

LESSON 1 > LET GO OF THE OUTCOME

Mark: That's a great question. In some of those first six races where I was in the lead where I thought I'm going to win this and then I fell apart and got passed. I was really going there with the purpose to try and win. The very first year that I did it in 1982, I ended up being in the lead with this guy Dave Scott, who won it that year on the bike ride. Halfway through the bike ride and my derailer actually broke right about that point.

I didn't finish the first time that I was there, but I had been neck and neck with the best guy in the world at that time for part of the race. I thought, "Maybe, I could be good at this."

It was right at that moment, as I had to drop out, but I had been with Dave who won that year I thought maybe I can be the champion. That became my goal. Each year, when I felt that goal slipping away, I just felt like I was slipping into oblivion and death, and doom was going to come to my life because I wasn’t succeeding as the Ironman champ.

Finally, after six years of failing at this goal, I thought, okay, my family and friends are saying, "Look, Mark, don't go back there. There is something about the Ironman, that's just not for you. You can win races everywhere else in the world, you can beat the guy that has been winning (Dave Scott) at all of those other races. They would tell me, forget it, it's too hot, it's too windy, it's too long and this just is not for you."

We all have those people that we rely on to tell us things about ourselves that we're unwilling to see. I was this close to saying, "You guys are right." Then I just took a step back and I realized there was something that I had just actually never tried to do and that was to go there and to just have my best race.

It doesn’t have to be… there is only going to be one person who wins. That means everybody else is a loser. Absolutely not. But I realized that I had to let go of the outcome.

So, in 1989, as I prepared for my seventh Ironman that became my goal… to just prepare myself to swim strong, to bike strong and then to run a strong marathon. Not go easy, but to give it a very strong positive effort and have my best race. Then just see what happens.

It was a real shift that one, took a lot of the pressure away and two, made it so much more meaningful because it was about bringing the best that I could to the table. Then the universe will do with it whatever it wants and whoever is supposed to be the one that was meant to win is going to win it.

It was a huge shift and that was what enabled me to stick with it that race. It was a very intense competition. We were side by side for basically eight hours. The whole time through, I was just like, "Let me get the best I can out of this." There's a lot to winning that year, but that was one of the big shifts.

Matt: Interesting. You hear people talk all the time about not wasting time thinking about what's outside of your control. Great in theory, but difficult to do. In those earlier races, were you worried about what the other racers were doing? Focusing more on their strategy, their pace, and when you made that shift happen it became all about your pace, your strategy.

Mark: Yes, exactly. In the earlier years, I was looking at Dave Scott and saying, "Okay, why is he so strong? What is he doing that makes him so unbeatable?" \

I thought I needed to be like him. That he was somebody for sure, his whole mentality was more of just “beat life into submission.” I was trying to be like that, and I was trying to embody that kind of energy.

All the other races that I went through it was just about myself. As I said in the beginning, I have broader concept of what mental toughness means. And it can mean a number of different things, I would embrace whichever definition I needed in the moment.

LESSON 2 > USE YOUR COMPETITION AS INSPIRATION NOT NEGATIVE MOTIVATION

Finally in '89 I said, "You know what, I am not Dave Scott. I'm hard-wired different than he is." Let me just embrace the fact that I am not that person. Let me just go there and be who I am. Embrace the way I am.

I was well aware of everybody in the race of course. I went in there thinking I have competed against all these guys before. Sometimes I win, sometimes I don't. Why don't I look at them as the people that they are instead of going winners or losers, that they're people who are going to help me elevate my effort, my performance, to something that I can never do on my own?

That shifted my fellow racers from being competitors to cooperative game players who were helping to elevate me to my highest level. We can look at competition as bad or we can look at it as, "Okay. This is what's going to help bring out the best me that I have."

The final year that I won the Ironman was in 1995. I was 37 years old. Nobody had ever won as a 37-year old at that point. I was trying to win six titles in six starts, which nobody had done. I went to the Big Island before the race and I had a talk with the island. I said, "Help me to have one more great race." It wasn't about winning. I wanted to go there and have a great race.

As it turned out, the dynamic of the day turned into something that I had never seen before. I came off the bike 13.5 minutes behind the leader, who was a 24-year-old athlete. Nobody had ever closed a 13.5-minute gap to become the Ironman champion.

When I got off the bike, I thought I'm having the worst Ironman in my career! It ended up that eventually, I was able to chip away at that deficit. And at mile 23, I made the final pass and went on to win that six title.

LESSON 3 > DON’T GIVE UP WHEN IT GETS TOUGH – YOU WILL BE SURPRISED BY WHAT YOU LEARN IN THE PROCESS

When I looked back on that day, I realized, it was my greatest Ironman because it was so difficult to win it. There were so many moments when I wanted to give up.

But these words kept coming back in those early miles of the marathon. “Be fearless in the face of your fears. No matter what, take that next step. It's never over until it's over.”

Meaning no matter how dismal things look for you, take that next step because you never know how it might turn around. I kept doing that and trying to tune into the island there and say, "Help me here. I'm giving everything I have, but I don't know if it's going to be enough."

Just keep going and keep trying to get back into that champion's mindset. Which for me you might call it mental toughness, but I think a mental space that can help anybody is to just quiet your mind.

When you can get your mind to be quiet, one breath can do it. If you’re going haywire, negative thoughts coming in there just tell yourself to, "shut up."

Free yourself up to get back into the flow, into that engagement that's so necessary to pull off something amazing. I had so many moments like that where I was ready to quit. But I didn't, I kept going.

And that ended up being my greatest Ironman ever. It wouldn't have happened had I not had this incredible athlete, putting out the performance of his life, pushing my absolute limit.

