I had a recent experience where, I had taken on a challenge that left me physically and mentally exhausted. This was also during the time of the recent Tokyo Olympics and it got me thinking – how do athletes become mentally tough enough to push through the years of training and competing at that level and can I use some of those tools to support me in more of these challenging experiences?
I ventured on a 24 klm two day hike up to a campsite on Cascade Mountain in Banff National Park. I have done a fair bit of hiking in this last year, but I have never hiked up to a campsite where you are packing in all your gear on foot and I hadn’t slept in a tent for over 10 years. When I was asked to go on this adventure, I was at a place in my life where I was saying yes to anything that could get me out of my comfort zone, so I agreed to do this. Now all I had to do was buy all the gear – sleeping bag, mattress pad, water bladder, dehydrated food, head lamp and a very large backpack. Then I set about putting it all together and figuring out how to carry it. I did some research and the backpack should weigh 20-30% of your weight to avoid injury. When I had everything in there, it was about 37 pounds and within the recommended weight for me. The trail had an elevation of ~1400m and was classified as a “hard trail” on the All Trails App that I had used throughout the year to gauge what I could handle. I typically tackled “moderate hikes” and the only two “hard” ones I had done to date had an elevation of only ~700m and were 5-7klm in length. So not only was I going to be challenging myself by the length and elevation of the hike, but I was doing it with 37 extra pounds on my back! As the date grew closer, I started to worry about how I was going to manage this. I have plantar fasciitis which makes walking long distances very difficult and issues with my hips as well and wondered if I was going to be able to manage this trip, but I had committed to going and would follow through. The temperature both days was 31 degrees Celsius (88 degrees Fahrenheit) and there was a smoky haze in the sky due to several forest fires burning in neighboring British Columbia. The mosquitos were rampant and not responding to any type of bug spray. I had heard that the multiple days of smoke in the air, the fires had created their own weather pattern and even though there is no rain in site, there was humidity in the air that seemed to unleash the hordes of mosquitos.
There were times on the trail that I wanted to just quit, I couldn’t go on and my friend kept saying just take your time which seemed to trigger anger in me for some reason. It wasn’t about taking my time, it was about being in physical pain and trying to convince my brain to go on! So much was going through my mind while I was walking, my emotions were all over the map and the stress seemed to be there the whole way. I wondered many times – how do you keep moving when you hit the wall due to your body’s resources being utterly depleted? When I got back and was resting my body, I started to research on the internet to find out what I would need to do to condition myself if I want to complete more of these in the future. I did overall enjoy the experience, being out in the mountains, my favourite place, and to be secluded from the world just enjoying the beautiful surroundings. My research took me to a few podcasts; by retired Navy SEALs Jocko (John Gretton), Draeger and Mark Divine. I also found one called Warrior Mind by Gregg Swanson that intrigued me as well.
How to grind it out to get to the finish line of a race or a project?
Jocko – (John Gretton) retired US Navy Officer says, “Because emotion and logic will both reach their limitations. And when one fails, you need to rely on the other. When it just doesn’t make any logical sense to go on, that’s when you use your emotion, your anger, your frustration, your fear, to push further, to push you to say one thing: I don’t stop.” When I was getting angry at my friend when he kept saying, “just take your time”, I was using that emotion to fuel me to keep going. Another Navy SEAL – Draeger says there are “Four Pillars of Mental Toughness.” They are Setting goals, mental visualization, positive self-talk, and arousal control. I definitely had the all of these going on that kept me pushing to complete this trip. At one point when I was sweating from the heat, getting eaten by mosquitos and really feeling the friction blisters on my feet, I equated the hardship of hiking that trail to being harder than childbirth. Although it’s been over 25 years since I experienced that but think when you are having a baby, there’s a reason and a purpose in birthing another person you are responsible for so you push through the pain at all costs but when the goal is for yourself, I find it’s harder to do it and that’s why I felt that. I didn’t really have a purpose in it all – sure getting out in nature is wonderful but I can do that on a much easier trail however the personal development that comes from challenging yourself is so worth it, but it was hard to keep sight of that in the moment of the struggle.
I have to laugh at myself sometimes as to how I get into these situations where one day I’m just a regular get up and go to work come home watch TV kind of person to one day saying yes to an extreme event. I have had many of these situations. I find that I am somewhat of a binger not just when it comes to drinking, eating and socializing but also in motivation, also in getting my kicks in or adding spice to my life so to speak! This year I went all out and did the Unleash the Power Within 4-day seminar Tony Robbins puts on. It’s a grueling 4 days of up to 16-hours/day of breaking you down emotionally to build you back up. And the last time I slept in a tent back in 2010, still brings chuckles – this is me…, “yes I can go to T in The Park at the age of 43, where there’s 85,000 other people half my age raving in front of several stages where folks like Eminem, Black Eyed Peas and Jay-Z were playing and everyone is ingesting all kinds of pills to illuminate the experience and oh did I mention it was in Scotland in 4 days of solid downpour of rain and my borrowed wellies (rain boots) had holes in them as did our children’s tent borrowed from my friends 12 year old sister! The mud made it difficult to get anywhere and the porta potties were overflowing with water and not useable, not being able to find your tent among the thousands of tents out there that all look the same! And then attending my friends’ wedding with 25 people in Vegas 3 years ago and not going to bed for 96 hours to now agreeing to hiking a really difficult trail and sleeping in a tent at my age. It can’t be that hard!! There is humour in all of this. My bestie puts it like this, “I want no regrets when I die and that’s the legacy I want on my tombstone.” I try to keep up with this philosophy at times again as I said in doses it seems.
