What are those crazy people doing?

I was very fortunate to go to Kona, Hawaii and do some media work at the Ironman World Championships a few weeks ago. This has to be one of the worlds most amazing sporting events. Over 2000 of the fittest people you could imagine put themselves in this furnace of an Island to face the test of swimming 3.8k, biking 180k and then running the full marathon distance of just over 42k!

Ironman, like a lot of endurance sports, has a slight deranged appeal to it. At the world champs the deranged aspect propagates. You get a sense that to the athletes the harder the race is the more appealing it is. These people want to face the toughest conditions, they want to face that moment where every ounce of your mind, body and soul is telling you to give up. It’s in this moment that they get to reveal to themselves who they really are.

Sitting down next to the finishers after the race I got to hear all types of astounding scenarios of trying to overcome that moment. What I found most interesting was that nearly everyone I talked to had lost the battle in some way, some big, some small. It wasn’t that they’d had terrible races but they knew that this race had still beaten them, they knew their was a better version of themselves still out there.

This is why I have so much respect for endurance athletes, even after they had gone through hell, a place that 99% of the population has never been close to, they still seek to find their mental and physical nirvana.

Occasionally you see someone who has had that magical day where they revealed 100% of themselves to the race and that moment of doubt. You see it in their eyes, they might be sitting next to you but they are somewhere else. They are off in a distant place in their mind where they know deep within themselves that when the going gets tough they are going to be ok. They have learnt a level of trust in themselves that they will keep forever, that they will pull out like a mystical weapon when they have to face adversity in life.

Most people look at Endurance athletes and think that they must be crazy but when you see that look in their eyes you know it’s a journey worth exploring. 

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The lesson Aimee Learnt

It was a Saturday morning and I was doing some run coaching. I turned around and heading towards me at a fast pace and a big smile on her face was Aimee. Aimee had been training with us over the last couple years so I had a pretty good relationship with her and as a fitness professional you develop the ability to figure out what motivates different people and what their real drivers are.

With Aimee, I know that she is a person who absolutely hammers herself in every session and when you watch her you get the feeling she’s trying to beat some inner demon, that there’s something inside her head that she thinks she can destroy by testing her physical limits. 

But on this particular morning I didn’t see the demon in Aimee, the smile she had on her face represented a completely different emotional place. Before she got to me I assumed that it must have been because she was having a great run surrounded by stunning nature as she was running down a beautiful tree lined street with the river on her right hand side and the sun shining down, it was just one of those stunning days. As she approached me I said to her, ‘you seem in a great place today’, this allowed her to open up and reveal that while she was loving running in nature the place she was in came from an experience she’d had over the last couple weeks. 

After working in the fitness industry and gaining the trust of many of my clients over the years I have gained many insights into things I would never normally have known or even thought about. One of these areas is how much so many females mentally struggle with image and weight issues. I know that most of us have some idea on this stuff but I’ve been shown how consuming this thinking can be for some. Aimee was one of them and the demon she was trying to beat when I saw her exercise was her image battle. 

If you meet Aimee you would think that she would have nothing to worry about in regards to her image, she’s a young, fit looking woman but that doesn’t mean that what she feels inside isn’t real for her.  She has dissatisfaction in herself based on her image and over the years her strategy for beating this has been to be very strict with her exercise, with the amount that she was doing and the intensity that she brought to it. Sometimes her strategy would lead her to make some unwise decisions, like continuing training when she was injured. 

When Aimee started to speak on that sun filled Saturday she shared with me an experience that had helped her have a shift in her thinking around her exercise and image strategy. She told me how recently she had been unable to exercise. At first she was really worried about putting weight on so she stayed focused on maintaining good eating habits and not binging on ‘crap food’. During this time she didn’t put any weight on, she actually lost a little bit. She was amazed that she could do this without her demon beating exercise strategy and from this experience she started to see exercise in a different light.  

As I rode beside Aimee she happily expressed how learning that she could maintain a healthy image without beating herself up through exercise dissolved her previous motivation for exercise. ‘Now I can just enjoy the exercise itself, today I’m just loving being out here running’ she told me. 

Aimee’s experience is a great reminder that the attitude we bring to exercise will often determine what we gain from it. While in the past she would complete a session feeling dissatisfied because the demon had beaten her, now she was in a place where she could enjoy all the good feelings that exercise can offer. As she ran off with a big smile still planted on her face I could see that she learnt a pretty great lesson. 

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Episode 24 Fitness Behavior - What about the kids?

I got an email from Stuart Moore asking for my thoughts on kids and exercise. On this months show I share some ideas on how to get kids loving exercise. 

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