Wisdom From an Ironman: Developing Grit and Resilience

Anyone can do an Ironman or run an Ultra Marathon. Once you’ve decided to take up a challenge that’s going to stretch you to your limits, grit is the piece that will get you to the finish line. As the saying goes, “the biggest muscle is actually between your ears”. Here’s what you need to understand to help you achieve your most ambitious goals.

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A Fine Balance

There are five basic elements to our lives that exist in some form of balance:

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• Family & social life
• Nutrition
• Exercise
• Work & income
• Sleep and recovery

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The act of balancing these elements is what we broadly define as “wellness” today. Think of them as five fingers to your hand. Too much nutrition and not enough exercise leads to obesity. The absence of sleep lowers your ability to recover after exercise or to be productive at work, which in turn compromises your income, that impacts everything again.

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The most important skill that anyone wanting to become an Ironman or Ultra runner has to master, long before embarking on the journey, is how you would balance inevitably limited 24-hour days. Trade-offs between these “five fingers on a hand” need to provide you with a decent amount of time per week that you can dedicate to preparations towards your goal.

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Now, the Ironman is just a physical fitness goal. You can apply this theory of balance to work to any goal you are working towards in your life. Suppose your goal is to improve the Nutrition aspect of your life. You’d want to learn to cook at home if you have no cooking skills today. To do this, you’d have to compromise something. It’s always the reality of what you can afford as well as what you’d need to give up to achieve your goal.

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Anchoring: Knowing Yourself and Assessing the Environment

At its core, the act of making commitments is a very personal one. The easiest way to stick to your commitments is to find a strong link between the commitment you’re making and the values you live by. Human beings are also biased to depend on some limited and initial pieces of information to make subsequent judgments – this process is called anchoring. Your “anchor” is an impulse behind the original decision. It is the single most powerful force that will keep you going towards the goal.

There are many self-assessment tools out there that will help you place your character on a framework of labels and attributes. Training up resilience and ‘grit’ aspects of one’s character places a huge importance on self-centricity, independence from others’ opinions, and empathy to those who think differently. Anyone taking up a regimen with 15-20 hours of training a week looks “crazy” to others. This self-sacrifice is judged as insanity, and some will even belittle you for making this choice.

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Achieving big goals is completely opposite from being “kiasu” as it’s called in Singlish, standing for “fearing of missing out” or FOMO. Not being prone to FOMO pays off. If you find that you tend to be “kiasu” though, despite your level of determination, the nature of your character – being an interdependent, risk-averse person who needs a lot of guidance in decision-making – would require a different motivators as compared to different personality types such as ‘self-made’ ‘commoner’ or ‘risk-taker’. The latter would not be afraid to become a lone wolf, when focusing on her own tasks.

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Knowing yourself is important for anchoring as well.

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Identify the anchor that led you to set an ambitious goal. Be it a purchase of an expensive bicycle to battle Ironman distance, or a bright-as-the-sun headlamp that’ll help you run an ultra distance through the lonely dark night, staying attached to the original anchor and building stories around it is literally half of the battle won.

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For example, I remember for my first Ultra-marathon, I’ve started with exactly the latter: I bought an expensive Lupine headlamp. German-made, with extreme brightness and insane battery life. That was an anchor to drag myself out of the bed at 4:00am and do loops of MacRitchie Reservoir and Bukit Timah climbs, running into spider webs stretched across the trails. The anchor’s monetary value and its presence in my view day after day eliminated any doubts and took away many psychological transitions from downtime to training.

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The Human Element

To achieve your big goals, surrounding yourself with positive, like-minded, and supportive people is a must. Avoid casting aside your goals in favour of mingling with weak links without social necessity, or making problematic choices to maintain toxic connections. Doing this will lower your motivation, which will ultimately lead up to failure.

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Big changes require big support. Do a scan of your social circles and be very selective about the people you spend time with. The unfortunate reality is that you cannot be nice to everyone at the same time. In the worst case, you can always distance yourself from certain people while you work towards your goal and choose to reconnect with them once you’ve accomplished what you set out to accomplish. It may appear an egoistic choice, but a necessary one to make if you’ve made a commitment to something larger.

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That doesn’t mean you shut yourself away from everyone. Quite the contrary. Recovery after training includes interactions with people and fulfillment it brings. So, never isolate yourself from the true friends who understand and support you on your journey towards your big goal. These are positive pillars of encouragement who will cheer you on even if they don’t help you actually achieve your milestones in tangible ways.

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Setting up a social calendar months ahead of time may sound like a crazy idea for a lot of us, but in reality, this is how the most successful pundits and their families operate. Structured time-off over weekends, joint holidays, and even work-day breakfasts require focus and planning. Be intentional about how and with whom you spend your limited free time.

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Remember, when you’re working towards a big goal, your schedule and commitment to regimen is the only sacred and non-compromisable area of your personal life, until you reach that D-day and H-hour and accomplish what you had in mind. So, ensure you communicate this with everyone in your life who supports you. But for the time being, put your goals first.

It usually strikes most people when their running coach tells them to go… slow. Wait, what?

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Slow, slower, and slower again. Slow running, at a pace that people walk while keeping high feed cadence, is daunting. Such prolonged “low, slow, distance” aerobic exercise training increases stroke volume, lowers resting heart rate stroke volume, and, more importantly, sheds fat as fast as possible. It’s something that many coaches refer to as “biological adaptation”, “the base”, or “the foundation”.

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There’s even a saying that it’s often more important to walk to the gym and back when you want to burn fat, rather than to just go into the gym class. But, this kind of training can take a mental toll on you. It’s so tempting to give in to the group-thinking or wannabe “hear-and-say” mentors, not coached themselves, and follow their tips to go harder, go faster.