During my hike, there were times when I needed to ask how many klm’s had we done to keep going and other times that would have made me feel hopeless. I went through such a gamut of emotions and they changed every half hour to an hour. I typically wasn’t setting the pace being the amateur in this venture but my friend kept stopping maybe to let me catch up or to rest every few minutes and every time we did that, the mosquitos got worse and I would get frustrated and then when I couldn’t take it any longer and was ready to have a melt-down, I pushed past my friend and I was now keeping the pace. One of the things I remembered reading a few years ago about momentum was that if you keep stopping and starting, it takes more energy to get going each time and even if you only move an inch at a time, you will preserve energy and it’s easier to keep moving. I remembered this at the hardest times on the trail and at some points I literally was moving an inch swaying and swerving from exhaustion, but I knew if I sat down or stopped my body would seize up and I would be done. Tony Robbins says when you are in your head, you’re dead and I completely get what he means by that now. I had to really reach deep within me to pull out positive thoughts and I remembered the incantations I use to say that I hadn’t thought about for over a month. Those really did help me to keep going.
There’s an article on the MTV News website called 8 Mental Tricks That Will Get You To Push Yourself Harder During Workouts:
- Think about finishing in small increments (less digestible)
- Keep your eyes off the clock (a watched pot never boils)
- Have a reason strong enough to want to exercise or complete the race.
- Find a mantra (I said my incantation “All I need is within me now and I have the courage to see it through” and I just kept repeating it)
- Set specific daily goals (in this case in was hourly goals)
- Find something you like about the sensation you’re experiencing
- Feel grateful to be working out
- Know the difference between an injury and normal soreness
The Warrior Mind Podcast by Gregg Swanson is dedicated to getting you in peak performance. It’s called “10 Powerful Words to Keep You Motivated if you are losing steam on life or a project”. Setbacks cause disappointment and momentum says Swanson and to boost your confidence he recommends these 10 words:
Purpose: If you feel lost, down or not feeling good about yourself go back to your purpose of what you are trying to accomplish. Revisit your goals and remind yourself to stay inspired.
Planning: Looking back through what you have already allows you to tweak or adjust if necessary to keep moving. We don’t always anticipate things that come up and it can take you out but if you plan for it, then you know you have a plan
Acceptance: Accepting that you are a human being and that you are going to have ups and downs. We have emotions and that’s what makes life have texture and be colourful.
Reward: When your motivation starts to lack, reward yourself and look back at what you have accomplished to date and celebrate that and then move on and forward.
Health: Moderate exercise, healthy diet, hydration and minimum of 7 hours of sleep per night. Nutrition affects our brain and our mood so ensure you are following a healthy nutritional plan.
Motivation: Motivation to keep motivated. YouTube, Podcasts etc., go searching you can find anything on these social platforms to pump you up.
Organization: The interior is reflected on the exterior so if your surroundings are cluttered, it will reflect on the inside so do some organizing in your environment and you will feel empowered through this sense of accomplishment.
Refresh: Put something new into your plan and this will give you some new creative thinking and keep you motivated.
Networking: Depending on your goal, task or project is reach out to someone who is further ahead on the path than you and seek some guidance or provide information to others. Take your eyes off yourself and put onto others.
Take Action: Always, action cures everything all the time. Take action and move yourself forward.
Mark Divine’s (ex-Navy Seal) Unbeatable Mind Podcast episode on Tap Into Your Mental Toughness talks about how mentally tough people control their emotions. Divine say, “Toughness is the ability to commit to something and see it through. Mental resilience around the capacity to deal with the inevitable setbacks and to learn from them and to grow and not get frustrated and loose motivation. The qualities of mental toughness include consistent ability to find motivation where you are at when you need it even if you feel you’ve lost focus and be able to find it. Motivation is something that needs to be learned every day and it’s not something that is endless or limitless in supply. Somedays you just don’t feel motivated, you’ve lost sight of your why or the target has moved and the ability to reset and look within and recharging the old vision or tapping into the new vision is what being mentally tough is all about, be adaptive. Curating your mindset to be positive and always be able to find the silver lining. This takes skill – to feed courage and starve fear. By focusing on the positive side of the information then you starve the negative and it dries up and goes away. You need to train yourself and don’t allow others to.”
