There are basically two ways to approach any challenge. One way is to focus on all the reasons why you can’t do it. The other way is to focus on all the reasons why you can. I find it …
Continue Reading about 38. Stop Arguing for Your Limitations →
There are basically two ways to approach any challenge. One way is to focus on all the reasons why you can’t do it. The other way is to focus on all the reasons why you can. I find it …
Continue Reading about 38. Stop Arguing for Your Limitations →
My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.
Hey there, and welcome to episode number 38 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about why we need to stop arguing for our limitations. There are basically two ways to approach any challenge. One way that some people do it is to focus on all the reasons why you can’t do it. The other way is to focus on all the reasons why you can.
And I find it interesting that so many people choose option one, when they’re facing something challenging in their life. They spend a lot of time and a lot of energy focusing on all the reasons why they can’t do it. So today, I want to talk about why we do this, why we argue for our limitations, and how this kind of thinking is just keeping us stuck. And I do offer some suggestions on what we can do instead.
But first, if you like this podcast, please come check us out on Facebook, though – Running Lean community on Facebook, you can just search for those words, and you’ll find us. This is a positive, energetic, informative, fun group of like-minded runners just like you that share common goals like losing weight, living a vibrant life, becoming super healthy, running, making running easier.
I host a weekly live trainings in there on things like intermittent fasting, which we’re focusing on this month. Running, nutrition, weight loss, exercise, physiology, all kinds of stuff. Here’s a recent comment from one of our community members, Amy.
Amy says, “I ran a virtual 10k this morning, although it was hot and steamy, I felt great. I didn’t have to eat anything before the run, or even feel like I needed anything to fuel with but water. Thank you, Patrick and the rest of the group for the motivation and helping me change my mindset and my body these last eight weeks.”
That is awesome. Thank you, Amy. Amy’s a great example of the kind of positive, motivated people we have over in the Running Lean community on Facebook. And this month, we’ve got this intermittent fasting challenge going on right now. Intermittent Fasting is just practicing some periods of the day where you just don’t eat anything.
You can call it time restricted eating or meal spacing. But basically, you know, we talk about how to do it safely, how to incorporate this into your running, why we would want to incorporate this into our running. There’s a lot of amazing health benefits, by the way. So just check us out, come and see what it’s all about the Running Lean community on Facebook, and figuring out all this stuff.
How do we do time restricted eating? How do I lose weight and continue running? How do I make running stronger? How do I become a fat adapted runner? All these things take some time to figure out. They take awareness, they take knowledge and they take some support, so that you can create this kind of lasting change in your life.
Listen, this is not about a diet, diets are temporary, right? What I help people do, through my coaching practice, is help people create new habits. And it takes about 90 days to create a new habit. So most of the coaching I do with people is a three month or 90 Day Program. And what you get with that is the knowledge, awareness and support that you need.
So that you can accomplish those goals so that you can create the habits that you need to change your lifestyle to change your relationship with the we’re all different. We all have different dietary needs, what works for one person may not work for somebody else. You know, if one thing worked for everybody, I could just create a PDF and give it to all you guys and be like here just do this, but it doesn’t work that way you need to figure out what works for you.
So together you and I will figure out exactly what will work for you. It takes a little bit of trial and error, but eventually we get it right. I want you to make big changes in your life. I want you to get off of the carbohydrate addiction, I want you to reap all the amazing benefits of becoming a fat adapted runner.
If you’re interested in this, cool, check it out, just go to innerfiretribe.com/weightlosscoaching, that’s one word, and apply for coaching with me, we’ll get on the phone, we’ll have a little conversation, we’ll get on a Zoom call. And we’ll have a quick little conversation and see if this is a good fit for both of us. Cool.
Alright, let’s get into this topic today. So the topic today is, I titled this stop arguing for your limitations. And I have to tell you a little warning before we get started here that I’m doling out a little tough love today. I think this is an important message for all of us to hear. And listen, I need to hear this too. I’m not exempt from this message either.
So part of me talking about this is to remind myself that I need to stop arguing for my limitations too, because I do it sometimes, too. But I’m hoping this message resonates with you. I wrote a short post about this earlier in the week, and shared it on social media, and I think it touched a nerve for a few people.
And so I thought you know, I think I need to do a little deeper dive into this. Because a few people said, you know, oh, that was tough to hear, but I needed to hear it. So I’m hoping this resonates with you guys. So here’s what I’m seeing, I hear you guys tell me things like I want to do something big. I want I want to accomplish this big goal, I have this, this big dream or goal, you know, I want to lose 50 pounds, I’ve struggled for so long with this weight, I really want to lose this weight, or I want to run a full marathon, I really want to do that.
And so, you know, you say you’re all in, you want this with every bit of your soul, you’re like, I’m so focused on this goal, I’m gonna do it. You might have a plan, you start working the plan. But then you know, stuff starts to happen. Maybe you wake up in the morning, and then the weather’s not awesome, it’s raining outside, and you’re just like, I don’t really don’t feel like running today.
Or maybe you just get tired or maybe stuff like your job is stressing you out. You know, your kids are driving you crazy. Or the one that I love, you know, well COVID hit and so you know what that means as if like it was some hurricane that you know, knocked your house down or something.
But here’s what’s happening, we have all these external things that happen in our life. You know, we get an extra workload at work, you know, our boss is demanding more of us or, you know, the kids are being, they’re doing school from home, they’re doing like remote schooling, or the husband doesn’t help as much as he should be, according to you.
And you have all these external things happening. And instead of just forging on, you use these external things, as an excuse to give up to quit, you use these excuses to give up on these big goals and dreams that you said you are all in on. You wanted more than anything else. And you just use his excuse to quit.
You know, you say, I can’t focus on my health because you know, my kids are our home and they’re doing school from home now. So there’s no longer I can’t focus on my health anymore. What, really? Or I was doing fine, not eating sugar and carbs. But then I had this really stressful day at work. And, you know, my boss gave me a bunch of extra work. So I needed to eat a whole pizza and a half gallon of ice cream at one sitting.
If you’ve done that before, it’s fine. You’re normal. I’ve done that before. Or you’re just like, you know, this is just hard. It’s really hard. Training for a marathon is hard. Or losing weight is hard. So I just, that’s why I can’t do it. By the way, all this stuff I’m talking about here, this stuff is just life.
Stuff happens all the time. Life’s not supposed to be some carefree, happy existence. You know, flowers, daisies, unicorns, rainbows, it’s not like that. It’s more like 50/50 – half the time you feel pretty good. Half the time you feel not so good. That’s okay. You can either just accept this fact, or you can just fight against it with everything you’ve got.
And when you accept it, when you accept that you won’t feel happy all the time. Honestly, there’s a lot of freedom in that. What happens is we get ourselves into trouble when we have this belief. And we hold on to this belief very tightly that we have to feel happy all the time.
And I got news for you, that’s just never going to happen. This is you fighting against reality. And I see it all the time. I see it every single day. Well, I just want to feel better. Guess what, you’re not always going to feel good. And that’s okay. The inner turmoil that you feel is mostly caused by resisting these negative emotions, quote, unquote, negative emotions, unwanted emotions, like stress, like anger, like fear, like sadness.
All these emotions, we feel are just part of the human experience. We’re humans, we get to feel all kinds of amazing emotions, some of them are pretty amazing. Some of them feel so good. And some of them not so much. But to be human means we feel all these emotions. And we have to accept this fact, we will feel some positive and some negative emotion, some wanted emotions and some unwanted emotions, and it’s all good.
Life is 50/50 – be willing to accept all of it. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to accept it and say, well, that’s just the way it is. I can’t do anything about it. No. It’s like I tell my weight loss clients all the time, I’m like, you have to love yourself exactly as you are right now. Look in the mirror and love yourself exactly as you are every bit of your body.
You can’t hate yourself and expect to lose weight, I always say can’t hate yourself thin, you got to love yourself exactly as you are. And you can work to change that. But you have to accept what is. It’s when we resist what is when we resist and reject that half of our existence that we quote unquote, don’t like or, you know, don’t think is normal.
That’s what causes us the internal pain and the agony, we resist and reject any kind of unwanted emotion. Okay, that was a little a little tangent, I went off on there. But I just need you to understand that there are external circumstances that are going to happen in our lives. And those things are neither good nor bad, really, I’ll talk about that more in just a second.
But understand that you may feel some stress, you may feel some anger, you may feel some fear. And it’s okay. Don’t push it away. Don’t push it away, just accept it all. I love this quote from Henry Ford. He said, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” This is perfect for what I’m talking about here today.
So like I said, at the beginning, there are basically two ways we can approach a challenge. So we have something challenging in our life, we want to lose a bunch of weight, we want to run a marathon, we can focus on why we can’t do it. Or we can focus on why we can do it. Let’s talk about these.
When you focus on why you can’t do something, here’s what happens. You find all sorts of excuses, all sorts of reasons you have stories you want to tell me about why this isn’t going to work for you want to lose weight, but stuff happened at work, you know, my husband doesn’t help as much as he should. The kids are screaming in the background.
And in your mind, these are all valid excuses. They are valid reasons why you can’t do this thing. Why you can’t stay on your protocol, why you can’t train for your marathon. But let’s look at this. Let’s look at how this works. Because here’s the thing, these are all just stories that you’re telling yourself. These are all just stories, you’re believing you’re choosing them, and you’re choosing to believe them.
So let’s look at how this works. You got stuff happening at work, the husband’s not helping the kids are demanding stuff from you. These are what we call circumstances. Circumstances in our lives are always neutral. The circumstances in our lives are facts. They don’t hold any meaning on their own. They only mean something after we have a thought about the circumstances. Okay.
Neutral circumstances are true for everyone. They’re just facts, facts that can be upheld in a court of law, let’s say. So, the kids have to attend school from home, that is a fact. My workload has increased at work, tat is a fact. These are just facts. Everyone would say, yeah, that is true.
None of this means anything, until you have thought about it, until you choose a meaning that you want to assign to this particular circumstance. You with me so far? Circumstances, always neutral. If it’s something happening outside of our thoughts, feelings and actions, it is neutral, we have no control over it.
So the kids have to attend school from home is a circumstance, millions of parents are dealing with this right now. Right? This is just a neutral fact. Kids have to attend school from home, it does not mean you can’t, you can no longer focus on your health. It doesn’t mean you can’t train for a marathon.
Those millions of parents that are dealing with this right now, you know, half of them are probably out there, focusing on their health right now. They’re probably training for their first marathon right now. They’re figuring it out. Kids doing school from home does not mean you can’t run. If that were true, it would be true for everyone. But it’s not.
You’re choosing not to focus on your health, you’re choosing not to run. And what you’re doing is you’re using your kids having to do school from home, you’re using that as an excuse. Because what you’re trying to do is hard. And you don’t want to do it. Because it’s hard, because it’s uncomfortable. Because it’s gonna take a while.
By the way, nobody said this stuff was going to be easy. It’s why it’s a challenge. But you want that thing. You want it with all of your being. But instead, you’re choosing to focus on all these reasons, you’re choosing to believe, you’re choosing these reasons. This amazing story that you’re creating in your mind about why this won’t work for you.
And then I come in as your coach and I say, listen, here’s what your mind is doing, your brain is just making up these stories about why you can’t do this. This is a choice you’re making. These are just neutral circumstances, you can figure this out, let’s figure it out together. And then that’s when I get the pushback.
I get people digging in and fighting like hell, for all the reasons why they can’t do it. Why, you know, it’s different for them. They have all these stories, all these excuses, all these reasons. They defend these things, to their dying breath. They are fighting tooth and nail for these beliefs that they have about why they can’t do it. Why? It’s too hard for them and they argue with me.
