waits said something like, ‘This doesn’t need to be the national anthem.’  This training of yours doesn’t need to be at an elite level, or even close to your perfect.

You gotta find a way to grind.

Ah, but isn’t that the opposite of being merciless about your training, your ‘work?’  No.  

The training will never be as good in action as it is in your mind.

Here’s an encouraging word: there is no correct format or way to train.  The first training attempts are almost always sh*t.  You can do in training whatever you want.

But that can be derailing too.  Too many choices are paralyzing.  Pick a lane and stay in it.  

You’d be surprised how much you can do with a simple approach.  No one is asking you to reinvent the wheel here.  Look, if how you train is a plethora of different concepts, f-it, go for it.  But just accept that the center of that Venn Diagram of those many concepts is probably pretty small.  Maybe just you.  You want to complete the event/adventure, right?  Don’t make it so complicated.

The game inside the game, THAT’S The Game.

Write a plan

When it comes to writing a plan, there’s a saying, ‘Write out what you know.’  It’s probably taken too literally, and people think they know more than they do.  That’s the fast track to injury and burnout.  A plan is something you make up and works for you, only you.  That’s harder, in my opinion.

Mark Allen gave me some flawless advice.  He said, 'make a plan.  Ten to twelve weeks.  Be sure that something important happens in every one.  Have a simulation or two.  Be certain that it progresses to something significant that you can measure.  And give us an effort, something where you dig deep, learn something about yourself and the plan.’

And I have more gospel for you: you already know what to do because you’ve definitely gone through this exercise before.  And you know in your bones how training goes, even if you’ve never really thought about it: after crafting a great plan (from your perspective), you embark on the adventure.  A few weeks in, everything has gone wrong and you can’t even see f*cked from where you are.  A few weeks later, you're facing the dragon and you're gonna stubbornly grind it out or die trying...

Boom, boom, boom.  Three acts.  Twelve weeks.  A training arc.  You now begin to know this stuff.

Make a new plan.

Train for real

As an endurance athlete, you being out there, doing it, that is your nutrition.  Treat scrolling on your phone, dead time, as empty calories like the junk food it is.  You have to cultivate the athlete’s mindset if you’re ever going to do the endurance thing.  Vanish into training on the regular.

Cormac McCarthy said, ‘books are made out of other books,’ which I understand to mean that you have to learn while you’re training, and train while you’re learning.  Don’t worry about the nonsense of being influenced by how others are training or even what they are training.  It’s the canvas.  Start flinging paint.  

What you’re trying to do is develop your ambition, your desire, and zero in on that curiosity that planted the seed in the first place.

Endurance…adventure…journey.

Train every day, but you can quit after one minute.  That trick works.  Once you do, reality says you cannot train for only a minute a day.  You have to live in the rhythms of training and recovery, experiences and curiosity.

If you train a lot, you’ll daydream about your event and train within those daydreams too.  The act of training becomes the performance of what you’ve been observing and thinking about.  Train your environment.  Steal moments from your day and train in them too.

Become more

Know that the act of intentional training, because of its difficulty and loneliness, is an act of courage.  And it will change you.  Intention allows for potential to unfold.

In her essay On Self Respect, the late Joan Didion was writing about writing, but I believe her insight applies to any endeavor worth pursuing:

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”

And that’s why you should train for that endurance event this year, reaching beyond the current you.  You’ll ultimately arrive at the intersection of humility and pride, of detachment and engagement, of discernment and love.  You’ll have more sides.  You’ll become yourself, someone more than you were—and that’s everything.