He lays it out in pretty simple terms, “The mind is the source of creation for all that’s in your life and if you want to be tough, you foster courage and if you want to be adaptive, then you foster adaptability and if you want to be positive, then you have to foster positivity and if you want to be wealthy and abundant then you have to foster a mindset that’s wealthy and abundant.” Divine believes the mentally tough curate the quality of their thoughts and they curate when to think and when not to – that capability allows them to know when to take action and when to stop. He says, “When you are working with the mind, one side is cognition and we work on the performance of our brain and our attitude and ability to persevere and then the other side is the emotional side of the mind. You may think that the emotional side could be part of your body as the emotions are experienced in the body and your thoughts can be felt in the body as well as they are housed in the brain which is part of your body so in essence the emotions and thoughts are like brother and sister. The mentally tough also take a hard look at their emotional self and they become more emotionally aware and become less reactionary in a situation where they are triggered. Mentally tough people are also emotionally aware and in control of inner states and are able to find the optimal energetic emotional and phycological patterns that will bring them the success they are looking for and that needs to be trained. Given these criteria, it’s not easy being mentally tough and can take a lot of training. I do believe he’s right about all of this and can see now from pushing myself and completing that hike, I know what I’m capable of right now and what I need to do daily if I want to up my game and continue to challenge myself with more difficult hikes.
Where do athletes struggle with this…
I heard about Simone Biles and her recent decision to step down from the individual all round gymnastics competition at the Tokyo Olympics to focus on mental well-being, I was a bit puzzled by that until I went through what I did. I definitely had a different perspective going up that mountain than I did when I got back home. I can only imagine at her level of athleticism, that any seed of doubt or negative self-talk that was going on could create an injury that could have huge implications on her career or long lasting physical injury not to mention the toll on her mental health. She was able to take a step back, build back up her confidence, practice out of the lime light and come back to take bronze in the balance beam. The courage it took to do that also displays her mental toughness. Michael Phelps was quoted as saying, “…We’re human beings, nobody is perfect. It’s ok to not be ok. It’s ok to go through ups and downs and emotional roller coasters…I felt like I was carrying, as Simone (Biles) said, the weight of the world on my shoulders. It’s a tough situation.”
Aren’t we all allowed some days to say I just can’t do this. Some would say and maybe even me at one point, that when you become an athlete you know what you are getting into, but it goes back to this whole thing that you are a human being and can have highs and lows. Prior to going on this hike/camping trip, I was struggling for about a month with getting myself to feel motivated to want to exercise or go for a regular weekly hike and I had some health challenges. I didn’t even have the energy to clean my house and found myself in bed a lot with no get up and go. On one of my weekly calls with my coach, she said to me, “Heather, you are only human, and you need to expect the highs and lows and the more work you do on yourself, you’re getting better at not staying in the lows for as long as you once did. I have been pushing myself very hard since January of this year with working on my emotional fitness, so it would make sense that I would want to just have a break. Maybe the timing wasn’t so great, but it all happens for a reason and I do notice that I don’t stay down as long as I once did and can see some improvement there. I believe all that hard work the last 7 months, had prepared me to be able to complete this 24klm challenge but I also think I wouldn’t have taken it on either if I hadn’t been pushing myself to be better. It all seems to be related, the more we improve, the bigger the challenges I guess.
After hearing that Damian Warner won Olympic gold in the decathlon, I’m not sure if I hadn’t had my recent experience and still feeling the soreness in my body, would I have appreciated just what he accomplished. This 31-year-old from London Ontario dominated the men’s decathlon over the two-day competition completing 10 different track and field disciplines setting a new Olympic standard. In my eyes, this man has the right to call himself a mental warrior. The mental toughness he must have to pull off what he did is astounding. And then what? I wonder how you keep going after something like that. To be the best in the world, what’s next for him? There’s no more carrot and that can also take a toll on the mind from what I understand. I read online that Michael Phelps also had depression after winning all those medals, it’s hard when you’ve trained for something all your life and then it’s over. He says the easy part is becoming the champion. As we were coming down the trail on the last approx. 4 klms, we ran into a couple that appeared to not be regular hikers. They were doing a shorter hike that shared a portion of the trail to the one we did, and they didn’t have a backpack or water camel pack with any of the gear you would normally have on a 6klm hike and they stopped for a moment to ask where we were coming from. When we explained that we had been camping another 8 klm up the mountain, the guy was so amazed, he asked how often we do this and I replied it was my first time. He got the biggest smile on his face and said to his partner she is so hard core! My friend was very quick to repeat it, so I would be sure to understand how proud I should be of myself. I didn’t take it as a compliment at the time as I knew in order to get through the next 4klm that was uphill, I had to keep myself in a focused mental state and not let my guard down. I knew once I finished and got to the car, I could then relax and celebrate and when I did, the term hard core resonated as it was a very major achievement for me!
I guess the message in all of this with regards to challenging ourselves, is that we need to prepare every day to build mental toughness and to always have a goal in mind to achieve and strive for. I’m no professional athlete or Olympian but I believe the principles are the same no matter where you are at. Whether you are climbing a mountain, wanting to walk 10,000 steps a day or for some with health challenges, just walk around the block or where ever you are at with your goals, that you gain insight from this great quote I found that sums this up… “physical strength will get you to the start line. But mental strength will get you to the finish line.” I hope you gained some awareness here to help with your next fitness goal or life challenge and that you find your mountain and climb it!