No, it’s just the way it is Patrick, there’s nothing I can do about it. But you know what, there is something you can do about it. These are just beliefs that they are choosing. They’re arguing for their limitations. They’re basically saying like, look, I have these limitations. I can’t do it. Here’s all the reasons why. And then they list them all out.
And I hear stories and stories and stories. It doesn’t make any sense. You’re basically saying I want this goal. I want this thing that I’ve wanted for so long, but I know it’s a challenge, but it’s it’s too hard. And here’s all the reasons why I can’t do it.
They’re like focusing on the reasons why they can’t, creating all the reasons, all the excuses in their mind. And choosing to believe them. That’s the scary part right there. You’re choosing to believe these reasons. You’ve got to stop doing this. Just stop it right now.
Stop arguing for your limitations. Because the more you focus on why you can’t do it, the more reasons you’ll find, the more excuses you’ll find. You look for reasons why you’re failing and you will see these reasons everywhere. When you start looking for all the excuses, you will find them everywhere.
My friend Samantha says it this way. She says, “When you argue for your limitations, they’re yours to keep.” Powerful. So there’s another approach. This is the one that I would suggest you take on. It’s up to you though.
Let’s go back to those neutral circumstances. Okay, so my boss is asking a lot of me at work right now. It’s really stressing me out. So you can choose to believe that this workload is stressing you out, you can choose to believe that this means you can’t focus on your running anymore. You can’t focus on your health, and you have to like quit running.
You can choose to believe that this extra workload means you can just sit around and watch Netflix eating a whole pizza and half gallons of ice cream. And that’s just the way it is. As if you know, it’s all happening to you. What results do you think you’re gonna get from that? From taking those actions?
I can pretty much guarantee you’re not going to be running a marathon anytime soon, I can pretty much guarantee your health will definitely not be improving anytime soon. All right, my boss is asking me to do more work right now is a neutral circumstance. So what if you thought, you know, my boss was asking more of me. And I’m up to the challenge.
Hey, I’m really good at what I do. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve done way harder things in my life. This is no big deal. You know, I might need to adjust my training plan a little bit. But hey, I got this. Wow, that’s a little more powerful, isn’t it? or what have you tried on a thought like, nothing is more important to me than my health.
And running a marathon has been a dream of mine for way too long. Now, I’m not letting a little extra workload stop me from reaching this goal. You know, what if instead of looking for all your limitations, because when you look for them, you will find them? I promise you? What if you looked for all of the possibilities? Focus on why you can’t and you’ll find reasons why everywhere.
Also focus on why you can and you’ll find reasons why everywhere. If you get to choose what you want to believe about your circumstances, because they are neutral, why would you ever choose to believe that you can’t do it? Why would you choose to believe that this stuff means you can’t reach your goal?
Why would you ever choose failure? Because that’s what you’re doing. By the way, I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as failure. You either keep going until you succeed, or you quit. These are two choices that you get to make. And they have nothing to do with anything outside of you know, kids screaming, no workload can change that. These are choices you’re making. You either keep going until you succeed, or you quit. For me, quitting is just not an option.
These are choices you get to make based on your thoughts, your feelings and your actions. It has nothing to do with COVID. Okay. Lots of people are training for a marathon. Lots of people are building a business during this global pandemic. Lots of people are improving their health. I see it every single day. Lots of people are getting amazing coaching and changing their lives for the better. Stop using it as an excuse.
Sorry, this is where the old Tough Love is coming in. I do love you guys. I hope you know that. Everything I’m saying I’m saying with kindness and love. I’m smiling. But listen, where are you in your life with this right now? Like where are you arguing for your limitations? Think about this.
Like, let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds? It’s pretty common for a lot of people I’ve talked to. Why do you think you can’t do it? Think about that. Why do you think you can’t do it? Why? Why isn’t this going to work for you? Ask yourself that question. See what your brain comes up with for an answer.
So maybe you came up with answers like well, I’ve tried everything, nothing’s ever worked before or you know understand I’ve time to figure all this out right now I don’t even know where to begin. These are just reasons you came up with, they’re just thoughts in your head. They’re not the they’re not the truth unless you choose to believe them.
Take a look at the circumstances in your life right now. Ask yourself this question: What am I choosing to believe about this particular situation, whatever it is? You know maybe it’s the kids being home. A lot of people are talking to me about their kids being home and doing school from home and it’s posing some challenges, some unique challenges for people.
What are you choosing to believe about that situation? Are you holding on to a story or a belief about it? That means you can’t do this. You can’t succeed at your health goals or your weight loss goals or your running goals. If that’s you, like, maybe think about that, and what do you want to believe instead? You get to choose what to believe.
By the way, this is a very important question to ask your brain, what thought can I choose to believe? What thought can I choose to believe that will motivate me, that will fill me with courage and passion and excitement about this big goal? It’s so important to me. Maybe something like you know what, I’m going to lose 50 pounds, no matter how long it takes.
I’ve tried a bunch of other stuff. It didn’t work. That’s all behind me now. Now. Now is the time I’m going to figure this out. I will not stop until I figure it out. I will not quit until I succeed. This is way too important to me. I don’t want to ever feel sick and tired again.
I don’t know, I don’t really know where to begin with all this stuff. But I’m going to start today. And maybe I’ll ask for help. I’m going to seek out a coach, I’m going to get guidance, I’m going to get direction, I am going to make this work. Damn, that is a much more powerful way to approach something, right?
What if you took all that fight, all that energy that you’re putting into arguing for your limitations, and instead, put all that fight and all that energy into searching out like the possibilities and all the reasons why you’re going to succeed? I wonder what kind of results you’d get if you did that.
Remember, whether you think you can or you think you can’t. You’re right. Okay, I hope you don’t mind. This little bit of tough love for me today. So here’s what’s coming up in the Running Lean community on Facebook. Remember, I talked about doing the September intermittent fasting challenge.
We’re talking about time restricted eating, meal spacing, that kind of stuff. This week, we’re going to be talking about training in a fasted state running on empty. Why do we do this? It sounds crazy. I know. But why is this good for us? And why would we want to do this? Why would we choose to train without calories and without fuel?
So I’ll talk about that this week. So join us in the Facebook group, just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. That’s all I got for you today. Lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends, keep on Running Lean, and I will talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles or starving yourself and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a lien running machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss and you’ll learn the three secrets to losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to runningleanpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become lean running machine.
I'm here with a special edition of the podcast to give you a quick update on what's coming - The Running Mind Podcast is getting a new name! I want the podcast name to more accurately represent the …
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A lot of people, especially non-runners, believe that running is a cure-all for every health ailment out there today, especially being overweight. People think that if they are overweight, all they …
Continue Reading about 24. A Weight Loss Coach? For Runners? →
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 24 of The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m a master life coach and a weight loss coach for runners. A weight loss coach for runners. Yes, I am a weight loss coach for runners. This is what I’m talking about here today.
And the reason I’m talking about this is because of this, I think there’s a misconception out there, that all runners are in perfect health, they’re all super skinny, super lean, 0% body fat, they never have to worry about gaining weight ever again. And I think a lot of people, especially non-runners, think that running is the cure-all for every health ailment that’s out there today, especially things like being overweight.
I think there’s a lot of people out there that think if they’re overweight, all they have to do is start running. So train for a 5k train for a half marathon, whatever. And they’ll magically lose all the weight and live happily ever after the end. The truth is very different. Running is not the magic pill for weight loss. It’s just not.
There’s more going on here. And there’s more that we need to look at. Running is amazing, though, and definitely plays a big role in living a healthy, vibrant life, but it’s not everything. So yes, runners, just like everyone else, need a coach to show them the way to show them what to do. So today I’m going to talk about that. I’m gonna talk about why I decided to become a weight loss coach for runners. Why is this even needed?
I’m going to talk about what this means for you. And I’m gonna talk to you about this aha moment that I had recently that kind of shifted my thinking around all of this, all this stuff around health, fitness, diet and exercise. So I’m gonna get into all of that in just a minute.
But first, I wanted to tell you about the Running Lean community on Facebook. So this is a group that I created that goes hand in hand with this podcast. So we take a deeper dive, we get into some discussions, some Q&A, some training sessions. It’s a supportive, positive, safe place for you to come and learn about all this stuff. It’s totally free.
If you listen to the podcast, though, you have to join this Facebook group. So just go to Facebook and search for Running Lean community. Okay, so let’s get into this topic today. a weight loss coach for runners. What? Yes.
So first, a little bit of background on how I got here, then I’m going to talk about kind of the problem as I see it. But first of all, some years ago, you know, maybe 10-15 years ago, I was very unhealthy. I was very overweight, I was fat. I was sick, I was drinking way too much.
My life had become pretty unmanageable. And then I got diagnosed with testicular cancer, and that was back in 2003. And that was kind of my big wake up call.
So that was like something that really stands out for me is this pivotal moment in my life where I my mortality came into question, and I was pretty young at the time. But my mortality came into question, I was like, whoa, something has to change here. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die young. I was in my early 30s, basically.
So I started living a healthier lifestyle. I changed my eating habits. I started running, I stopped drinking like I did all the things that you know, we’re supposed to do. Start eating this kind of low fat diet, you know, but I really got obsessed with running so marathons I started getting into triathlons. I did an Ironman, I started getting ultra marathons and I came sort of obsessed with running like this was my thing.
I was like okay, this is like my new thing that makes me feel good. I’ve lost a bunch of weight. It feels awesome. And then I started becoming obsessed with like food and with eating better and and I went from like a low fat diet to barely eating any meat to like not eating any meat at all.
And I started eating only like, you know, fish. And then I went like completely vegetarian and stopped eating any kind of fish at all. But I was still eating a lot of like animal, you know, products like cheese and dairy and things like that, eggs. And then I went completely plant-based and I went to that extreme of just eating plant based foods, no animal foods at all, I started this plant based food blog, I got certified in plant based nutrition.
And I was just like really into it, you know. And my story of transformation was even featured in an article on The Forks Over Knives website. Forks Over Knives was basically a documentary that was written about a plant-based diet and how good it is for you. So all this stuff was like, you know, I just got obsessed with eating as healthy as I could. And running was a big part of that, too.
And everything was going beautifully for me, and like, my life was really good, I lost a bunch of weight. And I was feeling, you know, pretty good and pretty strong. And I was working out, I was able to do all kinds of stuff. And then I slowly started gaining weight back. So I had originally lost something like 60 pounds, you know, I was probably around 230. And I got down to like, I don’t know, 165-170.
And then I started getting them way back. And it happens slowly at first. And then it started to happen a little faster in the last few years. But I gained back close to 30 of those pounds. Before it was like another wake up call for me, you know, like I gotta do something about this. But in the last couple of years, I was, you know, in denial about this.
And I was like just trying to run more, which really wasn’t working. I was still eating mostly plant-based diets and actually started incorporating more dairy into my diet and cheese and things like that. But I was eating a very high carb diet, which a lot of you know, ultra runners kind of do. And, and there’s people that do other things as well.
But I’m just saying like there’s a contingency of ultra runners out there that, you know, they can eat all kinds of, you know, carbs and sugar and all that stuff. And it’s not a problem. Well, it was a problem for me, I started getting all this weight back. And I tried all the stuff I tried going to like a high fat ketosis type of diet, like going keto, you know, which is really, really challenging.
I tried doing some time restricted eating, which is only eating in a tiny small window during the day, I tried raw food, only raw food diet, you know, vegetarian, vegan, Paleo, you know, counting calories, all this stuff, like I was putting all my calories into this app, and just it was so absurd. I was obsessed with this stuff, you know.