I try to suspend judgment in the moment because when you look back and see what you accomplished in the end, it might have the most meaning to you of anything that you've done. Had you given up though, had you stayed with it, you would've never had that experience.

Matt: So true. That's powerful. As you're talking about this, I was just thinking about athletes that I've talked to and read stories about who had similar experiences and stopped worrying about what others were doing.

But instead focus on how to show up and play your best game, run your best race and give 100% of what you have at the moment because that's what's most meaningful.

You have this quote on your website that I'll read real quick. It says, "Beating an opponent at the end of the game is tough, beating them at yours is not." That really stuck out to me as I was on your website and it's so meaningful.

Because that’s also when you stop worrying about other people, when you start worrying about yourself, they will start worrying about you. You get to play the games with them. Was that part of the strategy?

Mark: However, it affects them when I'm thinking about giving my best that's for them to manage. For sure, that’s exactly what I was saying about the shift in 1989. I went from trying to play Dave's game, racing his strategy, with his form of strength that he had, which wasn't me, and I began to race my race my way.

It helped elevate me. That race, he had held the previous world's record going into it. He ended up having his best Ironman of his career that day. We were together the entire swimming portion, the entire bike ride portion, the entire marathon. All the way until about mile and a half to go.

Then on the last long uphill before you drop down into the town to get to the finish line, I made a break that stuck. He broke his previous world's record by 17 minutes. I did my best time of that day by nearly 30.

The difference in the times at the end was a mere 58 seconds. Which is a very small margin on a day that takes over eight hours to complete. Because I was playing my game.

Sometimes people think that it's disempowering to say, "I'm going to do my best." It's disempowering if that's your excuse to go easier or slower. It's very empowering if you say, "I'm going to do my best, but I'm also going to be completely aware of the world and how my actions are interacting with it."

If you can give your best and use the world to help keep you on track, that's when amazing things will happen.





Related: Worry about what other people think about you?





Matt: That's such a great point. I've never heard it said that way before that whole concept of, "I'm just giving my best." It is in most cases used as an excuse like, "I gave my best. I tried my hardest." Yes, to your point, taking that step back and assessing it and being in the moment, and be like, "What does that mean? Does that mean I gave full effort? I had a great attitude?"

Or does it mean I pushed my limits. I think if we could shift the thinking around that phrase, ”that I gave my best”, or “I'm just going to give my best”, and it meant something different… more like squeeze the value out of, or find out what's possible that'd be amazing. Amazing. I've got three young kids, 13, 11 and 7 right now, and I constantly preach, I'm sure they get annoyed. They get annoyed by a lot that I do, of course. I preach all the time about when they walk off the court or the ice or whatever, it's, "Did you get full effort, and did you have a great attitude?"

Because to your point, those are the only things you can control, that effort and attitude and leaning in on those a bit more to find out what's possible for you.

Mark: It is harder, I think, for kids to get into that space because they are defining themselves in comparison to other people. It took me until I was 31 to actually get to that point where I could say, "Okay, let me just define myself by what I do and the best that I can give, and not in comparison to other people."

Like you said, it's easy to say, it's hard to implement. Maybe hard to implement especially for kids. They can be some of the toughest to change that mental space so that they are just out there going, "This is just play at its highest level."

Matt: Yes. That's why I'm going to have my kids listen to this interview to get a perspective other than their father's. I'll edit that part right there that I just said, but anyway. You've run so many races. I went through the intro and talked about your 21 straight races and the longest winning streak and the six-time Ironman World Champion.

All these, it’s not just consistency that you've had. How did you, after you won an Ironman or another race and you know another one's coming up, how did you mentally say, "Okay, that's done now. I'm excited again for the next one."

How did you keep up the enthusiasm? I will call it motivation, motivation's greatest. It just tends to fade pretty quick. How did you mentally move on to the next one and be like, "I'm engaged. I'm ready. This is exciting. Let's go?”

Mark: I would let myself cycle through the whole thing. I would do the Ironman, and that was always in October. Then I would let everything come down. I would let my fitness go. I would drop back to let myself really just absorb, or to just going on to acknowledge what is going on, whether it was a bad race or good race.

I would try to learn what it was that happened out there and reflect on the race. I would recall the learning, about the things that I had never known about myself and reflect on how I managed situations.

I tell the athletes that I coach all the time, the only bad race is one you don't learn anything from, and that goes for the races that are your greatest effort, and those where you completely fall apart.

If you don't learn something from them, then that was a bad race. But if you learn something, that is a great race. I didn't immediately jump back and say, "Okay, I'm ready to go", because I wasn't, and you have to honor that we are human and that great effort takes a lot of energy and time and focus, and you have to let that settle, and you have to recharge to then relaunch again.

One of the biggest mistakes that athletes make year-to-year-- Well, two. One, they don't give themselves that downtime to recharge, regenerate and let the lessons sink in, let their bodies get ready for another season.

The second thing, the biggest mistake, or maybe it's the biggest mistake that top athletes make, is trying to go back to win the same things again for the same reasons.

What might spark you to go put all of this effort into something, whether it's an athletic event, or your work, what got you excited this year may have no meaning to you next year, or there's no luster left in it because you accomplished it.

Each year, before I launched into my training, I would just ask myself, "What is the reason? Why am I doing this, this year? What's the vision or the image? What am I trying to bring? What am I trying to get out of it?" So I let that evolve over the course of those six wins?

That's actually what kept me going back year-to-year, because each year, it was a slightly different reason that I was going to do all those thousands and thousands of miles of training. Had I tried to just take that thing from the first win and plop it on to all the other five after that, I may have won another one, but I certainly wouldn't have won six.