Ruling your Mind

You watch a video or hear a story about someone completing an impressive endurance feat and now you are all fired up to try something similar, say maybe a half-marathon? An olympic Triathlon? A full marathon?! Half-ironman? Ironman?!?!

So you start looking into the logistics and what it will take in terms of mental toughness, time, training effort, etc. and this is where people usually back out. You realize that in order to run 42km in one bout, you need to run over 100-200km in total during your training, and now you start getting in your own head: "Can i actually do this?", "I can’t run for that long…", "I can’t run more than 5km before my legs are burning or my breathing gets too heavy."

I say to you: TRY!! And once you hit what you perceive to be your max, just out of curiosity, push a bit further and see what happens.

Story time:

My friend Josh and I are training for a marathon and when we started training, I would complete a run and then post in social media, tagging him and calling him out so that he would go for a run. He would do the exact same to me. Towards the beginning of training, I ran a 3k and challenged him so he replied by running 5km… I went to the gym with the intention of running a 5km after being well-rested, but found that I was sore by 2km and stopped there. I was so disappointed and embarrassed because of my competitive nature that I thought of quitting because I had no idea how I would get to 42km if I was having problems getting to 5km?

I went home and reflected on the run that day and realized something that sounds very simple: I had already ran 3km, indicating that I was physically capable of more than 2km, therefore, my mind must have stopped me the other day as my muscles were well-rested and I had no injuries. With this awareness, the very next day I got back on the treadmill, and sure enough by 2km I could feel the same burn in my legs. But this time, although it was the same burning intensity as the previous day, I reframed my thoughts and reminded myself that this burn was one of discomfort and not indicative of injury. It was simply uncomfortable. Out of curiosity of what laid beyond the metaphorical hill I was climbing, I decided to challenge myself to see how much further I could go if I persisted through the burn and went until my muscles were not just uncomfortable, but truly fatigued or as close to that as possible. The second I made that decision, I realized I had to distract my brain from this discomfort because your mind is adapted to make you avoid discomfort for evolutionary reasons. So what I did was I started counting bricks on the wall in front of me. When I would get bored, I started counting tiles on the ground. After what felt like 3 minutes, I felt the burn get so much more intense and realized that I was moving to the upper limits of manageable discomfort, where injury probability was higher. At this point, I looked down at the distance and realized that I had run 10km.

"Rule your mind or it will rule you..." -Buddha

Your mind is adapted to protect you from harm which is why when you start feeling discomfort, it tries talking you into avoiding the situation whether that be with physical fitness or relationships where you are unhappy but comfortable. The primitive part of the brain is a short-term planner, however, higher brain processes factor in long-term benefits and can suppress the primitive short-term planning part of the brain in favour of long-term benefits. I refer to this as: Ruling Your Mind. It is a skill like all others that develops through practice and reflection.

Your brain is a phenomenal organ that adapts to the situations you put it in. Once you tell the short-term planner part of your brain that you are going to persist through the discomfort for a long-term benefit, your brain realizes that the discomfort is inevitable in this situation anyways. As a result of self-preservation, it tries to minimize this negative experience by taking you into Flow State, the state that many athletes refer to when they say their 2-hour run felt like 2 minutes and have trouble remembering parts of their performance. In my example, this was when I zoned out of my run from the 2km point to the 10km point.

Unfortunately however, at least based on my experience, there is a discomfort barrier that you must overcome first, before entering flow state, for your mind to realize that flow state is necessary. Now that I have this awareness, I know to expect discomfort during my workouts and that it will be followed by flow-state and get easier if I persist, and then I will be able to push much farther.

Fast-forward to 3 months after that 10km run, my friends Jay and Tyler are doing a fundraising challenge with me for motioball in support of the Special Olympics. We are about to do the most physically challenging thing we had ever done, untrained: Run 20km, Swim 2.5km, and Bike 25 km in 1 day.

I was somewhat trained because I worked out at F45 where there is a large emphasis on cardiovascular training, but Tyler and Jay only trained for hypertrophy, minimally incorporating cardio into their workouts. In addition, both are very inexperienced swimmers and Jay had only learned how to swim 4 months prior to that day. Everyone who heard the story on that day could not believe it because it did not make sense unless you had been in a position where you truly took control of your mind before which unfortunately is not that common. However, we did complete the challenge and Jay did swim the 2.5km after running 20km and before biking 25km. Lifeguards were walking next to our lane watching Jay because of his very poor swimming form and were in disbelief when he completed the 2.5km swim in 2 hours.

Jay after the 2.5km swim (His longest swim to-date)

After it was over, we all looked at each other and I asked them at what point they thought of quitting? We all replied saying we thought of stopping at around the 2-3km mark for the run, which was the first part of the challenge that we did at 7 AM. However, none of us said anything because we saw the others pushing through, not knowing that we were all thinking the same thing. This served as a reminder that we all experience thoughts of quitting but are all capable of practicing and developing the skill of ruling our minds. Additionally, we also all said that as we went on with the day, the discomfort got less intense. We found ourselves going more into flow-state and feeling euphoric about taking control of our mind and doing more than we thought possible.

One last quick example:

As I told this story that day at F45, the gym I work at, someone overheard and messaged me the next day asking if we could go for a run together and I agreed. I asked her what her longest run to-date was and she said 8km. I replied by saying that we would push it to 10km. 5 days after that challenge with Tyler and Jay, her and I set-off for what was supposed to be a 10km run, but ended with us running 21km in around 2 hours.

The human brain is a powerful organ that controls how hard you push yourself, whether you quit or persist in the face of adversity & discomfort so train your mind by practicing the ability to remind yourself of long-term benefits when facing short-term discomfort.

Next time you go for a run/bike ride/swim/workout/etc., once you’re at discomfort, ask yourself if this is actually your pre-injury max or discomfort that you are amplifying in your mind to give yourself an excuse to stop. Once you gain that awareness, the next step is to develop the skill of controlling your mind. Remember that like all skills, sometimes you have off-days and cannot push past discomfort, so do not let that intimidate you, but serve as a learning opportunity for you to know what made your mental toughness weaker that day: sleep deprivation, low caloric intake, etc.?

The topic of ruling your mind is discussed in one of my podcasts where Jay is a guest. Here is the link if you want tot check that out! (audio-only versions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1qtxAoPFj0

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