Hitting the Wall

I originally published this article on https://www.hardwayfitness.com/

You’ll hear this mentioned a lot in many walks of life including those outside of health and fitness. Why do people wax lyrical about goals and why should you care about them as regards your fitness? A goal can be a very powerful motivator. Motivation alone can’t get you up at 6am in the morning and out running or to the gym.

This is where goals come in, e.g., if you knew that you had no choice but to take part in a fight in 6 weeks and for that fight you need to train your hardest and be the fittest you’ve ever been, you’re sure you’d be able to make yourself train at any time of the day, rain, wind, or snow.

Goals are incredibly personal and should be tailored that way. One of my first goals that I ever set was to be able to run a mile without stopping. When I set that goal, I couldn’t run 50 meters. Despite this seemingly simple goal for some reason, I kept skipping my runs and not going out and pounding the pavements as much as I should have.

I couldn’t find the motivation to do it. I genuinely wanted to be able to run that 1 mile it would have marked a huge personal achievement, but I wanted to be lazy more than I wanted to achieve it. A few weeks later I was losing the will to keep running when I heard about a 5km run being organised in work.

It was a standard 5km charity run, it wasn’t timed, and it was billed for all abilities. In a fleeting moment of bravery (often that’s all it takes) I signed up for it. The run was in 7 weeks, so I knew I had to up my game.

I was online immediately downloading a running plan that promised to get me to 5km in 8 weeks. I cursed myself for not being more motivated earlier and losing precious time. I was out running every day I could manage and had to force myself to take rest days. In the end I did the run, I completed the 5km, I had to walk some parts, but I completed it.

So, you see my point about goals and motivation. They’re closely related and can be the difference between you training or not even training at all. If you start to falter and if you start to drop off, consider signing yourself up to something like a 5km run or walk, you’re going to force yourself to do it. Once I had done one 5km race it was much easier to sign up to another and another and then eventually start to target doing a 10km race.

As I touched on in earlier blog posts, I have had huge confidence issues and was very self-conscious and the thought of failing that run-in front of my work colleagues haunted me. I used my own fears and self-consciousness to conquer a goal that was well outside my original goal and outside of what I thought I could do abilities wise.

The goal to run 1 mile without stopping was a poor goal and I had no real motivation to do that. I just wanted it. The challenge/goal of having to run 5km in front of my work colleagues lit a fire under me, I was determined not to embarrass myself and that fear was more powerful than my bad habits. Sometimes a little fear is a good thing.

Perhaps take a moment to take that in. Motivation is a complex and very personal thing, if you’ve failed in the past was it because your goal just didn’t motivate you? If that was the case, how might you have fared if you knew you had to compete in a race/fight/challenge in X number of weeks.

Fear often plays a part in our decisions, it’s ever present or at least it was for me when it came to embarrassing myself, by using that fear as a motivator I was able to force myself to do what I couldn’t make myself do on my own. Your own mind can be your worst enemy if you let it, often enough you do have the ability or the capacity to do something but for some reason your mind just won’t get on board. Instead, all you get from your mind is a never-ending list of excuses and no motivational support.

Playing on another fear I had a massive fear of letting down my colleagues by not completing the race, it crossed my mind so many times to stop training, fake an injury or say something had come up the date of the race. This would have been a very weak move on my part, and it would have really impacted my motivation, my confidence and set me back further on my fitness journey.

You need to accept fear as a necessary evil. Everybody feels fear and doubt it’s how you manage them that defines your outcome. You may not always win or succeed but that’s life, but you can control yourself and complete what you know need to be done.

Even now when I train e.g., if I go out for a run, that first kilometre or two my mind just wants to quit. I’ll get things like, just stop for a second, my knee is hurting, and this doesn’t feel right, or you should just finish up now and call it day. Unfortunately, your mind doesn’t always act in your best interest. You need to build up the will and resilience to keep going even if your mind is screaming at you. You are not your mind.

Every single time I’ve pushed myself passed where my mind said I would fail in any form of training just as soon as I have exceeded that perceived limitation, my mind goes quiet. It’s a liar and a good one. Get used to questioning your mind; I often have entire inner dialogues where I tell my mind to shut-up because I’m busy doing what it says I can’t.

I use mental exercises like building a house brick by brick or imagining myself partaking in a big sporting event or thinking about good times I’ve had in my life and trying to vividly imagine them and place myself there so I can feel the memory of the joy or in some cases the sadness that I felt, and it silences the mind for a time.

Silencing your mind allows you to do what it is you’ve set out to do, climb that mountain, walk, or run that hill, complete the event, whatever the task may be.

Many people talk about hitting the wall, this is a mental wall where your mind attempts to stop you because things appear difficult or painful. The more you bring yourself to this wall and push passed it the stronger your resolve will be, the more confident you will become and as a direct result you will start to achieve things.

We all want to achieve we all want that sense of accomplishment and it’s there for you but it’s not going to be handed to you, there’s no participation trophy, there’s no safe zone for your ego to dwell in. All that there is for you is the hard work and pain, on the other side of that is the reward you’re seeking, when you hit that wall, you need to find a reason to get over it.

Remember, chin up, chest out and handle it.

Yours,

Stephen