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It’s also applicable at work. In many books, like “BS Jobs” and others, the notion of self-defined non-value added human jobs are taking the front seat. Chances are, even if you’re doing an elementary job, parts of it will be crossing paths with non-value-adding processes. So, why do you need to rush on those elements? Bulk them up, delay them, batch them in one go at the end of the year, or maybe simply not do them at all. Do important things early enough, patiently, with a slower pace and higher quality. Think about the excellence of your value-adding work, not about its pace.

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To master anything, you need to start by deeply understanding what you’re doing. This can only come through the state called “flow”, or full immersion.

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Flow at work is an interesting field of study these days, but getting into the flow takes cognition, determination and training. But imagine, at a slower pace, working through three to four value-adding hours of meaningful deep contribution, makes way more return to your employer than a few short, loud, rushes, 15 minutes each.

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It takes incredible willpower to go slow, while staying focused on the long audacious goal like marathon, an ultra distance, or an Ironman triathlon. It’s tough to give your company’s running group a miss as they all train for five- kilometre run around Marina Bay as their ultimate goal. It’s tough to not exercise with your loved ones, as they take selfies and walk most of the time. But don’t give up.

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“It’s lonely at the front of the pack, all leaders know this feeling.”

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The great news is, once you get into the groove of determined solitude, you will soon be able to tempo up your training, and either mix in sprints, or go up a notch with every fraction of your planned workout’s duration.

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All marathons are won on the “negative splits,” where the runner starts from a slower pace and “dials up” a notch towards the middle, the last quarter, and finishes strongly. Working backwards from your goal and knowing the winning pace will help you figure out the average pace you’d need to maintain to smash your goals on D-day. Don’t get to that average on your first week, you’ll burn yourself out. Go slow, even slower than you think, and stay focused. As you progress, dial up a notch.

Low Morale: What if I Don't Want to Do it?

Hardly anything can compromise your reach for the goal and your success-tailored regimen as your own morale. Sometimes, you really can be your own worst enemy. Self-doubt and questioning why you embarked on this journey in the first place won’t lead you to productive outcomes.

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Limit your brain by the power of simple digits. Put a count to what you do. This would be your first marathon, this is only 100 days away. When you mix in some digits and countbacks, you’ll find that putting a number to things will be a solid and reasonable way to rationalise your brain against your inner doubts.

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That said, if you are going to succumb to irrational behaviour, try to use it to your advantage. The concept of FOMO or the fear of missing out is a great example. If you find yourself trying to back out, try to use the idea of missing out to get yourself to stay in the game. You’re already in it, and wouldn’t you regret the decision to give up two decades down the road, when you’ll have a substantially different “five fingers on your hand” combination?

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Fight your low morale factors by breaking down tasks into smaller parts. That’s a well-known trick: the less resistance you get step by step, the harder it is to back out. To go for a run at 4:30am, make sure your running shoes are at the exit from your apartment, toe-outward. Arrange your socks neatly on top of your shorts, shorts on top of your running singlet. Coil your heart rate monitor on top and put your gear next to your bed. Wake yourself up with a special app that can turn on the wi-fi controllable bulb in your room. Invest those 30 dollars, but make sure your wake-up is rightly timed with your natural REM sleep cycle, to wake up recharged.

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Another tip to stay motivated is to make your goals visible so your loved ones can hold you accountable. Post your marathon ticket purchased online so your friends support you. If you’re planning to race overseas, plan your trip in detail long in advance. Know what to bring, what to pack, how would you spend your day off after the race.

Why theory of sport motivation is proven and why self-help books often suck.

There are only a few types of motivators. Amateur athletes progress between them, or drop off without return. First comes the “just do it” phase. This is when you get your first Finisher’s t-shirt and wear it around proudly, as if it were a tuxedo or a ball gown. The second phase, once you’ve run your first marathon, is centred around improvement “How do I do it better?” This is where you start to tweak your nutrition choices, add some (un)helpful gadgets to your shelves, and discuss strategies and techniques that work and don’t work for your training. The last phase is competition. You’re now focused on beating your personal best, your buddies, or the age group records.

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Many self-help books go about being “the best of breed”, and offer lots of advice on managing careers, writing the best CV, putting achievements and motivations first.

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The truth is, everyone’s motivations are different. For some, just “dipping a toe” and doing something just once, for a half of year or so, is good enough. And for others, participating in a competitive way from day one, so that no one is going to beat them, is the only possible way forward to the goal.

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Know yourself, and plan to do things right. If you’re an engineering minded genius, maybe you’d love to dig into the “how do I do it better” straight away. Whatever makes you happy and doesn’t compromise your results – that’s your obvious choice.

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Attention Restoration Theory

Being outdoors in the city centre is not the same as being on a trail run in the middle of a large forest. There’s increasing evidence that by immersing yourself in nature, you are restoring your attention and focus. Cities are full of “white noise” detractors: whether you need to stop at a red light, keep to the left of that ice-cream kiosk, make a sharp turn to avoid an opening door. Make sure you’re conditioning your mind by allocating some time every week to train in the great outdoors.

1. Get Outdoors

Slow down for an uninterrupted hour-long run in nature. Immerse yourself into the living and breathing organism of the forest, without any of the distractions.

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2. Slow Down

Aerobic exercise at low-intensity zones is akin to meditation. Smile when you’re exhausted and use your endorphins to level up your pain tolerance level and persist through. Mindfully check in with your body to endure further, without stopping. Go slower, but don’t stop.

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3. Identify Your Anchors

This is your “why” – the impulse behind the original decision that you made. Hold onto this anchor, and build a story around it to make it more meaningful.