And none of this stuff was working. That’s what I’m trying to get to here is like, all these things I was doing, and nothing was really working for me at all. And then, I don’t know, a couple years ago, I started becoming really obsessed with studying the human mind with the human brain and how it works.
I started becoming a student of the mind. I started you know, researching and taking courses and taking classes and becoming certified as a Master Practitioner of NLP, which is neuro linguistic programming. And this is like how we can use the power of our mind to make changes in our life. And this all kind of goes along with me becoming certified as a Master Life Coach.
I learned about how, you know, our neural pathways work, how we can change these neural pathways in our brains, how we’ve got these habits that have been formed in our brains over, you know, decades over our whole life, these mental habits that we can actually kind of reprogram or change.
I learned about neuroplasticity, which is the way that we can actually change those literal neuro pathways in our brains, to create better states and to create better results in our lives. It’s just amazing. It’s amazing stuff, all this mindset work, how we change our thinking, how we change and manage our emotions, how we can make sure that our actions are in alignment with our goals like all this stuff, amazing stuff.
And I thought all right, so um, I can be like this mindset coach for runners like this seemed like a good fit, very logical, because you know, running is so mental. It’s such a mindset sport. You know, I always say running is 20% physical or 100% mental and we’re all mental, right? So I thought, okay, I’m going to be the mindset coach for runners because runners really need help with this.
And I know runners, so this is my life. I’ve lived it for so long now. So I started asking runners like what do you need help with, what do you want to help with the most? And I’m putting it out there and interviewing people and talking to people and asking them what they wanted help with. And people kept coming to me like, yeah, that mindset stuff, that’s good and everything, but I really like to lose weight, like, can you help me lose these last 10 pounds, or I seem to be put on, you know, 20 pounds, and I just can’t, you know, lose it and running it, it really isn’t working for that.
So, you know, I’ve noticed you’ve, you know, had a lot of luck with that in your life, like, can you help me with that? And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. And this happened over and over again. And I was like, wow, what is going on here? Like, I had to really consider that this might be an issue that I need to address that I can help people with.
And so I did. I kind of set out to help runners with this issue. Okay. But the question remained, like, why are all these runners needing help with weight loss? Isn’t running how you do it? Like, isn’t this the answer to weight loss? So I started looking into this, you know, I looked at my own experience, first of all, especially over the last three to five years and realized that was definitely not the answer.
Because I kept slowly gaining weight, you know, as a regular runner, you know, ran one or two marathons a year and was training with a group and ran, you know, four or five days a week, and was gaining weight pretty steadily. And I was like, well, that’s crazy. And I started seeing all these posts and Facebook groups, that I’m a part of, you know, these running groups, marathon training, half marathon training, stuff like that.
And people are asking questions like, Hey, I noticed that, you know, I’m gaining weight, even though I run every day, or, you know, I’m training for a marathon and gaining weight, like what’s going on with that? And people are like, oh, you know, you need to run more, you know, and, you know, giving them some advice and things like that.
And some of the advice I saw out there was marginal, not really helpful. But people are like, Yeah, I’m running all the time. I’m not losing weight. How come this isn’t working for me? The general consensus seems to be like, well, you’re not really doing it right. You know, you’re not running enough, try running hard, or try running faster. Try running longer. That, you know, that worked for me, so that it should work for you. This is kind of what people were saying.
But I wasn’t getting, I wasn’t seeing an answer. I wasn’t seeing an answer that worked. For most people, it wasn’t working for other people. And I think there’s just an assumption out there that all runners are super skinny, they’re super lean, I’ve found this really not to be the case. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t a lot of other people that I’ve seen out there either.
It wasn’t a lot of people that are friends of mine, it wasn’t people that are in my running groups and things like that, you know, if you’re a runner, if you’ve ever watched a long distance event, like a half marathon or a marathon, even some of the smaller, you know, 5 or 10K’s but, you know, I’m kind of mostly talking about, you know, half marathons, full marathon, that kind of thing, here, but, you know, so you get this huge group of people, right?
And then there’s a small group at the front, who are the faster people usually? Well, of course they are if they’re at the front, right? And they’re super lean, they’re like, super fit, and you’re like, oh, yeah, you know, they look amazing, you know, they’re super, they got like, 0%, body fat, whatever.
And, but then, if you keep watching, you know, the vast majority of the people out there are pretty average, you know, and, or maybe slightly overweight. And there’s a lot who are like very overweight, and there’s a lot of people are even considered like in the obese category. They’re out there running a half marathon or a marathon.
According to the CDC, in 2018 71.6% of adults, over 20 in the US are considered overweight or obese. That’s it. 72% of the US population is obese. It considers themselves overweight or obese. And there’s a lot of people who are turning to running as a way to combat this epidemic, really, in this country.
There’s something like 30,000 running events every year in the US alone. 30,000 running events, but like we’re running a lot. And if we’re running we’re the answer then what’s going on with all these overweight runners? Are they all just doing it wrong? Probably not.
I feel like I need to say this here. Like it’s not my job to tell people or to tell you that you’re overweight or that you should lose weight. You know, this is something that every individual needs to decide for themselves. You know, I don’t use some US standard to determine like what you’re supposed to weigh. Again, this is all up to you.
I’m all about positive body image, you know, you have to love yourself exactly as you are, right now. You have to love the way you look and love the way you feel about yourself. Yeah, you have to love your body, just as it is, before you can even think about wanting to change it, you’re not gonna be able to lose weight, if you have this, like, if you hate yourself, if you have a terrible view of yourself.
You can’t be engaging in negative self talk and hating how you look and expect to make positive changes to yourself. Within yourself, you can’t hate yourself thin, you have to love yourself first. And you can love yourself just as you are, and be working to change that. You know, just because you want to lose weight doesn’t mean you don’t love yourself, or you don’t have a positive body image.
It’s just the opposite. Loving yourself is the only way to create the body that you really want for yourself. It’s the only way to really feel good about yourself. So what I need to say here is like the bottom line is like, if you consider yourself overweight, and you love yourself, just the way you are, you don’t want to lose weight. That’s amazing and awesome. You go do your thing. It’s totally, totally cool.
And if you consider yourself overweight, and you want to drop a few pounds, or a few dozen pounds, that’s amazing, too. Let’s do that. It’s all good, though. There’s no judgement, there’s no shame, there’s no right or wrong here. The key is to love yourself, however, you are right now.
Okay, so let’s go back to explaining all these overweight runners like how do we explain this? How do we explain that there are so many runners out there who struggle to lose weight? Turns out, and I’ve talked about this a lot here on the podcast, and I’m going to continue talking about this.
But it turns out that running is just not a very effective way to lose weight, the whole calories in calories out thing it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because of overcompensation because we tend to eat more when we work out.
You know when we do long runs, we tend to overcompensate by eating more food. Our bodies are doing this on purpose, our hormones are doing this because you know they’re trying to cope, your body is always trying to maintain homeostasis. So if you burn a ton of calories, and if you continue to do this over time, your body, your body’s metabolism actually will lower in order to account for those calories.
And it will try to get your calories back up. And so it will make you more hungry and not feel as full as often and will increase your appetite. And, and so losing weight by just running is really really hard to do, it really is hard to do. Losing weight is more of an issue of balancing your hormones than it is about you know, running a bunch of miles.
You know, running also doesn’t address some of the other issues that go into why we gain weight, why we can’t lose weight, you know, there’s, there’s mental cravings, there’s mental urges, there’s, you know, beliefs that we have, a lot of times there’s limiting beliefs that we have about what we can and can’t do.
There’s emotional issues, there’s a lot of emotional eating that happens. Especially right now during the COVID-19 quarantine, like a lot of people are turning to the fridge to feel better, because a lot of stress is going on out there. Instead of like experiencing those emotions, people are eating over them.
So anyway, we have to address all of these factors. There’s a lot of stuff at play here. It’s not just about running. Okay, so the problem as I see it is that I think people are trying to use running as this, catch all this, like, you know, the magic pill for losing weight and it’s just not true. It just doesn’t work. Okay.
So that’s kind of the problem is I see it and so how do I help solve that problem? Well, you know, here’s one thing I did for myself that helped me and this is where I’ve, I’ve kind of created my solution around this. So I was really working on trying to figure it all this out, you know, and so I started doing some reading and researching.
And I started getting help and getting training and I got a coach and I learned about all of this. I learned about how my hormones were actually jacked up and how my hormones were like, making me fat, how counting calories really doesn’t work. I learned how to, you know, manage my mind around all this stuff and Learn how to allow and process my emotions. So I got coaching, I had somebody show me the way, I had somebody that was there to kind of challenge my old ideas and my limited thinking, I had somebody there to point out my blind spots and somebody there to hold me accountable for my results.
Getting a coach has been the most powerful thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s helped me. I have a coach for my business. So it’s helped me, you know, create a business that I love, and I’m so proud of. I have a coach that’s helped me with my kind of general mindset and this weight loss and health and things like that, that has helped me more than anything else.
And coaching right now is a booming industry. The coaching business is booming right now, if you’ve ever thought about becoming, you know, like a life coach is something that people really want and need right now. More than ever. People want coaching, they need it, and it works. People are getting amazing results from working with a coach. I know I’ve experienced this.
And I know lots and lots and lots of people are experiencing amazing results from working with a coach. So here’s my big “aha” moment that I had recently. This was crazy. So I’m listening to this podcast and it’s from one of my mentors. And her name is Dr. Katrina, you bet she’s a pediatrician.
And she was talking about some of the work that she does. And she is a weight loss coach for physicians. And I was like, oh, that’s cool. You know, that’s a cool little niche business that she has. She works with, you know, busy physicians and helps them to lose weight. And then I was like, what, whoa, wait a minute, what? She helps doctors lose weight! This is a big aha moment for me.
I was like, well, even our doctors, who should be the most knowledgeable people on the planet, when it comes to diet, health, nutrition exercise, they don’t know what to do. They need help. So doctors are reaching out for help with losing weight, because they don’t know what to do. It’s whatever they’re taught, which is very minimal from what I understand. Like they don’t get taught this stuff in med school. Whatever they’re taught is not working.
And the limited amount of training and education that they do get is based on flawed guidelines that we’ve been following for the last 40 years, you know, the low fat, high carb diet that has more than tripled the obesity rates in the US since its inception in 1980. Yeah, that’s the stuff they’re kind of taught and following.
It doesn’t work and they don’t know what to do. And doctors are just like, I don’t know what to do, help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. So they’re reaching out for coaching with this for themselves. And I’m hoping that they can turn around and teach their patients some of this stuff too. But this is like a huge lightbulb moment for me because I was like, of course, runners need help with nutrition and weight loss.
Even our freakin’ Doctors need help with this stuff. Basically, everyone needs help with this. So boom, here I am. I’m a weight loss coach. For runners. I’ve combined my passions, my passions for running, for eating healthy, real food, for mindset, you know, changes for managing emotions. I’ve combined my life coaching with health and nutrition and weight loss coaching.
And I’ve created this amazing program where I get to help runners get lean and get strong. I’ve lost all this weight, I’ve lost the 30 pounds that I gained, and it only took me like eight weeks to do it. I’ve completely transformed my body. I’ve completely transformed my mind. And I have more confidence in myself and I love myself today unconditionally.
And I want to be an example of what’s possible. Because if I can do this, so can you. You know, I’ve transformed myself into a lean running machine. And now I get to help others to do the same thing. I love this. I love being a weight loss coach for runners. And my hope in doing this work is that you get to experience that same kind of transformation too.
