The Wild Dog Blog

Tag: sport performance

  • Prepare to the Best of Your Ability

    Prepare to the best of your ability so that when you win, you can take pride in knowing you’ve earned it. 

    Prepare to the best of your ability so that when you lose, you can take comfort in knowing you did everything within your knowledge and power to give yourself a shot. 

    I’ve been on both sides of the table. Backed by months and months of relentless preparation and work, I’ve won and felt the satisfaction of the outcome matching the input. Conversely, after allowing some gaps in my game to go unaddressed, I’ve lost and felt the disappointment in reflecting on all of the ways I could have prepared better.

    What does preparing to the best of your ability mean to you? To me it means not cutting corners or leaving any stone unturned – in my sport, in the gym, in my lifestyle choices, and in how I’m training my mind. I try to pass this along to my athletes because winning and losing will always be outside of their control. But how they prepare will determine how they feel about themselves when they stand on top of the podium or walk away empty handed. And isn’t that what matters most?

    Wild Dog Athletics has 1 new athlete spot open for March. Go to https://www.wilddogathletics.com/ to learn how I go beyond the program to help you prepare for your big goals and wild adventures.

  • Suffering is Optional

    “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

    Is it the ultramarathon that creates suffering or the mind?

    In the ultramarathon community, it’s a common preaching that athletes need to learn how to “love” or “embrace” the suffering. And while this isn’t completely off-base, the more ultramarathons I run the more I realize that what’s most important is choosing whether or not I’m going to label what I’m experiencing as “suffering” in the first place. 

    I can teach my mind to not suffer needlessly by being aware of the stories I’m creating around my experience. When I’m throwing up on the side of the trail I can choose to perceive that experience as neutral, something that just is, rather than labeling it as good or bad or writing a story about what it means for the rest of the day. When labels and stories are removed or carefully chosen, you’d be surprised at how quickly the “suffering” dissipates.  

    Ultramarathons themselves don’t create suffering. How I perceive what I experience during an ultramarathon is what creates suffering. 

    The question then changes from “What can I endure?” to “How will I choose to endure it?”

  • Be Like The Mollusk

    The mollusk’s life work is its shell.

    Layer by layer it builds its shell from the surrounding environment over the course of its lifetime. It doesn’t do so because of reward or recognition and it knows nothing of outcomes – it simply keeps showing up to build. For the mollusk, the act of showing up and building something is enough.

    When the mollusk dies, the shell is released and carried away by the sea. Sometimes the shell finds its way to shore where it gets picked up by human hands and cherished as something beautiful. But the mollusk didn’t build its shell with this outcome in mind. It was doing what it intuitively knew it had to do until it couldn’t anymore, and the shell became something beautiful to the world in its own time.

    How could you be more like the mollusk? Where in your life could you be more present with the showing up – the building, the crafting, and the creating?

    As you go about your week, notice how your concern with outcomes influences the quality and presence with which you work at the things that are important to you. When you let go of outcomes and allow the work itself to be the reason and the reward, you’ll no longer need validation to show up each day and give your best effort.

  • Are You Being Derailed or Redirected?

    It’s 2018 and I’m in the middle of the build-up to my first marathon. I’m putting in more miles than ever before and hoping to run a Boston Marathon qualifying time. But being new to marathon running, I don’t know how to ease into big miles properly and end up getting injured. A few weeks before the race I’m forced to pull my entry, feeling devastated that the injury completely derailed me from my goal. I spend the 3 weeks of healing time thinking (or stewing) about what would come next. 

    I eventually manage to get back to short runs pain free, but at that point I no longer have the fitness or time left in the season to chase a Boston qualifier. Feeling unmotivated and discouraged, I start scouring the Internet for something different that could get me excited to train again. I stumble across a 7 mile trail race in my area and think it sounds interesting and that it will give me a mental break from the monotony of road running. I sign up, not knowing what to expect, but excited to train for a race purely for fun and for an adventure. 

    The trail race is a blast and not only do I get hooked on trail running, but at the race I see other runners completing distances I hadn’t known were possible – ultra distances – 50K, 50 miles, and 100 miles. I think about what an amazing accomplishment it would be to finish an ultramarathon. One year later, I’m back at the same race to run the 50 mile distance – crossing the finish line in 15 hours and change. I’ve been running ultramarathons around the country ever since. 

    What I initially thought was derailing me back in 2018 when I came up injured a few weeks before my road marathon was actually redirecting me. Because of the injury, I discovered that fateful 7 mile trail race where I was introduced to ultrarunning and as a result led to a life full of travel and adventure. 

    What we think is derailing us is often redirecting us. When we remember how often a perceived “derailer” became a “redirector” in hindsight, we can face obstacles and challenges with faith in all that we do not know and maybe even with excitement about what we can discover if we have the courage to keep moving forward.

  • Cowboy Yeti 100K – Make the Effort the Objective

    It’s the middle of the night and I’m trying to get my eyes to focus as the light of my headlamp bounces off of the fog in front of me. I’m two miles from the finish line of a 62 mile trail race in Texas, and I’m feeling strong as I start to close in on the end of the day. I hadn’t been feeling that way for most of the day – I spent miles 25-40 dry heaving and throwing up, but caught a second wind in the last 21 miles of the race and managed to rally back to a decent pace. For the majority of that time I had been alone, so as I squint through the glare of my headlamp, I’m surprised when another light starts to come into view ahead of me. 

    “Is that another runner?” I think to myself. Long distance trail running sometimes has a funny way of making you feel like you’re the only one out there – there usually aren’t many runners on course and over such big miles it’s easy to get separated from each other. Due to how much I had to slow down in the middle of the race and not seeing anyone for most of the day, I had assumed that anyone who was ahead of me at that point was far ahead of me and was out of reach competitively. 

    Despite that, I had been pushing myself hard physically and mentally in the last third of the race. Not because I thought I could catch anyone, but because I knew holding myself accountable to giving my absolute best under the tough circumstances I’d faced throughout the day would leave me feeling really proud at the finish. 

    As I approach the light ahead of me I realize that it’s coming from two other runners. I slow my pace to say hello and give a few words of encouragement before passing them and picking it back up to head to the finish. I feel a fresh bolt of excitement realizing I had unexpectedly caught two competitors who had been ahead of me for the entirety of the day. I think about how that opportunity presented itself because I didn’t allow myself to make excuses or let my foot off the gas pedal, even though it would have been easy to do so. 

    In other sports, athletes can motivate themselves to push through adversity and discomfort by seeing how close they are to catching their competitors or how close their competitors are to catching them. This dynamic rarely exists in trail running because your competitors are often out of sight. When the going gets tough, it comes down to how accountable you are to giving your honest best and how willing you are to not let up no matter the circumstance or outcome. 

    Trail running teaches me this over and over again – to make the effort the objective and to keep hammering even when the possibilities have not yet come into view. They’re beautiful lessons I’m happy to be reminded of that have both changed the way I race and changed the way I live.