Enduring Our Own Chaos

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Bryan Yates, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.

I took my last drink on January 12, 2012. After 27 years of alcohol, the moment was long overdue. In the first 24 hours of sobriety I was nervous. More to the point: during the entire first 30 days, I was consumed with worry, hand wringing and an obsessive internal anxiety. As a devout (and foolishly biased) atheist, the “God thing” made Alcoholics Anonymous seem out of the question — even though I had several friends who found ongoing recovery in its rooms. In those early days, I didn’t have a higher power of my own. So I relied on tools I developed as an endurance athlete — those tools became my strongest asset in managing the liability of alcohol dependence.

In moments of uncertainty and chaos, when things in the world are well beyond my control (which is most times, actually), I find stability in my experience as a distance cyclist, a coach and a sober human. There are things we all — as individuals, businesses, communities, and institutions — can learn from the processes of athletic performance and addiction recovery. In the Venn diagram of those two circles, the overlapping space is a zone I call the endurance mindset.

“… grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

As Covid-19 sweeps across the globe, it upends everything we take for granted. It has obviously left many of us anxious, confused and vulnerable, shaking our illusion of stability uniquely and deeply. Familiar institutions are closed, favorite everyday products are no longer available and our livelihoods and financial security are at risk. We keep asking ourselves and each other “How long and what’s next?” as our political leaders make, contradict, and amend pronouncements. Friends around the globe tell me they have this same sense of bewilderment and helplessness, so I know this is shared experience.

Utilizing core mental and emotional tools helps me to stay grounded, purposeful, and connected. Running, riding, paddling, swimming, hiking — doing anything purposefully over a long time and distance — has a similar effect. I say purposefully because it implies doing these things with a singularity of focus and intention. Plenty of people endure lots of things. We suffer loss, we work in dissatisfying jobs, we are pulled from task to task in the “busyness” of our everyday lives. We survive, carry on and hope to grasp a calm spot in the river’s rushing current.

An endurance mindset is about agency. It’s about being actively and thoughtfully engaged to build mindful stamina, focus, and perseverance. We often think of flexibility, mobility, agility and adaptability as athletic traits — but they can also be applied to how we relate to internal and external forces. It turns out that all these “grit credits” are bankable. And when we harness them to navigate something like the current crisis, those credits can alchemize our vulnerability and uncertainty into calm acceptance.

“… the courage to change the things I can…”

Marathons, long rides and epic hikes have finite, knowable finish lines. At the moment, there’s no clear, discernible end to the Covid crisis. For me, endurance training isn’t just an outlet for self-indulgent fitness or escapism. It’s a dress rehearsal for more critical scenarios. Along the way, I’ve learned some valuable lessons that have provided a much-needed light to help guide me — and friends, fellow alcoholics and addicts, and those I work with as a coach — through dark situations. I now find myself consciously using endurance tools and experiences each day.

Here are a few simple ones that work profoundly for me.

Have a North Star. Holding a guiding principle, a light in the distance, keeps me on an understandable trajectory. Endurance athletes often have a goal in mind for any event. These can be as straightforward as a specific finish time, a target place in the field, or simply completing. I often ask people who want to lose weight and change their body compositions to clearly define what their goal is and (more importantly) why they want it. Businesses, non-profits, and institutions do this, too; it’s called a mission statement. Having a mission, and developing a deep and fundamental relationship with it, helps create direction and focus. It defines how, who or what we want to be at some future point. Having a strong post-pandemic personal vision can be a source of energy when all else feels uncertain and unclear — waiting in line line at the coffee shop, when a loved one gets ill, or when we need to jump into action in an emergency. (For a related, and more elegant version of this, check out Stacey Abrams excellent “Three Questions…” Ted Talk)

Control What You Can Control. When I cease grasping at things that are out of my control, like Covid-19 or how other people behave, I focus on the things I truly can control. As an athlete, this comes down to how well I’ve trained, how well I’ve planned for an event and how I react to surprising challenges. Becoming panicked and angry a long way from the finish line means wasting valuable emotional energy. To stay grounded and constructive in the moment, I coach athletes (and myself) to keep it one pedal stroke, one stride, one minute, one hour, one race — and one day — at a time.