Here’s what I want for you. I want to help you lose weight. Sure, that’s nice. Seeing the number on the scale go down each week is awesome. But it’s not the most important thing. I became a weight loss coach for runners because I want to help you stop obsessing over food and calories.
And I want you to learn the amazing health benefits. And I want you to experience the freedom that comes from just eating real food. And I want you to stop obsessing over running as the only way to lose weight and start enjoying running. For all the amazing other benefits that are provided for you I love running, I completely recommend it to everybody, keep running it you know it’s a, it’s a great way to relieve stress. It makes you happier.
You sleep better, you have more energy throughout the day, it’s good for your heart, you build strength and endurance, you build strong bones and muscles. All that amazing. Just stop obsessing over it as a way to lose weight because it really doesn’t work.
I want you to love how you look. I want you to love how you feel about yourself, I want you to love yourself unconditionally. And I don’t want you to just be alive or survive. But I want you to thrive in your body. I want you to live a full and vibrant life. I want you to learn how to think and feel and act with purpose.
And then I want you to become an example of what’s possible to all of this. This is what gets me out of bed every day. This is why I’m devoted to my work as a weight loss coach for runners. That’s why I believe in this. And I’ll continue doing this as long as I can.
All right, I’m going to be continuing this conversation in the Running Lean community on Facebook. So join the group. I’m going to talk this week I’m going to talk more about what it means to eat real food. And how that is such a critical factor not just for losing weight, but for becoming a lean fit healthy runner. So just go to Facebook, search for the Running Lean community. Awesome. That’s all I got for you today. Lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends as always and keep on running. I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.
Today, I have a cool little brain hack to teach you. It’s all about the power of making decisions ahead of time. It’s a simple technique, but it’s not always easy to do. It requires a little bit of …
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I’m your host and the life coach for runners. And today, I’m going to be talking about a cool little brain hack that you can do. I’m going to teach you this today. It’s all about making decisions ahead of time. It’s a simple technique. It’s not always easy to do. It’s not easy to do at first, but it gets easier. We’ll talk all about that in just a minute.
But when you commit to doing this, you kind of trick your brain, okay? You can, it’s a cool way to build confidence, confidence in yourself, build trust in yourself, create momentum towards your goals, keep you motivated, get more done. All of that in just a minute.
First, let me ask you a question. Have you tried using running as a way to lose weight? And has this ever worked for you? My guess is probably not. Because I’ve tried this. I’ve tried this for years, and it has never worked. And I know why now. But running was not working.
I was running many, many miles to try to lose weight and I wasn’t getting any results. I tried all these different diet plans. I tried using sheer willpower. I tried restricting calories, none of this stuff worked. So I did tons of research. And I finally found the answer. It turns out that I had an unnatural over desire for food, and no amount of running was ever going to fix that.
I also learned that this wasn’t entirely my fault. My over desire, this unnatural over desire was caused by things like the way our food is made the way it’s marketed to us. And mostly by the way that I had trained myself to think and feel about food. So I was an over eater, okay, I was over eating. But the overeating was just a symptom.
The real problem was an underlying physical, mental and emotional relationship with food. And when I figured out those three things, when I figured out how to fix those three things, I was able to lose the weight easily. And I’ve been able to keep it off. So I’ve dropped 23 pounds in the last couple of months here. I’m actually back to the weight I was at when I was training for Ironman back in 2013.
And back then I was working out like over 20 hours a week. And today I’m barely working out at all, seriously, I’m running a couple of times a week, I go for a walk every now and then. But I’m not doing that kind of training. And I’m back to that weight. And then one of my weight loss clients just checked in with me this morning.
And he said he’s lost 29 pounds since he started working with me just six weeks ago. He says he feels great. He has tons of energy. He no longer suffers from those crazy food cravings and doesn’t have those uncontrollable urges anymore. And he says that for the first time in his life, he feels completely in control of his weight. He even said that he doesn’t have any pants that fit him and so he’s got to go buy all new clothes, which is not a bad problem to have.
But if you want to learn how to do this, if you want to learn how to change your physical, mental and emotional relationship with food, I’ve created a brand new training program. It’s free, and it’s called How to Become a Lean Running Machine and you can get it right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean to get the free training.
You’re going to learn why running more and eating less does not work to lose weight, and you’ll learn what to do instead, you’ll discover why we store fat on our bodies and how to train ourselves to burn more of it. You’re going to learn how to reprogram your mind so you stop craving food that does not serve you and you’re going to understand how to break those emotional eating habits.
Now I explain the science behind all this. I provide solutions to help you recalibrate your body to manage your mind to control your emotions. Just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean. And you’ll discover the secrets to becoming a lean running machine. And spoiler alert, it’s not about counting calories, and you don’t have to run 20 miles a day. Okay, just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you too can become a lean running machine. Cool.
So today we’re talking about making decisions ahead of time. This is a cool, cool brain hack. I’m really excited about talking about this today. So before we get into the content here, the actual solution, what we’re going to do, I need to explain a couple of things to you, I need to talk to you about how your brain works.
Now, we have kind of two brains, we have a primitive brain, and we have a modern brain, we have this primitive area of our brain called our amygdala. And this is often called the fear center of our brain. Now, the amygdala is like, responsible for our fight or flight response. Okay, this is like an old part of our brain that was used, you know, created eons ago, okay, so, a lot of times people call this our reptilian brain, or I like to call it our lizard brain, okay?
But this part of our brain is responsible for the fight or flight for those primal urges that we have for just survival. It’s always wanting to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Okay, so this is all of our like primitive urges, this part of our brain, the amygdala is responsible for all that, okay. We also have an evolved brain, and this is called our prefrontal cortex.
And the prefrontal cortex is, is more modern, it’s one of the newest parts of our brain. This is the part of our brain that controls cognitive behavior. It controls planning, it’s responsible for decision making. Okay? So just so you understand the difference between the two, we have our, our lizard brain, that’s the fight or flight, the fear center, the primitive urges, and then we have the prefrontal cortex. This is our modern evolved brain responsible for cognitive behavior, and decision making, okay.
So when it comes to making decisions, clearly, we don’t want to be using our amygdala. We don’t want to be using our lizard brain to make our decisions for us, okay, but too many of us do that. We do this all the time, we’ve trained ourselves to just give in to those primal urges, at all costs, okay? This is not good for us, okay.
So when it comes to reaching a goal, succeeding in anything that you want, like, if you want to succeed in running, let’s say you want to run a marathon, or let’s say you want to lose 50 pounds, either of those things, is just a series of decisions that you make along the way. Okay, Tony Robbins actually has this quote, and I love this quote, he says, “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
So do you want to leave your destiny up to your primitive brain? Probably not. We want our destiny to be shaped by our prefrontal cortex by our thinking, cognitive decision making brain, okay. So what happens though, is we don’t do that, we have learned over our whole lives really to just give in to these primal urges to just be the lizard brain, okay?
But what happens when we do this is we make a decision, and then when the time comes to actually act on that decision, we give in to the feelings we’re having in that moment, okay. We don’t do what we say we’re going to do. So we may, we may plan on running tomorrow. But then tomorrow comes and we wake up in the morning, and we had it on our schedule to run five miles at 6am.
And then at six o’clock, your alarm, you know, or 5:30, your alarm goes off, and you’re like, I don’t feel like it. And so you just hit snooze, and snooze, and snooze, and you get up at like 7:30 or whatever. You just don’t feel like running. So you’re giving in to that primitive urge of like, oh, this is uncomfortable. I don’t really feel like doing this right now. So you don’t do it.
Or maybe you plan on eating healthy food tomorrow, okay, and then tomorrow comes and then you know, you’re at the company in the break room, and somebody has some cupcakes sitting there and you’re like, ah, screw it, I’m just going to eat five cupcakes, whatever, who cares? You know, like you’re just giving in to those primitive urges.
You know, you have this desire, this craving and you just give into it. That’s letting the primitive brain that’s letting your lizard brain run the show. Okay, you’re when you do this though, and we do this with everything in our lives. That’s crazy. When you do this, you’re putting your lizard brain in charge of your goals and your dreams. That’s crazy.
But I see this all the time. Runners, they don’t run. People who say they want to lose weight, and they just eat whatever the hell they feel like. And what do you get when you do that, when you continue to give in to these urges? You get nothing, you don’t get the results you actually want. You don’t get anything done, you don’t create the momentum you need. You don’t feel motivated, you feel stuck.
So you end up just giving up on your goals and your dreams, and leaving your lizard brain in charge of your life. And this, when you do this, it’s like a dream killer. Okay? Well, that sounds terrible, but it’s true. Okay, so instead, you want to put your prefrontal cortex in charge of your decision making, you want your modern evolved brain running the show, okay? You want that planning, thinking, and cognitive brain to be making decisions and following through on those for you.
This part of your brain is far superior at setting goals and accomplishing things, okay? You’ve got to train yourself, though, to use this part of your brain, it’s really easy to just use your primitive, primal fight or flight, you know, fear center, like just just get into that that’s easy to do. It’s not easy to use your prefrontal cortex to plan ahead, to write out your training plan to plan what you’re going to eat, and then actually do those things.
Follow through with those things. But you want to use your prefrontal cortex, you want to use it to make decisions and keep those promises that you make to yourself. Okay. So how do you do this? Well, step one is to plan ahead. So get the steps that you need, figure out what your training plan is, figure out what you’re going to eat, okay, and then put that stuff on your calendar.
Alright, so plan ahead, plan your runs for the whole week, plan on what you’re going to eat for the week. And I tell my clients always plan at least 24 hours in advance, this is key. You know, if you make plans for an hour from now, you’re already into that lizard brain thinking because you’re already like responding to how you feel in the moment, okay, and you, you cannot do that, you have to plan ahead of time, okay? It’s so easy to just give into the urges in the moment. Okay. So number one is to plan ahead, always, always, always plan ahead.
And then number two, there’s only two steps to this, by the way. Number two is to follow through, do what you say you’re going to do. If you put a training run on your calendar for tomorrow morning at six o’clock, do your training run tomorrow morning at six o’clock, when the time comes tomorrow to eat a healthy meal, eat what you said you’re going to eat, don’t deviate from that, okay?
Don’t deviate from your pre-planned schedule, or your pre-planned eating plan or whatever it is. So when you do this, you start to train yourself, you start to train your brain to use more of the evolved brain and you start to quiet the lizard brain. You stop giving in to the primal urges, like I don’t feel like it. And you start building momentum towards your goals.
So you plan ahead, and you follow through, you plan ahead and you follow through it, you plan ahead and you follow through this is how you get stuff done. This is how you build momentum and trust in yourself. This is how you build motivation. Your motivation is a feeling. That feeling is created by thoughts. You know, so what do you want to think? What do you want to do so that you feel motivated? Motivation doesn’t come from outside of you. It’s a state of mind.
So here’s an example from my weight loss clients. Okay, this is what I tell them to do. And this is how we apply this when it comes to losing weight. So I make them well, I encourage them and make anybody do anything. But I encourage them to plan all of their food for at least 24 hours in advance. Okay plan, I recommend writing out a two week eating food plan which we call a protocol. So write out a two week protocol. This is what I’m going to eat every day. Okay?
But at least 24 hours in advance you plan what you’re going to eat and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat okay, you don’t deviate from that ever. So you choose foods that are going to fuel your body in advance and then you only eat what you said you’re going to eat. You do not deviate ever, okay?
You don’t give in to those primitive urges, or the cravings, and I teach my clients, I’ve got some awesome tools and strategies that they can use for how to deal with the cravings and urges when they come up because they do come up. But I teach them to honor their protocol no matter what.
