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Resilience - The mental battle

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” Edmund Hillary 

I’m 9 weeks into this blog, so far speaking to the lessons I’ve learned and how I’ve mentally had success. I began this blog over 2 months ago to tell my story as to how I, as a regular guy, ran a full marathon (42.2kms) without ever having run more than 21.1kms, on a short training window, and also keeping harmony in my work and family.

Likely at this point you’re thinking; I still don’t know how he ran the marathon? What was his training regimen? What did he eat before, during, after? What shoes did he wear? What crazy physical ability does he have over the rest of us who haven’t completed a marathon?

Success in life is 90% mental, only 10% physical.

I firmly believe this statement above. I live by it, love by it, and know it has attributed to much of my success in life. 

This is the reason you haven’t read how I physically handled the run, it’s just such a small piece of the puzzle. I needed to continue to explain my mindset, the 90%.

Ok, so it’s not exactly 90/10 for everyone. Some people maybe it’s 80/20, 85/15, 92/8, sometimes it feels like 20/80....whatever it is, it should be heavily weighted in the mental aspect and you need to get to realizing this. Not simply realizing it but truly believing it.

Let me explain a bit.

As runners, trainers, athletes we all have bad days, weeks, brick walls, we get tired, have jobs with rough days, raise kids, families, responsibilities. What gets those successful individuals over isn’t their physical strength but their mental strength. We can all put on shoes, some people just burn through the shoes faster than others. It’s not the muscles in the legs, the lungs, or the abs, you don’t start a run because of muscles. You destroy the run because of muscles you’ve built up, but you get from point A to point B by running on mental strength, not physical. You get past kilometres 30 to 35 on mental toughness, when your body wants to quit but you tell it another story.

In organizations, you can create the best physical environment for employees but if the passion for the organization isn’t there it won’t matter. The physical aspect of great computers, amazing systems, or smooth processes doesn’t create enough for employees to succeed if mentally they aren’t driven to do so. Want to change a system in your company, you need the people to feel passionate about it or it won’t matter how great the change is. This is why hiring people on their passion or heart are much more important than on education, experience, or any other physical aspect. 

Honestly, I’m just as guilty or maybe even worse than everyone else on this. I fight the mental battle constantly with myself, self talks on how I am unable to do something or why am I trying to do this. I need daily, often multiple, reminders as to how mentally I make the decision to get something done or not. It’s a tough battle,  takes a lot of effort to overcome and stay ahead of your head. I know this, which is the biggest piece of it. Knowing it and confronting it allows you a chance to overcome it.

For the marathon, physically I had no business lacing up my shoes to run 42.2kms. I should have never survived nor ran it in an acceptable enough time. I should have crawled across the finish line and collapsed, not skipped and embraced my family and cheering squad. But I believe fully in the 90/10 split, I’ve lived it in many aspects of life so far and know I can convince myself that something is possible before others even consider me in the running. Then during the marathon, it was all about mentally separating from what’s going on physically, use that 90% to your advantage!

“The first step before anyone else in the world believes it, is that you have to believe it.” Will Smith


DadBud

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