Take It Seriously, but Hold It Lightly
Make a subtle shift in your approach to sport and let success come to you
by Chris Bagg
Frustration can often get the better of us, both as endurance athletes and humans navigating this challenging world. Who among us hasn’t had a bad day at the office or during a workout, when everything seemed to conspire against us, when it seemed nothing was going right? And who among us hasn’t doubled down during those moments, conditioned as we’ve been to believe things such as “No pain no gain,” or “The early bird gets the worm,” and, finally, worst of all, “To the victor go the spoils?” Have a quick scan of those three terms: violence abounds in all of them, and they’re a short distance away from abbreviations often seen in endurance forums like “HTFU” or “STFU,” which are also toxic, dismissive, and unhelpful. All of these posit a world in which discomfort is a virtue and success is a zero-sum game—in other words, the same capitalist bullshit that has been producing “winners” and “losers” for millennia.
In my experience, trying harder when something isn’t going your way rarely seems to work, and if we go a little deeper, a little farther past the group of toxic bros who believe pain and suffering make you better than others, you’ll find another group of *more* successful leaders, coaches, and athletes who urge things like “Let it come to you,” and “don’t over-react or over-correct,” or, my favorite, “Holding something tightly only strangles it,” which is an ugly paraphrasing of E.B. White.
The truth is all of those ugly exhortations can have some short term success, which is why they are parroted by people who can’t or won’t look past their own initial impressions or the wounds of their childhoods. But if you want to truly succeed at your sport AND feel happy and proud (which sounds a lot like our “Faster, Happier, and Healthier” mission), read on as we teach you how to give your sport the respect it deserves (”take it seriously”) but also how not to strangle it in your anxious, scared grip.
Improvement is a long-term process
Competition can be healthy
You are not your success (or your failure)
Failure is a muscle
Improvement is a long-term process
What’s the biggest reason you’re frustrated with where you’re at?
It’s because the change isn’t happening fast enough, right? Or something like that. We have coached hundreds of athletes, and we have heard, thousands of times, something along the lines of “why is this taking so long? Is there a way to get there faster?”
This perspective is both understandable and a terrible pitfall. Many endurance athletes never make it past this step, and, frustrated by how long it is taking to reach the goals they have set for themselves, exit the sport looking for the validation and affirmation that attracted them to endurance sports in the first place. If quick improvements are your thing, then we’d suggest looking elsewhere than endurance sport: the best endurance athletes have been doing the sport for a long time, fueled by a powerful love of the sport and of healthy competition, NOT by a desire to achieve or to dominate. Physiological changes, too, take a very long time. Want to engage in some cardiac remodeling? That’ll be months to years. Want to develop a huge aerobic engine? Get ready to spend many hours and many weeks swimming, cycling, and running at low intensities that develop the energy systems that support great endurance performance. We hate to say this, but there is a reason that pros are pros, and usually that reason is, yes, *some* genetic ability, but more often it’s because they have been moving consistently their entire lives—their whole being has been shaped around sport, and by the time they began competing their physiology was very different from yours or mine.
Athletes get frustrated when they lose sight of this long-term process, but there is no way to shortcut it: you can’t sub intensity for volume, you can’t skip your strength and mobility work, you can’t eat or supplement your way to a greater and grander you. The long-term-ness of it, though, need not be a grind. We see athletes fetishizing “the grind” all the time, and this is just another maladaptive manner of thinking similar to what we talked about in the introduction, since it places you *in opposition* to the process of training: “I just have to get through this block,” or “I’m building something in spite of myself,” or other statements such as that. If you really view your chosen hobby as something to get through, well…maybe go find another hobby?
Ipsum Lorem Bacon
Competition can be healthy
Competition is another area that can short-circuit your development and leave you feeling sad and enervated rather than proud and accomplished. Competition can be defined as “Putting your ego on the line in a shared environment governed by mutually agreed-upon rules,” so we understand why it can be threatening. At the end of a race the organizers literally print out a list of participants with one name at the top, one name at the bottom, and everyone else ranked in the middle. Those are the results. If you feed your ego through sport or competition, you have set up a contract with your brain and heart that reads “my happiness is determined by beating other people.” The problem, of course, is that you are not in control of other people, or the wacky shit that goes down during any endurance race. If protecting and feeding your ego is your fuel, we anticipate you won’t be here too long. Your ego will suffer enough bruises due to circumstances truly beyond your control that soon you just won’t want to do this any more and you’ll go find another way to feed or protect that ego (and you’ll repeat the process there).