And this is hard to do at first, because it’s uncomfortable. Our primitive brain is saying, like, I don’t want to be uncomfortable here. You know, I’m all about avoiding pain, and seeking pleasure. And this feels kind of painful to me, it’s not pleasurable. But I gotta tell you something, that uncomfortable feeling, it goes away, and it goes away pretty quickly, when you stick to this, you know, might be a few days, it might be a couple of weeks, but it goes away.
And then what happens is, my clients, they begin to lose weight, they begin to feel good about themselves, they start to build trust in themselves, they know that they can then go to a party, and they don’t eat the cupcakes that are there, not because they’re like white knuckling it and starving themselves and forcing themselves not to and using sheer where willpower is because they’ve built up some mental toughness, they’ve built the confidence that they need, and they just no longer have those cravings and those urges, okay, they begin creating these new mental habits.
They’ve hacked their brain, they’re creating new neural pathways, they’ve been creating new behavior patterns. So they’re no longer a slave to the lizard brain, their prefrontal cortex is now running the show. And it’s a lot easier for them to just stick to their plan. And they keep making steady progress, they get to their goal weight, and they end up having to buy all new clothes, which is a good problem to have, right.
But they’ve built so much trust and confidence in themselves that, you know, when it comes to just maintaining that weight, it’s a piece of cake. Pardon the expression, it’s easy for them. It’s a cupcake. And it takes practice, I gotta tell you, it’s not easy.
At first, it will be uncomfortable, but that’s okay, because you can handle a little discomfort. You know, your lizard brain is always trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure, it does not want you to be uncomfortable at all, you know, your lizard brain is gonna say just eat the Ben and Jerry’s, you know, or you don’t really need to run today, it’s fine, you’ll be fine.
But you cannot listen to that lizard brain, okay? Except the fact that there will be a little discomfort when you are, you know, going for some big goal that you want, except that you will be uncomfortable. That is part of the process. But do what you said you’re going to do no matter what. And do this over and over again. Plan ahead and follow through, plan ahead and follow through. Keep the promises you make to yourself. And it gets easier. And the more you do it, the easier it gets. And the more you do it, the easier it gets.
And you build mental toughness, you build confidence in yourself, you build trust in yourself. You said you were going to run and you did. You said you are only going to eat what you put on your food plan and you did, you stuck to it. You didn’t give into the urges eating give into the primal cravings. This builds a huge amount of trust in yourself. It builds a huge amount of trust in your ability to accomplish things that are important to us.
One of the problems is we get stuck in this moment of, you know, giving into an urge to eat the ice cream, even though we know we shouldn’t. And we know we’re not going to lose weight if we eat the ice cream, but we do it anyway. And what we’re doing here is we’re making the ice cream more important than our long term health and our weight loss goal.
We’re trading a tiny bit of immediate gratification for getting to our goal weight for feeling good about ourselves. You know, we trade away our long term health and happiness for some tiny bit of short term pleasure. So when you plan ahead and follow through you build trust and confidence in yourself and there’s really there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you won’t try.
You know you train your brain so you don’t make decisions on the fly that you make all of your important decisions ahead of time when you stick to them. This is a cool little brain hack. I’m telling you it works. You create new neural pathways and you create new brain patterns, right these are like new mental habits. And then you create these new patterns of behavior that become easier and easier over time.
So you’ll know you’ll have this confidence and confidence in yourself that no matter what you will stick to your training plan. And when you know that, when you know that no matter what you’re going to stick to your trading plan, how do you think you’re going to do in that marathon? Probably pretty damn awesome.
When you know, no matter what you’re only eating what’s on your food plan, how much easier do you think it’s going to be for you to lose weight, probably a lot easier. This is a simple little brain hack. But it’s so incredibly powerful. Most people have no idea how to do this. Most people just listen to their primitive brain, they just let the lizard brain run the show.
They let the lizard brain make all of their decisions, they just give in to all the primal urges no matter what. And most people never make any progress toward their goals because of this. And they always feel like they’re stuck. And they are stuck in this loop of like, avoid pain, seek pleasure, avoid pain, seek pleasure, and they’re not willing to get even a little bit uncomfortable. And so they don’t get anywhere. And their life sucks and they can’t figure out why.
Instead, learn how to use your evolved thinking brain practice using your prefrontal cortex. Put your modern thinking brain in charge of all of your important decisions, plan ahead, follow through, plan ahead, follow through, just keep doing that. And I promise you, you’re going to be a mental badass, there’s nothing you won’t be able to accomplish seriously. Alright, that’s all I got for you today.
Next week, I got something cool that I’m doing for you. Starting next week, I’ve got the first in a three part series that I’m doing all about why runners gain weight, and what you can do to lose the weight and how to become a lean running machine. I’m gonna be talking about that over the next couple of weeks. I’m excited about sharing that stuff with you guys. I’m really passionate about this.
I’ve had amazing results in my weight loss journey over the years, and most recently, some some sharing this with other people. They’re starting to get amazing results. And I want to share this with you guys. So that’s all I got. Listen, I got lots and lots of love for each and every one of you, my friends, always. I’ll talk to you soon.
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Chris Wissman is a personal trainer, a movement and lifestyle coach, and an all-around badass when it comes to functional fitness. He's co-owner of Real Human Performance in Madisonville. Today we …
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m your host. And today I’ve got a really cool treat for you. I’m talking with my good friend, Chris Wissman. Chris is a personal trainer, he’s more of a movement and lifestyle coach. That’s what he calls himself.
And Chris and I can have conversations that just go, who knows where, and they’re awesome. We talk about mindset, we talk about physiology, about physiological load. In this particular show, we get into running form and posture and how important that is, and what happens to your body when you don’t have good form.
We talk about things like being hunched over all day sitting down and what that’s doing to us, maybe the importance of having something like a standing desk. And we talk a lot about diet, too, and how there isn’t one diet necessarily for everyone, there’s not one diet that’s perfect for everyone. And then it’s important for you to figure out what your metabolic diet type is.
Chris has a wealth of knowledge on all this stuff. And like I said, we could go in many, many different directions here. And we could talk forever about some of this stuff. We don’t talk forever, but we do talk about a lot of different things. This is really cool. I love love, love talking to Chris. And then at the very end, he gives us a couple of simple, very simple tips for endurance runners to help us to be more efficient in what we do.
So you have to wait until the end of the podcast for that one. But before we get into that, I wanted to quickly go over something I’m very excited about. And I just recently launched Inner Fire Tribe’s group coaching program for runners. So this is a comprehensive online training program.
And it’s designed for you if you’re a long distance runner, if you’re a half marathon or marathon or ultra runner; it’s designed to help you bring your mind and your body into alignment so you can get the results that you want. It’s designed to show you and teach you how to train your mind like you train your body. So you can get those powerful results. So you can reach your goals, whatever those may be, they may be running faster than you ever have before or completing a distance you have never done before.
So when you become a member of the Inner Fire Tribe, you’re gonna get detailed training plans. So we’ll have comprehensive half and full marathon training plans. And then a training library that’s going to continue to grow. So new training plans will be added all the time, you know, we’re going to be adding 5k and 10k. And you run your first ultra plan that’s going to be coming very soon. You’ll get mindset training.
So I will do weekly, live mindset training, so you can learn how to train your mind to work for you. You know, the key, the key to success in all of life, but especially in running is to get your mind and your body into alignment. If your mind is fighting against you every step of the way, running is going to be very challenging for you. So as a master mindset coach, my focus is helping you build the mental toughness that you need to make running easier, you know, get faster and actually have more fun doing it.
You will get live online coaching. So I do a live coaching in a private Facebook group. And let’s face it, running is hard, right? There’s a lot that goes into becoming a successful long distance runner. And not everybody’s needs are the same. So what I want to do is some one-on-one coaching with you in an environment where other people can benefit from it. You’ll also get that supportive community of the Facebook group. It’ll be comprised of runners just like you. So it’ll be fun, I’ll be supportive. It’s a great place to ask questions, get help about all things running nutrition, gear building, mental toughness, and so much more.
And then everything we do, becomes archived into a comprehensive video library. And then we’ll be adding to that video library all the time. So we’ll be covering main topics like running forearm strength training, stretching, recovery, nutrition, fueling for race day, proper nutrition, hydration, pay strategy, tapering, all the things that go into running rain, seems easy enough, right? Just put on your shoes and head out the door.
But when we get into the sport of running, and especially the sport of distance running, there’s a lot of factors involved. And you can almost not have too much training when it comes to that. So this video training library will be ever growing. Now, here’s the best part about joining Inner Fire Tribe, this is not something that is going to break your wallet. Okay, you’re gonna get the training plans, the mindset training, the instructional video library, live online coaching, and a supportive community, you’re gonna get all of that. It’s less than $1 a day, you can find $1, you know, right now in the couch cushions, probably.
So when you join the Inner Fire Tribe group coaching program for runners today, it’s only $26.2 per month. And here’s what’s cool about it: it’s a subscription based system. And the longer you stay, the more valuable it becomes for you. Because we’re always gonna be adding new strength routines, new exercises, new training videos, new coaching sessions, and more and more and more, get in on this today, because it’s only going to get better.
And I can’t guarantee that I’m going to keep things at this low price point. So it’ll probably end up going up soon. So go there today, there, you got nothing to lose, really go to innerfiretribe.com/coaching. And you can sign up today, come and be a part of the tribe. I would love to have you there. All right, cool. So let’s get into my interview with Chris Wissman.
Today, I am joined with Chris Wissman. Chris is a movement and lifestyle coach, and just kind of all around badass. If I can say that, of course. Chris, why don’t you tell me and tell everybody else a little bit about what you do.
Chris Wissman
So at Real, Jen and I owners of a company called Real Human Performance. So we really focus on specifically the gym floor, just corrective movements and making sure everybody’s moving for their kind of individual approach. We also do stress management courses and workshops, outside of real and different corporations to the city. My passion is becoming more and more oriented towards kind of helping people through their, like changing their lifestyle factors.
That way we can like what you’re focusing on, help people ease the load, so their mindset can be even stronger and better than it’s ever been. So we approach it from kind of a pillar standpoint. And we can get into those pillars as we, as we were we record here, but um, movement, and then just like lifestyle factors and I help people with that.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool, so you’re different from the traditional gym or from, you know, traditional, yeah, something like CrossFit, you know, so explain a little bit about the differences and how that would relate to somebody who’s let’s say, an endurance runner.
Chris Wissman
So running is the perfect thing to compare that or to relate that to, because CrossFit tends to stay in what we call the sagittal plane, which is just up and down movements, a lot of barbell movements, a lot of burpees, they’re not really incorporating the way that our core is originally designed to move our core is meant to propel us through locomotion is we’re meant to locomote and to run.
And that’s why I love this approach, because with running, you oftentimes see posture starts to either deteriorate depending on how you’re built, or just be stronger than it’s ever been because of that rotational ability that we train on the gym floor. So a lot of the things that we do on the floor, are oriented back towards restoring our core function and our back functions so we can locomote better. Locomote just meaning walk and run, just go through that plane of motion.
So do a lot of rotational drills, a lot of anti rotational drills, a lot of ground based movements, stuff that’s really designed to restore that style of movement and just recognize that not everyone needs to do the same thing. And everybody’s starting in a very unique spot. And we have to be very intelligent about how we deploy these movements to people to make sure benefits them because what use of it is that if we’re not if we’re not benefiting that person.
