#Ep 04 | The Mental Resilience Debate Endurance Athletes Need

But back to the original point, mental health.

Yes.

So mental health as a whole, but mental resilience is probably the larger thing in endurance sports.

So my question to probably kick things off is, what to you is mental resilience in endurance sports?

I think, simply put, mental resilience is the ability to continue to push forward physically despite not wanting to.

So when things start to tell you to slow down or stop, you have the mental resilience to push through those signals and continue to move forward.

yeah

100 i agree with that so i don't

think i have anything to add for that apart from especially in sort of like longer course endurance events it's the ability to make good decisions as well like the ability to keep going is one thing but the ability to make i think good decisions when you're flailing when your head's not in it type of thing because ultimately those good decisions are going to be the decisions that get you out of that slump of where you're in as well

I would push back on that because I don't think you necessarily need to make...

And the longer the event, I think most people would think the longer the event, the better decisions you need to make.

I would argue the longer the...

The longer the event, the less important your decisions are.

The important thing is that you are able to make decisions.

I think when people get mentally critiqued, they don't make decisions.

Where if you're able to...

Like me for 100K ultras, as long as I know I'm not stopping and I'm just continuing to move forward, it's like...

Everything else just kind of doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if I decide to eat or not because I'm 16 hours in and I'm in the shit regardless.

Whereas maybe for an Ironman or a half Ironman or marathon type distance, the quality of your decision matters a lot more because there's a lot less margin for error.

Yeah, 100%.

I agree

with that.

I think that the ability to make decisions and ultimately...

I experienced it during my Ironman.