EMBRACE YOUR CHALLENGES
Paddy Cloete (Psychologist and Ironman)
paddycloete@mweb.co.za
082 413 6649; (041) 581 1318

Ironman’s motto is “Anything is possible”. Most of us who do Ironman know this to be true, but most of us have reached a place in our training and/or on race day, that it is difficult to believe that anything is possible. As we take off our race numbers after competing in the half and we start to prepare for the full, it is a good time to remind ourselves of the Ironman motto.

Ironman training is hard. It is supposed to be hard to prepare you for the challenges you will encounter on race day. To succeed, you need to accept that everything will not go your way. It never does, but this is no a reason for despair. You need to embrace the challenges that you encounter during your preparation. If you tackle these challenges head on, you will arrive on race day mentally tougher than what you thought you were and ready to cope with the unexpected during the long day ahead.

Most top athletes know this and believe their ability to embrace their challenges is one of the reasons they have been successful. Lewis Pugh, the man who has achieved the impossible by swimming in sub zero temperatures, uses the Afrikaans word vasbyt to describe this quality. He draws on the image of a “lioness running across the veld and grabbing a wildebeest under the neck, kicking and hoofing. The lioness holds on because her life, and the lives of her cubs, depends on it. Vasbyt therefore means to never, ever, ever give up – to have grit and determination” (Pugh, 2010).

Ryk Neethling, Olympic gold medallist, echoes Pugh’s sentiment. Neethling had to work hard for his gold medal. In fact, he only medalled at his third Olympic games. He therefore speaks from experience when he stated that success comes from toughing it out. No surprise then that Alexander Popov, the four-time Olympic champion and six-time world champion swimmer, describes Neethling’s mentality as that of a hunter.

None of these athletes succeeded because everything went their way. They succeeded because they embraced their challenges and toughened it out. Few world class athletes have demonstrated this more than Natalie Du Toit. The phenomenal swimmer who, despite losing her leg in a horrible accident, represented South Africa at the Olympics and Paralympics.

Natalie explains the importance of embracing life’s challenges as follows in her autobiography: “Sometimes in life you come up against a wall. You can stop at the wall, but then nothing more will happen. You can try to turn at the wall, but if you come out of that spin without purpose, you’ll be disoriented and may lose your way. Or you can choose to tumble turn at the wall, picking a new direction and using the impetus the wall provides to propel you forward in life.
Everyone goes through bad patches in their lives. Not one person can say that they’ve only ever had good luck. No matter how carefully you plan, life keeps happening to us, and sometimes bad things happen – things we have no control over. What we do have control over is how we choose to deal with our bad luck and ultimately what we want to become. But for this, we have to dream and strive.

When I feel doubt, I can either go, ‘I might as well give up now, because I might not make it’, or I can say, ‘Well, I have another two years in which I can achieve something. Whether I achieve it or not, I’ve done the best I can, and I know there’s no way I could change anything.’

I may or may not reach my dream of swimming in the 2008 Olympics. But I will realise my dream, no matter what – because I know, I’ve worked as hard as I can to try to reach my goal.” (Du Toit, 2008)

Michael Phelps, the phenomenal swimmer who achieved the unimaginable feat of eight Olympic gold medals and seven world records at the Beijing Olympics, also had his fair share of challenges. In fact, Bob Bowman, Phelps’s coach purposefully created challenges for Phelps because he believed that it would help Phelps to perform at his best under challenging conditions. He would deliberately arrange practices, schedules, drills, workouts, whatever he could think of, around the idea of being uncomfortable. He would make Phelps train after a long media engagement, make him miss dinner, step on his goggles and train in the dark during a power outage, to name but a few. Bowman’s thinking was to put his swimmers through every scenario possible, because he believes that a champion is anyone who can deal with any situation at any given time.

Bowman’s philosophy is that there is a difference between “can’t” and “won’t”. He taught Phelps that when he thought he “can’t”, he meant he “won’t” do something, because if he said “can’t” he was restricting what he could do or ever will do. Bowman maintains that this approach set Phelps apart from other swimmers because he can and will do whatever it takes to get the job done, in any situation.

Phelps realised that at the highest level of sport the only way to set him apart from the other physically talented athletes was to be mentally tougher. He therefore trained his mind just like he trained his body by embracing obstacles, mistakes and difficulties. Phelps realised that if you want something in life you need to put time, energy, dedication and heart into it. If he was not in the mood to train, he got himself in the mood to train. He trained his mind to maintain focus despite distractions.

This attitude helped Phelps to achieve at the highest level, despite perfect conditions. In 2007 at the World Championships his goggles started sliding down his face as he turned into the final 50. He could not see his competitors at all, yet he won in world record time. A year later, at the Olympics, the same thing happened in the finals of the 200 fly. As he dove in, his goggles started leaking. Phelps could not see a thing – not the black line at the bottom of the pool, not the black T that marks the coming of the wall and not his competitors. He therefore counted his strokes to ensure that he timed his tumble turns perfectly. He won the 200 fly in a new world record time. His attitude was, so what if he could not see? What was important at the time? Get the work done, no matter what.

Chris McCormack, two times IM world champion, adheres to a similar philosophy. He maintains that every triathlete, pro or amateur, no matter how fit, reaches a point in every race where you have to decide whether you will endure suffering. The challenge, according to McCormack, is how do you handle it? He handles it by creating folders in his brain. Similar to the approach that I advocate of creating mental files (refer to my 2007 article in the Ironman newsletter on Utilising Mental Imagery to Organise Your Filing System).

When things start falling apart during your training or in life, embrace these situations, learn from them and save the lessons on your mental desktop. You need these folders readily available. In your training leading up to race day and on race day, you will encounter many challenges, some can be anticipated, and others will be unexpected. Whether you concur these obstacles will be up to you. You need to accept that no one’s training will go exactly according to plan. No one will arrive at race day without having had to face challenges. The same will be true on race day. This is just life, not bad luck, not the universe trying to get you, just life. In the end it comes down to how you handle it. Natalie Du Toit (2006) summarises this beautifully when she says that “Realising a dream is not necessarily about winning the trophy, it is about striving for it. A dream allows us to live”… and living implies that we will encounter challenges. Embrace those challenges and remember anything is impossible. Whether you succeed, is up to you!

Acknowledgement to Du Toit & Hawthorne (2006),
McCormack & Vandehey ((2011),
Phelps & Abrahams (2008),
Pugh (2010) & Van Der Berg & Neethling (2008)