Patrick McGilvray
I want to go back to something you just said about posture. And for me when I think of that when it comes to running I think of running form. For sure a lot of people have what you would consider like terrible running form, terrible posture so they may stand like they may be really hunched over over, you know, their shoulders are up in their ears. They may be rounded at the back, or, you know, they may be flailing a lot, you know, and I see this in long distance runners, especially, you know, because we spend a lot of time out there running together, and you see some people you’re like, how’s that guy able to run a marathon like that?
Yeah, and some people are pretty, you know, they seem like they’re pretty fast runners. But my guess is that they could be a lot more efficient for sure and probably stay injury free. Like talk a little bit about the importance of posture.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, exactly. So that posture, you talk about that anterior rolled, forward posture has a lot to do with being seated. Unfortunately, we’re both seated right now. I usually try to sit on like a Swiss ball or something that keeps me active, that way, it stimulates my posture throughout the duration, which is just a big exercise ball for, for lack of a better term.
But um, basically, when you see that for rolled posture, and that kind of head for neck, it’s something that I still suffer from. And that’s kind of why I went out on a limb and tried to learn so much about it. It’s a lot of times that dysfunctional breathing pattern, when we start really heavily mouth breathing and getting exhausted, the musculature on the front side of our body, and our chest will start to constrict and just pull ourselves forward.
Which makes us have to try to keep our head up, our head is trying to do our head and eyes are trying to do anything they can do to stay in the horizontal plane of motion to make sure that we’re not going to fall over, right.
So as our chest falls forward, our head will start to come up. And that’s where you see what’s called back kyphosis, which is just lack of thoracic extension, lack of keeping what I’ll cue in the gym is just like, hey, keep up, keep up proud chest when we’re down there. That way, we can restore some of that extension to the mid back.
And when we’re able to train ourselves to maybe not so much panic, breathe throughout the day, use our nostrils, you’ll and just be very cognizant of our posture, you’ll slowly start to notice that improving. Again, it’s something that you can’t just fix overnight. Keep in mind how long it took us to develop these postures and, and so you have to really reinforce it every day, with everything that you do.
And that has effects way deeper than we know and has effects on our nervous system. It has effects on our digestion, it has effects on how our feet strike the floor. It’s very, it’s a, it’s a feedback loop from up, up and down and down and up. And it’s constantly talking to itself to help us try to find balance.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, that sort of proud chest that you know, sitting up straight, basically, right. It’s kind of a, it’s kind of a trendy thing right now, because there’s all these gadgets that you can wear, you know, that’ll bind you to, yeah, right. I’m like, okay, why is this all of a sudden a thing? You know, are we really that bad hunching over? And I guess we are.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, we are and, and that kind of pulls us back to it makes us a really quad dominant runner as well. And as we become quad dominant, then our glutes, and the hamstrings kind of start to relax or not do what they’re supposed to do, which is the pulling part of the movement. So the more anterior we are, the more front of the body we are with our posture, the more that’s going to go down the chain to our feet, and our knees, our quads and our shins. So you could see shin splints because of this knee problems, and all of that. So it’s kind of just a cascade of effects, if you will.
Patrick McGilvray
So really just stand up straight when you’re running with a proud chest. That’ll really help a lot, right?
Chris Wissman
Oh, for sure. For sure. There’s some really good people in the city if you want to get down deep in the nitty gritty with this. But I mean, generally speaking, we want to try to strike the ground with ease, we don’t want to be slamming down. We don’t want to be landing too much right on the heel immediately, we want to land kind of whole foot or maybe even front foot. And again, everybody’s really unique in that regard. It’s just about doing it, like you said, efficiently if it sounds and looks not efficient, and probably isn’t.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t know how people get through like 26 miles running the way they do sometimes. Well, I’m not saying I’m perfect at all, but…
Chris Wissman
I’ve seen like good posture, you hold really, really good posture while you’re moving. You’re a lot better than I am. So that’s great.
Patrick McGilvray
Well, yeah, and just full disclosure, I do work out with Chris. So that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to get him on here to talk about this is because we talk about this at the gym extensively. And I’m like, dude, we just need to get a conversation or record it and share it. It’d be awesome. So here we are.
Chris Wissman
Heck yeah.
Patrick McGilvray
So you mentioned like sitting on a Swiss ball is something you do to stay active while you have to sit because I mean, let’s face it, we do have to sit sometimes, yes. Or there are alternatives like a standing desk. Have you seen people having actual results from that? And what are the results from that, because everybody’s talking about, you know, they’re telling me like Patrick, you should really have a standing desk. Because I sit a lot.
Chris Wissman
I’m very big on the approach of individuality and almost like in everything that we talk about. And if we have bad posture, and if we’re not using our, our glutes or hamstrings, our knees, and if we have a dysfunctional breathing, pattern standing, and sitting really don’t make a difference.
In my opinion, if we’re able to stand upright, correctly, and be very long in the spine and access our proper breathing mechanisms, then yeah, it’s awesome. And it’ll keep us active throughout the day. If you’re someone that’s not getting enough movement throughout the day, it gives you a chance to just slide side to side, and it gives you a chance to stretch and open up. But I guess, standing desk with awareness, awesome, without it could lead to some long term things. But they’re great for some people.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. And you’re touching on something, though, that I think is important for us to all remember, which is that it’s different for everyone. Yeah, you know, everybody has their own needs. Everybody has their own things that work for them. And, you know, I’m in a lot of groups, and I see people post questions in groups, like, what’s the best way to do x? Or what’s the best shoe for x? Or what’s the best watch to where it’s like, dude, who knows?
Whatever works for you, you know? Yes, it is the best. Anyway, and I like your approach with that, like, when we do work out at the gym, you’re very much about the individual person and what their needs are. It’s not just about like, everybody do the same thing, no matter what. Yeah, you know, you take into account what people need, you know, I need certain things, and somebody else might need something completely different. So that’s cool. For sure.
So we’re talking about building strength, right? Yes, you’re talking about becoming stronger. You know, what are, what are some of the benefits of strength training for runners, because here’s, here’s something I’ve heard before. You know, runners, you know, you don’t want to bulk up. Because, you know, you got to stay lean. So, you know, the standard thing is, like, just don’t lift heavy weights.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, I think there’s benefits at certain times for that heavy lifting category for certain people. The main benefit that I see with the model that we use is restoring the transverse abdominis and your inner unit, so your, your core and your back and the way that functions, I don’t see a lot of people teaching humans how to rotate.
And there’s a ton of different ways you can approach this and it’s really not all that come left, you just have to know how to not go too far. So basically, you would teach someone how to resist rotation, via just like a planking platform or a box plank platform. And then you would slowly start to maybe lift a hand or a foot and make sure their hips don’t die from side to side, we can get activity in that deep pelvic floor, then they’re ready.
And I’m kind of fast forwarding a bunch, but then they’re ready to use resistance on the rotation. And if we can really learn how to powerfully rotate, then we’re going to go through that gait cycle fast, and you’re going to be very strong in it. So that’s really my focus on strength training around running.
I mean, there’s all the normal things such as, you know, just having more strength, your muscles, more endurance, the remote tools, you’re going to build, like stronger ligaments and everything around that joint. That way, that joint works better. And we’re at less risk for injury as long as we’re safe on the gym floor. But my real focus is restoring that rotation because we don’t do enough of it anymore.
Patrick McGilvray
And what a lot of people don’t realize is that running is a very rotational activity. Yeah, yes. You’re rotating. Yeah. You do use your core a lot if you’re doing it right.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, if you look at like these guys that are on the track for like, the Olympic athletes, you’ll see them literally, chin to hip. They’re ripping their hands as they go through and they’re doing our T spine is meant to have a ton of rotations. That’s why we’ll start our day off with mobility drills such as like the 90/90 sweep to open up the ribcage and intercostals and get everything available to move again, because it’s so stiff from just being forward all day. Seated and watching TV or in the car on the cell phone. Everything is just very stiff and rigid. So it’s just like let’s build some rotation back in this game and then people tend to do better?
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I know that when I first started distance running, I was not focused on the core at all. And then I started doing some core work and started to realize how important it is. Especially the outside. Your oblique slings, man.
Chris Wissman
Those are obliques. Yeah, you’re good at that you have the anterior and posterior oblique slings that connect. And this is why we go through a gait cycle that connects your shoulder and your hip. So it’s a big cross pattern from the front and the back of your body. And that’s what propels us through the so when we can if you look at a six pack on someone, this is like the most desirable thing to see as a six pack and someone that might not be the most functional. That’s our rectus abdominis. That’s like the top layer. And that doesn’t really have anything to do with the way we were built to rotate. It’s just kind of our protection mechanism for our organs. So it’s really good in that regard. But as far as locomotion, a six pack, isn’t that functional.
Patrick McGilvray
So interesting. Yeah. So it’s all vanity.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, many people picked up on it. And they just want to keep it and so I get it.
Patrick McGilvray
I get it. Good. Well, then I’m gonna stop. Yeah, I’m going to stop going for the six pack, then there it goes. I know. It’s just a vanity thing, you know, strong oblique slings.
Yeah. That’s cool. So let’s talk a little bit more about that. The gait pattern, you know, in that whole gait cycle, because it’s fascinating to me to just kind of learn a little bit more about, you know, propulsion, and how we are, what we’re actually doing when we’re running. You know, I’ve heard it said that running is like a controlled fall, you know, you’re sort of falling forward, you’re leaning forward at the, at the ankles slightly. And so that your body is just sort of controlling that fall, you know. So anyway, that’s just one way of looking at it first, talk through that a little bit.
Chris Wissman
So there’s a really awesome woman that I studied through, named Katie Bowman. And she’s got a couple of books, one of which is Movement That Matters. And there’s another one called Move Your DNA, she talks about that, you can see people that lose their core propulsion.
And while they’re walking, it’s like they are falling, and they’re just catching themselves every step, and that’s pretty abrasive to the joint. So if you can take that, that controlled fall and make it more fluid, and I’ve heard it explained to me like you’re Spinning the globe, if you can make it be very easy, that will help that control fall. And that will propel you forward.
Ultimately, you really want to see at the end of that fall, aka push off your foot, you want to see full extension. And we practice that a lot when we’re doing our, our drills from from deadlift to overheads or whatever they might be, is extending through the hips, and pushing and plantar flexing off the ground and really learning to get as long as you can, the more we learn to extend, the more using that your posterior chain, your backside, your body, your hamstrings, your glutes, and you’re really able to fire them.
And that will help that fall that you’re talking about. Just be powerful. So extension, in regards to power will help you a ton. And there’s a lot of drills that you can do around that as extension base drills. So for power extension up, up, up those drills man, they’re my favorites.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I don’t love them. No, they’re good. It’s good. I know I complain about the workouts, Chris, but I know.
Chris Wissman
You really don’t, man. I noticed when you came in, when you were really interested in starting this and have you started it, you had a different energy about you entirely. You literally were, you’re glowing. It’s a you’re a different Patrick than the one that I met, not that you weren’t a great human before. It’s just like, do you see Patrick? He’s dude, he’s radiating like he’s fired up. I really really like what you’re doing and everything. So that’s why I was stoked that the mind approach is what you’re choosing because it’s so important.
Patrick McGilvray
Well, that’s a good segue. Let’s kind of talk about that. So you know, I’m, I’m under this I’m operating from this place of like, mindset is everything. Okay? Yeah. Like everything that you want in your life was, you know, first created as a thought, and that our thoughts create the things we feel the emotions that we have. And it’s those emotions that create our behavior or actions, okay, so when you say or inaction.
You know, so when you say like, why did you do that? Oh, I felt like it or I didn’t feel like it, you’re talking about an emotion. Why didn’t you feel like it? What’s the thought that was telling you that you didn’t want to work out today or you didn’t want to go for that run, it might be some belief that you have about yourself that, you know, you’re not a good runner or something like that.
