Endurance Training Builds Strength | Inspiring Stories of Endurance Athletes | Strength Training

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Attorney Jim Dodson, (aka The Florid Bike Guy) ran across an inspiring article that talked about what endurance athletes learn, not simply from training, but the experience that they have in the process of training.

In this article, they talked about four different people who had experiences as endurance athletes. The first was a guy in San Francisco who swam every week down in the Bay. And one time he got involved in a storm, the tide was pulling him out towards the open water. As you can imagine, he's swimming alone, he was having difficulty getting back to where he was going. And the lesson from that was he kept stopping, getting his bearings until he got back to where he needed to be. But I think for us as cyclists, we all have been in that place where you're not sure, can I get over this, can I get through this, have I gone too far? You got cramps but you just keep pedaling the bike until you can get to the next weigh station or wherever the stop would be.

Another athlete they talked about was an Olympic runner. She told her coach, "I'm just not able to reach my pace today. I can't reach my pace." And she was all down about it. And he said, "Hey, listen, accept the rule of thirds." When you're training for a big goal, a third of the time, it's gonna be great, and a third of the time it's gonna be okay, and a third of the time, it's gonna be tough. Just understand. And then you can adjust your thinking on the tougher days. You just gotta get through this day and it'll be better tomorrow." This athlete took that advice and has just followed it in every aspect of her life. Like it was a transformative piece of information. We all have that ability that we can adapt to, we can do it on our bikes. Some days you have it, some days you don't have it, and some days you are struggling to get anywhere close to what you have achieved before. We have good and bad days.

In the article, they talked about "trusting your future self." There was a discussion about a woman who is a dog sled racer in Alaska. The funny thing about this person, you think about a female who is doing dog sled racing over hundreds of miles of wilderness, and she described herself as a very timid person. She wasn't that confident. And yet she's doing this amazingly confidence-requiring activity. And she said, "I used to lay awake at night, going through all the scenarios in my mind. Like, what if I encounter a moose on the trail? What if this, what if that?" And she finally said, wait a minute, I'm experienced, when that happens, I'll have the answer, I'll figure it out, and it'll be a better answer than what I'm coming up with right now. Trust your future self. Don't think about all the potential problems, trust that at the time that you need the decision made, you to come up with a decision, the answer that's gonna be best for you at that time.

And the final one was to "recall your courage." It was a discussion in this article about a sailor. They were doing distance sailing again in the Alaska waters. This was a group of women, and they ran into a log in the middle of the night and they were petrified that maybe it had caused damage to the boat and it was gonna go down. However, they managed to deal with the issues and not lose courage, and not lose hope, and not lose sight of what they were capable of doing, not the possibilities that might hold them back. Rely on your courage that you've shown in the past. We've all had those experiences. You had a courageous event, it's inspiring to you, you run into something that you didn't expect, and you can apply that same courage to what you're dealing with today.

There might be some people watching this video who are truly endurance athletes, many of us might be endurance athletes in our minds, but not at the level of some of the people that were written about in this article. But the principles apply in our life and can help us deal with the unknown.