It’s 5:15am. It’s cold (around 42 degrees), still dark, and you can hear the rain pummeling the roof of your house or dorm room. You know you’ve got a challenging workout this morning that’s going hurt…a lot. How much do you want to get out of bed at that moment in time? Well, we can probably guess.
This experience, quite common among most ski racers I work with, has caused me to consider the relationship that they have with their ski-race training. Sure, there are a few ski racers out there who absolutely love every moment of their physical conditioning, but for the rest, the focus is often on just getting through it.
How do you really feel about the time, effort, energy, and, yes, pain that you put into your ski-racing efforts? And how do you best get through those times, as I just described above, when the pull of a warm bed or some other equally attractive alternative (or simply the desire not to do something that will hurt) can exert a gravitational pull on your inertia (an object at rest will stay at rest unless a force is exerted on it) at these delicate moments when your motivation is tested.
The fall is upon us and, if you’re serious about your ski racing, this means you’re hip deep in an intense fall physical conditioning block. You’ve been at it all summer and there’s another few months of busting your butt before you get to do what you love to do, namely, get back on snow and arc some turns. Right now, you’re probably tired of it, of being exhausted, in pain, and maybe even a little bored. I remember fall training at Burke Mountain Academy back in the day: cold early morning runs, afternoon bike rides in the rain, soreness from heaving lifting, and incredibly intense intervals up “Blueberry Hill” (so named for a classmate of mine who threw up at the top after a blueberry pancake breakfast!); definitely not fun!
Yet, the physical conditioning you do, and the fitness gains you make in the fall are essential for your success this coming winter. It’s very likely that, at some point in this fall prep period, you’re going to reach a point in your physical training when you want to scream, “ENOUGH!”
That point you will almost certainly reach is what I call “the Grind.” The Grind occurs when your training is just no longer fun. It’s also the point that separates ski racers who achieve their goals from those who don’t. When most racers hit the Grind, they either ease up or give up because it’s just too darned hard. But truly motivated racers—Mikaela, Marco, Sofia, and Henrik—realize that the Grind is also the point at which it really counts. The fact is that everything up to the Grind is pretty easy, so anyone can get through it. But, when these superstars reach the Grind, instead of easing up, they keep on going and, in fact, push harder. They know that maintaining their effort, intensity, and focus during the last reps, sets, or miles might make the difference between success and failure this winter.
Over the years, I’ve heard colleagues tell their athletes, “You gotta love every moment!” My thought was always, “They’ve never actually done this, have they?” Yes, there are a few unusual athletes out there (the first words that come to mind are freaks and aliens) who do seem to love every aspect of their training, whether painfully intense or monotonously long workouts, cold, heat, rain, what have you. But for most of us mortals, love just isn’t in the cards when confronted with a challenging workout. To be sure, we love the feeling of accomplishment when we finish and, later, we love the feeling of pride when we achieve our competitive goals. But in that moment, there is decidedly little to love.
So, if love at those critical moments isn’t possible, what’s the alternative? Well, if you think in a binary way, there is only one other option: hate. But hate has no place in ski racing because, if hate is the dominant emotion you experience, then you will likely just not show up for a particularly hard workout, give an extremely poor effort if you do show up, or, in the big picture, just quit our sport because you can’t enjoy something you hate.
To find a place you can land when your training gets challenging, you must consider love and hate not as dichotomous (i.e., either-or), but rather lying at the ends of a continuum, so you can find a place along that continuum that is both realistic and helpful. I thought about what lay close to the extremes that might make a tough workout more palatable, such as liking rather than love or disdain over hatred but didn’t find either particularly appealing.
One place that I initially landed on the love/hate continuum was resignation. If you wanted to achieve your ski-racing goals, perhaps you could just resign yourself to the fact that you have to do the tough workouts, and they were going to be hard. But resignation didn’t strike me as a particularly positive or inspiring attitude to have. Perhaps it lay too far along the “hate it” side of the continuum. And there was an aspect of surrender that just didn’t feel right.
I then had an epiphany: If neither love nor hate are reasonable options when faced with a hard workout, then maybe what lies in the middle of the continuum is acceptance. You just need to accept the situation and get through it as best you can. Had I found a good place on the love/hate continuum that was both possible and beneficial? Acceptance does have a long history in philosophical and Eastern religious thought, so perhaps, if it was good enough for the Dali Lama, it should be good enough for me.
Acceptance meant several things to me. First, it removed the resistance that you could have toward the workout which alleviated the negativity and anxiety that can come with facing impending pain. Second, it connotes that you are making a choice to still do the workout despite the discomfort. Third, it was prioritizing the value that you gain from our sport, the goals you want to achieve, and the positive feelings you will have when you finish the workout.
But acceptance didn’t feel quite right to me either. Sitting at the center of the love/hate relationship felt so…uncommitted, sort of like being in limbo. Not as passive as resignation but lacking in proaction and weighted with a sense of numbness, no feeling at all. Acceptance might prevent you from going to the “dark side,” but it certainly isn’t rocket fuel to propel you forward. There had to be something else that lay somewhere in between acceptance and love that I could really wrap my arms around.
And then it hit me when I thought “wrap my arms around!” Wrapping your arms around something is a really positive thing because it’s proactive and physical. Plus, you usually wrap your arms around something you love (i.e., give a hug). And what is one word that best describes that action? Embrace! You need to embrace those difficult workouts. I recalled the well-worn military saying, “Embrace the suck.” It symbolizes a certain toughness associated with the military, especially the special-operations units such as the SEALS, Delta Force, and Green Berets. And who doesn’t want to be as tough as those warriors? There is also something more positive, enthusiastic, and energetic compared to mere acceptance. To embrace something also requires discipline, toughness, and perseverance in the face of hard workouts. It is definitely a place that is closer to love along the love/hate continuum, yet seemingly attainable for most of us.
So, from now on, when you have to wake up at “zero dark 30” (another popular military phrase) on another cold, dark, and rainy morning, you can look along the love/hate continuum, consider my options, and then choose to embrace the challenge ahead of you. You may not like dragging myself out of your warm and comfy bed, but you’ll be glad you did when you finish your workout and, more importantly, when you crush it in my first races this winter.
