The Only Way To Develop Mental Toughness
5:27 A.M.
5:27 — and still no texts from coach saying that conditioning is cancelled for the day.
There is freaking 9 inches of snow outside.
Nine. Inches.
And it’s still coming down with no sign of stopping anytime soon.
One of my teammates (and housemates), checked the time again — 5:44.
“We should probably head out…” he said, “…maybe coach will move it to the gym. I’m gonna bring my gym shoes just incase.”
“Good call.”
And as we trudged down the snow-covered stairs of our back porch and shuffled through the thick, freshly fallen — and still falling — powder, I couldn’t help but think: ‘We’re really going to do this…’
‘Shit’.
Let me back track for a second.
This story takes place in February of 2017 — just about a year ago. My last offseason training regiment was in full swing. For the past four weeks, my life consisted of classes, meetings, four *heavy* lifts per week, and two 6A.M. conditioning sessions every Tuesday and Thursday morning.
Outside.
In Cleveland.
In February.
Needless to say, these conditioning sessions were less-than enjoyable. In my three years prior we had virtually the same schedule but we had only conditioned once a week and it was in the warmth of varsity gym.
This year was different.
Our coaches wanted to build mental toughness — a characteristic bred from adversity, perseverance, and an undying spirit to never settle. Their philosophy was simple:
If you can run outside in the blistering February cold, amidst a lake-effect fueled blizzard — each breath so frigid, simply inhaling is a painful process in itself — you can survive a football game
Now, back to the story.
We were almost late to the stadium. My teammate and I left on time, but the snow was so thick and the streets unplowed, it was nearly impossible to drive. With just a few minutes to spare, we threw on our running shoes (not that it mattered — you don’t have much traction in 9-inch deep snow), took off our winter jackets, and met the rest of the team outside, right at 5:59.
Made it.
The field was like streets we took to get here: cold, hard, and completely unplowed.
The 40-something teammates who actually made it out of bed stood shoulder-to-shoulder across the goal line — or what we thought was the goal line (it was completely buried in snow).
As the lights began to warm up, I looked out across the pristine, white field. It looked smooth. Soft — like a cloud. The brightness of the stadium lights reflected by the freshly fallen snow turned the pitch dark hours of dawn into a gleaming, unflawed, snow-covered wonderland, bright as day. For a second, it was nice.
But only a second.
I looked down at my feet only to see the top of my shins and the rest of my legs buried in snow. My toes were frozen. As were my fingers. And face.
‘God, I can’t wait for this to be over…’ I thought.
As our strength and conditioning coach made his way to the field, I watched as my teammates shared glances with one another. Slight, nearly undetectable looks that said, ‘This guy can’t be serious — right?’, ‘Do you think he’s gonna move us inside?’, ‘Why are we here right now’, and ‘I think I have frostbite’ all at once.
Our coach shuffled his way to the 20-yard line and faced us. Not a moment later, he blew the whistle to commence our routine warm-up, as if it were any other Tuesday/Thursday morning.
‘Welp — there is no way I’m getting out of this now.’
As we made our tracks in the newly fallen snow, I couldn’t help my inter dialogue from changing. My confused, ‘are we really doing this’ attitude quickly turned to a pissed-off, ‘screw this’ one. And as murmurs of quiet shit-talking and whispered complaints began to fill the air, I assumed my teammates shared the same feelings.
We finished our warm-up and assembled back at the goal line.
On the menu for the day: Sprints.
Not just any sprints, though. Full length of the field, endzone to endzone, 100-yard sprints. In 12 degree weather. Through nine inches of snow. And counting.
“Ready…. on my whistle!” shouted our coach as we prepared for the inevitable.
And so it began.
To say I was dreading the task at hand is a gross understatement. I was livid. I wanted nothing to do with running on that field. In that moment, I wanted nothing to do with football at all. And so like the rest of the team, I complained — in my head, of course.
It sucked.
Every time we finished a sprint, coach blew the whistle to start the next one.
And the next one…
And the next one…
And the next one…
Whispers of complaint quickly fell quiet — it’s hard to complain when you’re gasping for breath.
After our eighth 100-yard sprint — physically exhausted and emotionally washed — we crossed the goal line. Yet again, the whistle blew.
And then I heard laughter.
Yep — laughter. It was one of my teammates a few paces behind me.
‘What on earth is this kid laughing at? Nothing about this is funny — at all.’ I thought to myself as we trudged along.
But his laughter continued. And soon enough, others joined him. Again we crossed the goal line, only now, half the team was in a laughing fit. The whistle blew and I started to laugh, too.
I couldn’t help myself — I mean, think about it! Here are a bunch of 20-somethings — half of them in shorts (yes — shorts) — running as fast as they can through mounds of snow, in absolutely frigid temperatures, somewhere just south of Cleveland, Ohio, at 6 o’clock in the morning, our heads thrown back in fits of laughter.
Taking a second to think about the situation changed my entire perspective.
You know that old cliché, ‘Time flies when you’re having fun’?
Let me be the first to say: It does.
The rest of our conditioning session passed in a flash. Before I knew it, we had finished — another day in the books.
It hadn’t even been an hour since we first stepped on the field and my attitude had done a complete 180 — all because of a change in the way I approached the situation, influenced by one sole teammate.
Developing mental toughness has nothing to do with how ‘tough’ you actually are. It has nothing to do with your physical abilities, looks, or smarts.
It has everything to do with your attitude.
The fact of the matter is, no matter how much we complained about not wanting to do sprints, it didn’t change anything — we still had to do them. Running while feeling sorry for ourselves made it a hell of a lot harder than running with a positive attitude.
If you want to develop mental toughness, start by approaching every situation you face with a positive attitude.
As one of my all-time favorite people in the history of the planet, Maya Angelou, once said:
“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”