Anyway, so our thinking creates our emotions, our emotions, determine what we do our behavior, and then our actions or behavior gets us our results, okay, you want better results in your life, change your thinking, you know, that’s where I’m kind of, yeah, that’s where I’m operating from here,
Chris Wissman
It’s literally that because with your thoughts, you’re changing your hormones, and that, and that is what propels our emotion. So hormones, control emotions, emotions, control what we do, and then reinforcing them by embodying that thought. And it’s, literally, it’s the most powerful thing that you can, you can change. And it’s, it’s incredible. It really blows me away.
Because it is, the higher it is, the top notch in the hierarchies scale on what we want to address. When it comes to lifestyle coaching, if you’re constantly in an automatic negative self thinking, then you’re going to just repeat your cycle over and over and over again. And it’s not like I’m perfect, I still struggle with it in multiple categories. And the best thing that you can do when you’re in those thoughts is just stop the thinking and interrupt it with something that you really think is positive, or you want to it’s an affirmation, essentially.
But with that information, I found it really important. And Elliot Horowitz kind of reinforced this to interrupt it with something you’ve experienced very positive in your life, something that, like I used to ride BMX and dirt bikes a ton, and I can just visualize myself flying into the woods. So that is just like, my utmost flow states.
So if I can reinforce my affirmation, with a feeling that I got was riding dirt bikes are as close as I can get, then you’re more likely to achieve that positive thought or what it is that you want to do. And you’re interrupting that negative thought, right now, and with some success.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and people really think that this is more complicated than that, you know, and, like, and it really isn’t. So, you know, being happy or being confident, you know, those are just states, their states of mind, you know, and if you want to be happy, go back to a time when you were super happy, like go float back into your body.
In that time, close your eyes, float back into that time, see what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel those feelings of happiness. Once again, I guarantee you if you take 30 seconds to do that, you’ll have a big smile on your face, for sure, man now, but what happens is we choose different thoughts. We choose thoughts of stress and anxiety and fear and hurt and sadness and guilt and shame. Like we choose these things. I think about choosing them.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, I think the statistic on that is like, like 90% of the population today is 90% of the thoughts are negative.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it would have something like 60,000 thoughts a day? Yeah. So think about that, like, okay, what’s 90% of that? I don’t know, 50,000 of your thoughts are negative. What are we doing to ourselves, you know? And then we wonder why everybody’s on Lexapro or whatever, you know.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, with those thoughts, you’re not only reinforcing a negative mindset, you’re feeding an overall disease. I like the disease that broken down like that because it is just that, it’s a disease. And with just, I remember at an old company, I worked at the stress that it gave me and went off to get into the details of it but I had a chronic ulcer and I had just really really bad stomach pains really bad digestion and the day that place stopped my stomach problems, I stopped right along with it.
So these can manifest as anything like headaches, stomach aches, actual joint pain. If you have a vulnerable spot in your body and your real for reinforcing a negative thought, that vulnerable spot like I will know if I’m experiencing something out of the norm or negative via my diet or my mindset if my knee starts throbbing, like just like, hey, here’s here’s a sign for you. Something’s a little off you know, pay attention because I’ve beat my knee up so many times it’s very vulnerable to inflammation and we’re creating inflammation with the reinforcing negative thoughts and debt and bad lifestyle factors.
Patrick McGilvray
It’s crazy. Yeah. So your thoughts create these, this release of hormones and chemicals, right? Like serotonin. I can’t remember the other ones.
Chris Wissman
It’s complex, but you’re right on. I can’t really remember them either. But adrenaline…
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, stuff like that. And they can have an effect on you. So you can think yourself into, you know, a panic attack, basically, you can think yourself into that fight or flight kind of, right, where you’re, like, so anxious, and so fearful that you, that people actually have a panic attacks have to go to hospital, just because of thinking, you know, isn’t that wild? Like wouldn’t it be in our best interest to think something more positive instead?
Chris Wissman
Yeah, you’re right on and with that, that psyche is like the hierarchy of, of everything that we do, like I said, and therefore, like also reinforcing that you’ll also be you’ll see people that have that, that panic attack kind of mindset also, or those same kind of people that maybe are casting blame, or holding, like forms of resentment towards other people. And that really reinforces that anxiety. Yeah, it is crazy man.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, and Bruce Lipton talks about this, in his book, The Biology of Belief. I don’t know if you’ve read that one yet. I actually haven’t. But you’ve told me about it. I will.
So you know, he basically just talks about this relationship between the mind and the body, and that we think ourselves into health, or we think ourselves into disease. And, you know, he goes on to talk about how most disease and especially chronic pain, any any pain that lasts more than like, 90 days, or something like that, is is all based on our thoughts, our beliefs, and that you can change that and change the physiological makeup, you know, the chemical cocktail that you got floating around in your body, and cure yourself?
Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah, without a doubt. And with that comes like, the other things in life. And this is where I, I’d love to kind of dive into the other things that make our mindset vulnerable are like just just things in our modern day world, whether it be sleep or eating out of your diet type, or moving too much or too little or not, or having too many stimulants, you know, and breath is a huge one, we talked about that a little bit.
The environment that you place yourself in the actual environment, with the people you surround your wit itself with, and the environment via like, the things we put on our skin, the things that we breathe, the things that we put in to our mouth, the things that, yeah, just the actual, like the physical environment that you put yourself, put yourself, then it’s, they all play a role in our low, or what you and I’ve talked about before, are physiological below to potentially compromise our mindset.
So if we can reduce the that load through any of the number of like pillars that we work on, then our mindset has a better chance of like, hey, let’s take you know, maybe we can have 80 or 80% of our thoughts be negative instead of 90, and then slowly work your way into just being a person that really believes what you say, and what you say is a positive thing to yourself. Yeah, I’m really interested in Bruce Lipton’s work, I’ve heard a lot about it.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it’s pretty wild stuff. There it is. It’s just really fascinating. Like, I can go, I’ve read a bunch of books like this, and I can just get really deep into that rabbit hole of like the mind body connection. It’s fascinating.
Chris Wissman
You are, your mind is your body, man.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, it really is. I mean, it’s like, it’s like the central processing unit. You know, it’s the CPU of your body, you know, it’s controlling everything. So you mentioned something in passing just now. I want to go back to that a little bit. You said something about diet type? Yeah, that.
Chris Wissman
So everyone has genetic makeup. And we all have what’s called a metabolic diet type or something, also referred to as bio biochemical individuality. So our gut is predisposed to absorb some things better than others. And when we have more eating out of our diet type, and really now, we have so many availabilities to eat healthy foods.
It’s more about not eating like the processed garbage and trying to eat foods that you know where they came from, you know, they’re clean, they’re not doused with herbicides and pesticides, and then that will help us and help our gut not be inflamed.
And if you can even take it a step further and do some diet typing questionnaires and you get really in the nitty gritty with what kind of vitamins and minerals that you might be an excess of or are not an excess of you can really dial in your nutrition and be right on the money with backing up your genetics.
So like people from like extreme northern climates would have like. It’s a shame that keto has gotten such a bad rap, but also a good rap because there are some benefits to it. Maybe if you’re an Eskimo I had the mistake of like, of getting wrapped up in the rabbit hole being keto, and I, I really messed up my gut.
And I don’t want to deter people from trying that because there are some definite benefits of having fats in your diet, but they have to be the right fats. And you have to know who you are, individually, if you’re going to get benefits from that. And so, it’s really more about just taking a step back and talking to yourself after you have the food.
And just see how you feel like I’m the weird person in the grocery store going, Hey, Chris, do you want do you want that? And like, you get an answer right away? You do, you do? I swear if you just, if you stop for a second and ask, you get an answer right away.
Like there’s sometimes that this company Jackson’s Honest, has these really good corn chips that are just it’s literally sea salt, blue corn and coconut oil. And sometimes my body’s like, yes. And other times, like, nope. And it’s just you just talk to yourself and your innate wisdom knows what you need.
Patrick McGilvray
My body always says yes, when I’m standing in front of the ice cream display. Patrick, do you need this? And I’m like, yeah, do you know, it feels so good.
Chris Wissman
I got really caught up again, when I sort of learned all this stuff. I got really caught in a rabbit hole just thinking all that was bad. And like, to kind of back up the mindset. Like if that eases your mind. And that’s something that is a treat to you and you really enjoy it. If the juice is worth the squeeze mentally, and you don’t feel terrible, like maybe not make it a habit, but enjoy that, like, enjoy the Graeter’s, you know what I mean?
If you’re gonna do it, enjoy it, don’t beat yourself up about it. Because that will really throw you down a spiral. And I’ve seen a lot of people, including myself, not get the benefits from that. Yeah, it gets a little tricky. So I kind of live and this is kind of a popular thing. But I kind of do live by the 80/20.
And just been taking a step back and asking myself if that’s what I wanted, that’s what I needed. I’m actually more of a carbo type if I were to do my metabolic diet typing, so I do really well on on like good carbohydrates. So I will have like Ezekiel bread, which is a great source of like sprouted soaked seeds and grains.
And for a couple of years ago, you wouldn’t catch me eating that because I thought that was bad. And it causes inflammation. And it sounds like it’s got gluten in it. It’s got gluten and, and to gluten is defense, everyone that has been tested, like they get a couple of controlled studies and everyone that had gluten showed gut permeability, which is like inflammation. So there is some truth to it.
But that was American gluten. Keep that in mind. We could go down a really deep rabbit hole here. And there’s American gluten and basically American students got a bad rap. Oh, it actually doesn’t have a bad rap. It’s bad because it’s been sprayed with so many chemicals and actually mutated what it is. So if you find an organic source of gluten, you might not unless you’re celiac, you might not get that effect.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, I mean, corn apparently is a good ancient grain. That’s low in gluten. Yeah. Yeah, man. So Metabolic Typing, this is very interesting. I’m interested in doing this, you know, like, how would I go about doing this?
Chris Wissman
So there’s an actual book called Metabolic Diet Typing. And the company that I do my training for, the Czech Institute, has their own version of it that I like. And so if you’re ever interested in a questionnaire, I’m more than happy to pass it to you. I like some things from the Czech Institute. And I like a lot of things from the diet, the diet typing from the book is very in depth.
So if you want to go down the rabbit hole, I’d go that route. If you don’t, I would just just ask yourself some questions, you know, and just be really honest with yourself about what’s benefiting you and what’s not.
Patrick McGilvray
Okay. So I did a quick search here on Amazon, like the Metabolic Typing Diet. Yep. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, that’s it. And Walt, and Trish Fahey. You got it.
Chris Wissman
It’s been around for a while. And, you know, there’s, again, a lot of questions when you start to identify your diet type, but it’s really intuitive, and it’ll help you. And keep in mind, our diet type will change seasonally because our ancestors had different foods available at different times throughout the year.
We have the luxury now to just eat food from anywhere at any time and just go to Whole Foods and grab whatever. So if you got down into the nitty nitty gritty of your diet type you may change your food according to like, when it’s wintertime or when it’s spring or summertime, you know, you might eat a little I’m hotter and heavier in the winter, and more dense foods and in the summer of cooler, lighter foods, and it just, we crave those things, and we crave the soups, you know, in the winter, and then the salads in the summer.
Patrick McGilvray
So, pumpkin spice chai latte, fall in.
Chris Wissman
That’s, that was I think that was programmed later.
