Resilience
What is resilience? How do you get it into your life? How do you weave it into your running?
If you’re listening to this, chances are you are, have been or have aspirations to be an endurance athlete. Maybe you want to achieve some goals. Maybe you want to run a marathon in a personal best time. Maybe you want to qualify for Boston. Maybe you’re considering a 100-mile race or something equally epic.
Or, maybe you are searching for ways to work that fitness adventure into your life. To find that balance that allows you to consistently perform. To not be hit and miss. To have a purring motor of a life that interweave seamlessly around your work, family, community, training and all the other substantial things that swirl in the lives of average people.
Maybe you are trying to deal with change. To bounce back to find again what is temporarily lost. Maybe you’re looking to grow, to try something new. Maybe it’s all these things at once.
Whatever it is, it requires resilience. Whether it is closing that 26th mile at race pace or dredging up the energy to change one more diaper you need to find and practice resilience.
There’s been a lot of writing on resilience recently. Analytical people want to know what makes one person successful and another one not. They study what are those attributes that determine whether you quit or don’t.
It’s an interesting mix of influences. There are environmental factors. Where and how you grew up. Where you live. The community you associate with. All influence, but don’t determine, your resilience.
In our training this environmental influence is the weather on race day, the course, the difficulty of our training and the support or lack thereof of our training community.
These are environmental influences. The stronger influencers are internal. They are within us. They are created in our thinking mind and burned into our autonomous nervous system as habit. These are the strong bonds of resilience in your practice.
All of these things come together at that moment when you are staring at the track about to start that speedwork. That decision to do the work. That is the culmination of resilience.
Grit comes from the act of gritting your teeth. Literally clenching your teeth together to find your resolve. How does one practice grit?
From Angela Duckworth’s book the rules are:
Commitment: I promise to do it. I will set a goal and do whatever it takes to deliver.
Control: I really believe I can do it. I will keep my emotions in check when doing it.
Challenge: I am driven to do it, I will take a chance and acceptable risk. Setbacks will make me stronger.
Confidence: I believe I have the ability to do it. I can stand my ground if I need to.
These are all internal commitments.
We can see right away in the ultra-running world that the commitment to finish is incredibly important. Deciding to do it. Then committing to it holds a lot of force in our minds. Are you committed? If you are not committed to the goal you will walk off the track when it gets hard. You will stop when it hurts. You will give up when it gets hard.
Do you really believe you can do it? If you have doubts they will creep in when you are in weak spots. You have to believe you can do it. If you believe then things will line up to support that belief. If you don’t believe then excuses will arrive to support your doubt.
Challenges are perhaps the biggest test of our resilience. How do we handle failure? How do we manage that bad workout, that bad race, that bad injury? Does it knock down our belief? Or does it teach us something and make us stronger?
We are all going to fail. Small failures every day. Big failures episodically. And it’s not the first one that gets you. It’s the fourth or fifth or 20th time that you get whacked with failure that is the test of your resilience. Those are the challenges that are moments of truth.
When we first start a new adventure we begin to formulate how we are going to achieve that new goal in our conscious mind. We might read the articles about it, talk to people who have doen it before or listen to all the podcasts on the topic. This is the conscious research phase that helps us reinforce our decision and commitment.
Learning becomes part of the doing.
As we begin to train for that goal we shift some of that conscious thought into autonomous habit. We execute the training every day that puts us one step closer. We burn in the habits that make the practice stick.
We hit rough patches and bumps, but with our belief and our commitment we change and adapt and move forward. And this brings us to the work. We do the necessary work to achieve that goal. As much as we’d like to find a short cuts to the goal we know that most direct path is through the work.
And thus we define our practice. And this is how we become present in our practice. We have built the foundation of commitment and belief and now we settle into the practice of the work. It becomes part of our lives.
This act of finding a goal, committing to it, believing in it, learning how to accomplish it and then dropping into the rhythm of the work these are the bricks in the pathways that build up a life of accomplishment.
But within these pathways, within the herringbone pattern of the seasons of training and adventure, of work and family, there are hundreds of moments of resilience. Hundred of times where we could choose to stay in bed. Hundreds of times where we could choose to stop.
Resilience is what keeps us on the path. We don’t make all those decisions the way we’d like but we focus on making enough of them that we push the table to our benefit. We push the entropy that surrounds us away and clear a spot of our own in our own practice. This is resilience in the small moments of truth.
The discomfort of a workout is strength being built one footstep at a time.
Resilience plays its hand in the long game as well. The devastation diseases, the full-stop injuries and the constant grinding advance of age. Resilience is knowing that there is next year and the year after and as many years that we can be gifted. Today may not be a day we can practice the work but today is still a day that we can hold our boat steady in the current and continue towards our larger goals.
Injuries and life events are opportunities to gain strength and opportunities to learn. That’s how to practice resilience over the long run.
There practical steps that Gary calls out in the Tao of Running, and that I have found to be true in my practice, to win those small moments of resilience.
First is making that decision. You WILL Finish. You WILL attempt every workout that coach gives you.
Second is bringing a confidence and positivity to the endeavor that reflects your belief that it is the right thing, that it is a purposeful thing, that there is a reason you are doing this.
Third is to reinforce these things in your practice. Maybe with a mantra. Maybe with affirmations or other ways to remind you.
Fourth is to embrace the hardship. Embrace the work. The effort, the discomfort the soreness is a reason to rejoice because it is proof that you are well on your chosen path.
Fifth is to look for the big setbacks, failures and challenges. To expect them. To be ready for them. To welcome them as learning.
And resilience in your practice will become doing. That one more step. That one more mile. That one more hill.
That one life lived well.