Covid-19 is a long-term and deeply impactful event. It requires simplifying, and adjusting my routines and behaviors. Things within my control are about today, like when I wake up or go to bed, what and when I eat, whom I speak with, how I keep in a peaceful state of mind, how I work — and not taking a drink. Tomorrow will come, but to wrestle in this moment with what it may be is to struggle with an imaginary internal storyline. That keeps me from thinking and performing in a flowing way. In practical terms, this means finding ways to snap back into the moment to focus on the next few (very small) things I can control, like taking a deep, relaxing breath.

Pause and Breathe. Breathing is the most fundamental condition for endurance sports. It is also our most basic and effective tool to ease troubling situations. In moments of fear, our breath speeds up. In stressful situations, our instinctive reflex is to clench our muscles and hold our breath. Even on the most challenging rides — when I am forced to respond to stronger, fitter, faster riders — reminding myself to slow my breathing and count each one up to 10 can be the difference between staying in the group or being left behind. This solution even calms everyday situations. Just lying down, closing the eyes, putting one hand on the heart and the other on the belly, then inhaling and exhaling fully for five breaths can significantly lower my accelerated heartbeat. Coming back to the simplicity of breathing pauses negative runaway thoughts, cools the emotional temperature, and momentarily lowers the stress of anxiety.

Laughing Helps. Lab studies have demonstrated that smiling and laughing can alter brain wiring and positively impact sports performance. In his book Endure, Alex Hutchinson discusses a study in which a group of indoor cyclists were told to ride to the point of personal exhaustion. During the experiment, a group of the riders were cued with subliminal, positive messages. This group lasted three minutes longer than their counterparts who did not receive any messages. In another story, Hutchinson explains that Eliud Kipochoge — Kenya’s Olympic marathon star — smiled in set intervals as he raced to nearly break the world two-hour marathon barrier. Smiling relaxes facial muscles and reduces tension. That increases feelings of security, which stimulates a sense of ease. That ease softens our perception of difficulty in the face of struggle. As we feel life’s difficulties mount, perhaps it is a signal to remember a funny story or listen to a favorite comic.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think. The mind is a cunning place. It will wander, imagine, conjure, and judge. In long cycling events, I can sometimes find myself in pain, angry at the situation, and even hallucinating. It’s easy to get swept along in that internal storyline and obsessive fantastical thinking, replaying old situations and imagining future ones. In fact, this happens to me all the time no matter where I am or what I’m doing. Finding a way out of that place starts first with noticing, and then detaching from, the thinking. Once we can observe our thoughts, as if they are passing strangers, it becomes possible to pivot to a more productive, present frame of mind. This ability to step back from thinking is a useful mindfulness technique that has, at times, kept me from chasing an emotionally paralyzing string of “what ifs.”

Power Together. There’s an alleged African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” This is particularly true for a peloton, or group of cyclists, where the workload is more efficiently dispersed across all the riders. In life, this translates to sharing the burden in a common community — even a virtual one. We know forced isolation can yield increased fear, anxiety, aggression and substance abuse. Some studies are demonstrating that people in isolation show elevated markers for inflammation and infection. In short, beyond our emotional requirements, there are biological — even metabolic — needs for humans to connect. The shared experience of group meetings is one very powerful reason that 12-step programs, when compared to other approaches, have reasonably higher and longer success rates in helping people stay sober. Virtual dinners, fitness classes, church meetings, discussion groups and book clubs are just a few of the ways we can maintain a sense of belonging despite our Covid-19 separation. Staying out of isolation and connected to our tribes can keep us happier, healthier, and stronger through this experience.

“… and the wisdom to know the difference.”

None of us knows how this virus is going to play out, nor how we will individually, locally, nationally and globally be transformed. What that transformation looks like remains mostly beyond our own control. Humans, though, are endurance animals. We are built to withstand challenges, to be transformed in recovery, to adapt and learn.

I am sensitive to the awareness that everyone is experiencing this pandemic and sheltering in place in very different ways. People are losing livelihoods, some are getting sick, many can’t pay critical bills or get the care they need. Others are at risk of losing their fragile sobriety; some of us are facing this event in complete social isolation. This is a time when many of us instinctively resort to trying to stay alive rather than living a life.

So while our suffering may be shared, the pandemic shines a light on the inequities floating through our lives. I worry for the vulnerable and understand that what I offer here is soft on answers for those hit hardest by Covid-19. Developing an endurance mindset is not necessarily a solution for what is happening. It does, rather, offer some potential tools for how we might think, feel and react in more agile, mobile, and flexible ways in this moment of crisis.

For now, these tactics have been working for me — but ask me again in a month.

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