You are not special.
You may think I say that to be edgy or show tough love, but I mean it in the most encouraging way possible.
Each of us is only one person out of the eight billion or so people on earth—and that’s not even counting the unfathomable number of people who lived and died already—so why should we think any challenge is unique to one of us?
The odds that you are facing an impossible, unknown, and solitary circumstance are infinitely small. That’s encouraging. And for those of us interested in becoming great endurance runners, there’s an obvious path used by athletes across the centuries to achieve the long-term goal we have.
Training is the bridge between the incapable and competent versions of ourselves. Yeah, everyone knows that, right? But you’d be surprised how few understand it.
Most of us see professional athletes on TV and think they have to be special. There’s no way a normal person could ever hope to do such extraordinary feats for a living. And sure, from a short-term standpoint, our doubt is warranted. Going from the couch to a marathon tomorrow could quite literally kill you after all.
But as I’m sure you know by now, this isn’t about short-term results. Every popular athlete you know got that way over years of training. And by “training”, I don’t mean one or two sessions a week when they felt like it. The type of training you need to reach that level is a lifestyle.
To truly commit to the lifestyle needed to become “special”, you have to first remove the assumption that limits exist where there are none. Forget about the “special” and “normal” labels and understand that anyone with a proper attitude towards their training can transform in front of your eyes.
No one would follow marathon training plans that require 40 plus miles for multiple weeks for example if they didn’t expect improvements in the coming months. Likewise in the real world, we have to view our current discomfort as the unfortunate path to improve long-term.
No matter if our circumstances are self-imposed or brought about by other forces, we have to shape our perspective to see those events as trials that will pass instead of destinations themselves. We can’t always control if we’re sick, despised, or abandoned, but we can always use those low points as building blocks of our growing endurance.
This is what useful training does for everyone: it makes us comfortable in our discomfort.
Building endurance isn’t about becoming a special person. It’s about becoming someone who can do special things.
The normal responses to pain, insults, and misery, are victimhood, retaliation, and complaints. The special responses are patience, forgiveness, and fortitude. Good training makes it easier to choose those better responses.
So don’t obsess about how talented you are or how many disadvantages you have. If you learn to be comfortable in spite of adversity and not just in its absence, you won’t seem very normal at all.
-Drew
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Marathon Mentality 4: Insane for the Mundane
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