But competition can be a healthy aspect of sport, too. Your competitors are literally the adversity that can spur you to greater heights (and you can be that for them, too) as long as you remember one crucial truth:
In the end, you are only really racing yourself. Endurance sports are long, even if you are doing a sprint triathlon. Once race distances get longer than, oh, a 200m sprint, your performance is mostly determined by your own physiology and mindset. That’s true for 100m and 200m sprints, too (otherwise the only thing separating me from Usain Bolt would be my determination to beat him and…that’s not the only thing separating us), but in shorter events determination can play a bigger role than physiology. By the time you arrive at the start line, the difference between a good performance and a sub-par performance is probably a matter of minutes in either direction, and that range has been determined by your training. Whether you have a good performance or a…less optimal one will be determined by how you execute your race, which is a mental, not physical, distinction.
Why this long rhetorical setup? Because if you try to hitch your wagon to another athlete, you are trying to match your physiology to their physiology through force of will, which will be possible for only a short amount of time. We know this intrinsically in many other areas, but for some reason when we race we lose sight of this truth. When you see a long line of professional triathletes on the bike early in the race at Kona, some of them are there because their body can be there, and some are there because they think they “should,” be there. But those “should-ers?” They are the ones that, two hours later, you do not see any more as the field comes down from Hawi. And even worse, because they were trying to do something they couldn’t do, they usually lose their race altogether and walk the marathon or drop out.
So how can you compete in a healthy manner? For endurance sports, competition happens in the last quarter or so of the race. By this point you have roughly established your place in the results, and you can probably move it up or down a place or two depending on how well you’ve executed up to this point, whether you’ve fueled appropriately, and your intrinsic desire to see what YOU can do. Note the language here. The language is not about beating someone or dominating something. The language is “Well, its’ getting kinda late in the race and I think I can do a little more. Let’s see what we can do.” If there is another athlete not too far in front of you, and your paces are roughly similar, you can use that athlete as a spur to your own performance. If they provide you a helpful spur and you surprise yourself with a good performance, thank them afterward. And if you can’t catch them despite your best attempt? Thank them afterward.
The short answer? Race from a place of appreciation, not expectation, and competition will feel fun and, dare we say it, communal rather than adversarial. If you’re ever feeling adversarial, then maybe you have some work to do.
You are not your success (or your failure)
We’ll try to keep this one short, because ideally you get it from the subheading, but say it with us: “I am not my success. I am not my failure.” Success and failure are simply things you pass through, and they feel good for a short amount or yucky for a short amount of time. They do not define you. Athletes that hold tight to their successes are probably using sport to buttress their ego (not sustainable long term) and athletes that hold tight to their failures have, sadly, used sport to reinforce the negative ways they already think about themselves. Neither of these are positive.
When a workout or a race goes well, celebrate it and move on. There’s a lot of E.B. White in this article, but he never kept trophies around because he “never enjoyed the stale smell of success.” I challenge you to find seven words with more impact in the English language. When we over-identify with success or failure, we leave the long escalator of progress for the purgatory of self-worship or self-disgust. Neither are productive.
Failure is a muscle
Many endurance athletes are motivated by avoiding what they think of as failure. Avoiding “failure” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and many excellent (and happy) endurance athletes are motivated by avoiding what they call failure. Why am I avoiding just saying “failure,” choosing instead to say “what they think of as failure?” Because what we think of as failure is very often not failure in the big picture, but simply a sign-post pointing us in a new direction towards success. To steal a helpful saying from the dating world, “Rejection is simply redirection.” If your event doesn’t go the way you were hoping it would go (which many athletes would term “failure”), then don’t waste that opportunity! The muscle we can develop, here, is the “what can I learn and how can I integrate that knowledge?” To circle back around to our introduction, the athletes who say things like “nose the grindstone” or “rise and grind,” or any other grinding metaphor are the ones who usually willfully ignore the lessons of failure, and they assume that simply doing more, or doing it harder, or doing it again will result in a different outcome. You’re probably well-read enough to know that that mindset is an insane one. Let’s really get off the literary deep end and cite good ‘ol Samuel Beckett, the cheerful bloke who gave us such upbeat numbers as *Wating for Godot* and *Endgame*: “No matter, try again, fail again, fail better.”
Conclusion
We’ll leave you today back where we started, with the great E.B. White, without whom this whole metaphorical engine wouldn’t be possible. The tighter you hold to your goals, your ego, your successes and your failures the more you will simply strangle what sports are offering us all the time: a simple path to greater self knowledge: physical, intellectual, and emotional. Heck, take it far enough and endurance sports can show you your spiritual side, too, but we’ll leave that for another day. Would it be possible to change “STFU” to “spirit the fuck up?”
“One never knows what images one is going to hold in memory, returning to the city after a brief orgy in the country. I find this morning that what I most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their tiny hands–she with a couple of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip.”