Patrick McGilvray
I don’t know, it’s pretty been around forever. What I love hearing you say is that, like diet, it depends on you. And I love this idea of just like figuring out what works for you, because so many people in the fitness community have kind of a one size fits all, you know, everything’s a nail, and they’ve got the hammer, you know, approach for diet, you know, it’s got to be keto, or it’s got to be, you know, paleo, or it’s got to be, you know, plant based, or it’s got to be, you know, whatever, or no carbs, or whatever it is. And I’m like, you know, it’s not that simple. You know, we’re not one size fits all people, you know?
Chris Wissman
Well, and when you when you start to make your, your transition into caring about what you how you treat yourself physically, and mentally, you’re gonna get some things that you identify with, you want to be like, that helped me like, so starting to clean up my diet and getting rid of X, Y, and Z, eating more of a paleo heavy fat approach was something that helped me and I identified with it.
And that was a part of the growing process. So I can really relate to where people are there. But it would be really sweet to start seeing people take a step back and just understand how different we all are. It is extraordinary how different of human beings we are, our gut microbiomes are totally different.
The way we move is different, the way we sleep, the way we act throughout our day, and our requirements are all different there, there might be some people that are just naturally deficient in vitamin A and others that aren’t at all. So you know, like, finding that kind of stuff out takes a little bit of work, but it’s well worth it. And just acknowledging the differences, I think is really important in it. And it kind of sets the ego aside for a minute. And, and allows you to relate to people and understand where they’re coming from.
Patrick McGilvray
So yeah, no, I love that. And, you know, I went, I was on a standard American diet for a long time. And that led me down the path of a lot of diseases, you know, me is what changed my Yeah, and I changed my diet. And I went from like, you know, pescatarian to vegetarian to plant based. And now I’m not as hardcore about plant based, I’m still vegetarian, I don’t crave eating, you know, meat at all.
And I don’t have anything against people that do. And I’m not saying one way is right or the other, but it’s just for me, I don’t have that desire for that. Yeah. So like, yeah, and I do like to have like a little cheese on my pizza, sometimes, you know, or, of course, whatever, you know, whatever. And I don’t beat myself up about it. Like, I have to do it this way or that way. So when people ask me, I say that I’m like, 98%, plant-based, you know, and that 2% is like, some Graeter’s every now and then you know, and cheese pizza, and I enjoy that it’s fine. And that way when I go to a party, and they’re like, have a cookie, I’m like, sorry, you noticed that it has butter in it? I’m like, Sure, Alex.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, my family just, oh, man, it’s been really accepting of it. But I can see the frustration on their face when I choose. I’m like, so every year that goes by, I experiment with a little more and a little more and, and I’m like, okay, I’ll try this this year. They’re like, why you’re gonna you’re gonna eat. I’m like, It’s not that I don’t think your food is good. It’s delicious. Which is like, since I’ve cleaned up so much when I do introduce something out of the ordinary for me, I just get, like ramifications sometimes. It’s like having a hangover. It’s not worth it.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, well, that’s a whole nother topic. So, just to kind of recap, like, I love this approach of like, do what feels good for you. Yeah, ask yourself, Do I want this? You know, and I think that can apply, you know, to a lot of things, you know, we could do that in our training. We can do that. You know, am I is this hurting my body? Is this form hurting my body? Is this long run good for me right now?
And it’s probably good for us to you know, ask those questions of ourselves on a regular basis, you know, and just just kind of check in with our mind. You know, what do you what does my body need here? Because your mind is so powerful that it really does know your your subconscious mind actually has a a blueprint of your of your body at perfect health that homeostasis.
Yeah, so it knows what that looks like for you. Yes. And if you can just tap into that, if you can just sort of like, let it be, you’re going to be much healthier, you know, for sure. Your subconscious mind is always trying to get you there. And we fight it, we fight it every day, we have a lot of this has to do with us wanting just wanting to feel good, we just want to feel good. I want to eat that bag, you know, of potato chips, because that’s salt in the ocean fad is just gonna make me finish sugar from the, you know, she’s gonna feel so good.
Chris Wissman
They have actual scientists that are behind, like, like flavor profiling now, so they don’t, I don’t even think they do nearly as many taste tests as I used to, they know it’s gonna taste good. It’s gonna, it’s gonna trigger our brain, and we’re gonna want more of it. And it’s already sugar. Yeah. And you have the brain addicted, the Holy Trinity, right?
Yeah, we can talk about something. So you mentioned the standard American diet. And what the standard American diet for you and I did was create disease, it may not have showed its face and shown its face. It’s like an actual, like a modern day disease yet, but we probably had a lot of different things going on with us, whether it be mood dysregulation, or aches and pains, or maybe weight gain or whatever it might have been.
But when our gut gets that much stress, it starts to become permeable. And you’ve heard everyone talk about leaky gut. And that’s kind of a really common topic to talk about. But the thing that I really love to dive into is something called visceral somatic inhibition. And those are just a bunch of fancy words for saying, when our gut is inflamed, that it’s taking over the nervous system response, the blood flow, and the hydration from the surrounding musculature.
The musculature is connected on those on those different on those nervous system pathways to protect itself. So when our organs are in bad shape from something like the standard American diet, or from maybe negative self talk, then our core, our transverse abdominis, and all these things don’t really have the opportunity to run at maximum capacity.
But when all the nutrients are taken away from the musculature and put in towards the organs, our liver and our in our gut and our small, large intestines, then we’re losing the availability to even use our core properly. And then we go down that rabbit hole of like, this is potentially where low back injuries come from, you know, our inner unit shut off, it can’t even work, right.
So it’s just all these stabilizing muscles up our spine that are responsible to take all the load of the spine and support us. And I’m sure they get mad, you know, and they want to shut down as well and take a break. So it’s very interesting to see what all these stressors can do on our body. And one of them is shut our core off. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s wild. And so like you said, though, the most powerful things in line if we continue that positive mindset, you can heal your gut through that. Just know that.
Patrick McGilvray
Fascinating. So give me one tip that we can take away as long distance runners. So if I’m running a half marathon or a marathon or an ultra marathon, you know, what’s something we can do? What would you recommend if you just met somebody at a party and you were like, Hey, do this one thing that’ll help you a lot.
Chris Wissman
Sleep and breathe, sleep and breathe. The more we can, but those are going to be really important as far as our availability to perform the next day, no matter what. Like your lifestyle prior to the couple of weeks before the race is going to be what it is. But if we can get a good sleeping pattern set, set and balance our circadian rhythm. Like you mentioned, we can come back in homeostasis relatively easy enough, we can start reincorporating diaphragmatic breathing, which would just be breathing down the deepest layers of our lungs and quit the panic breathing up into our chest. If we can breathe low and not high, then I think it would really set yourself up for some good endurance.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, how long does it take to for that sleeping pattern to kind of have an effect like is it right away?
Chris Wissman
I mean, I mean think about it the next day after you sleep eight hour you feel infinitely better than if you slept five. Especially again, everybody’s really different. Some people can get away with less but I wear an aura ring. And I know when my REM sleep is off. I know when my heart rate variability is often when my heart rate is elevated and it’s and really I don’t even need it because I can just tell it’s funny because I knew I just needed some reassurance and sleep affects so much. It’s so important to just sleep in a cool dark room. Try to get rid of the blue light before you go to bed and just get a good night’s sleep. And that’s helps me more than most things.
Patrick McGilvray
And then diaphragmatic breathing, that’s kind of like what you would call belly breathing. Is that right?
Chris Wissman
Yes, yeah. And you can get really complex with it. But if you just train yourself maybe lying on the ground, and expanding 360 degrees around your stomach, your back and your hips, and then coming back in, if you could expand 360 degrees, you know, efficiently learn to essentially diaphragmatically breathe. And my partner Jen is a expert with breath, if you ever want to talk with her, so she can, she can niche out on that.
Patrick McGilvray
I’ll be getting her on here, for sure. Cool. Is that something we can do while we’re running to that diaphragmatic breathing is that?
Chris Wissman
Yeah, it definitely will help. It will definitely help. And as long as you can handle maybe trying to train yourself to nasal breathing. I’ve read that that really helps her endurance. I don’t know, I don’t want to speak out of context. I don’t know the science behind that. I think Jen would be able to speak to that better. But no matter what I know that the guy frantically diaphragmatically breathing will help you whether or not you transition from nasal to mouth while you’re running is something that I’m not as familiar with yet.
Patrick McGilvray
I’ve done the nasal breathing while running. In fact, Jen and I, she gave me some tips when I was training for my 100.
Chris Wissman
Oh, cool.
Patrick McGilvray
So she yeah, so she helped me with that. And it worked for me for slower paces, you know, because you get to a point where you just I couldn’t get enough air to my cells.
Chris Wissman
Yeah, you have to oxygenate.
Patrick McGilvray
And so it was like mouth and nose and ears, anything I could just open up to get as much air in. But then there’s a lot to be said about that. Nasal Breathing. So we’ll get into that later. But that’s cool. That’s cool stuff. Heck, yeah, man. All right. Thanks, Chris. for hanging out with me. I know, I didn’t really know where this conversation was going to go. And it kind of went in a bunch of different directions. And that’s awesome. I just love to have these conversations with you. Where can people reach out to learn more about you or to learn more about Real Human Performance?
Chris Wissman
Real Human Performance on Instagram spelled out just like it sounds. And that’s where Jen and myself are and there’s a couple of our co-workers that are awesome coaches there. And my personal Instagram is @wissmansworld. But I do all my business there, so you can check both of them out. I do my weird stuff on my personal page. I’ll do like ice plunges and ice cold showers, and just act like a wild man and get out in nature and then keep it more professional at Real.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, you don’t have to keep it that professional. You’re not that, why is that wild? Honestly, good. Okay, cool. So thanks again. This has been awesome. Looking forward to having another conversation like this with you sometimes.
Chris Wissman
I really appreciate the opportunity to vomit my thoughts everywhere.
Patrick McGilvray
We love being the recipient of your vomit.
Chris Wissman
What a way to end.
Patrick McGilvray
Did you know that most runners fail to reach their goals? It’s not because of lack of training, lack of desire, whether it’s running faster or running farther, I believe most runners just haven’t developed the mental toughness they need to get them across the finish line. That’s why I created a step by step training called How to Build Mental Toughness and Become A Badass Runner. I want to show you how to train your mind so you can tough it out when the going gets tough. And the best part, this comprehensive training is yours absolutely free. To get it right now just go to innerfiretribe.com/badass and get started today.
Ian Burrell is a 2:13 marathoner and in 2015 he finished 25th at the Marathon World Championships in Beijing. It says something about how fierce the competition was if a 2:13 time gets you 25th …
Patrick McGilvray
My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is The Running Mind podcast.
Hey there, and welcome to The Running Mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. I am your host today, I guess every day. Today, I’ve got an awesome interview to share with you. I talked with Ian Burrell a while back. And if you don’t know who Ian Burrell is, he is a 2:13 marathoner.
And in 2015, he finished 25th at the World Championships in Beijing, which tells you how fierce the competition was that he finished 25th with a time of 2:13. Crazy, Ian is officially retired from elite competition, he still runs, he lives in Colorado Springs with his wife and kids. And he even talks about like, which is harder? Running the marathon at the elite level or being a parent of small children. So we get into that.
But we talked about setting goals, but letting go with the results. We talked about his experience, his incredible experience running the world championships in Beijing, such a cool story, how he mentally prepares for events like that. And just, it was a really fun conversation. He’s such a great guy. I know you’re gonna get a lot out of this. So I will stop talking.
Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Ian Burrell. All right.
Well, today I’m joined by Ian Burrell. And am I saying that the right way?
Ian Burrell
That’s correct.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. And we’re just going to talk a little bit about really kind of what it takes to accomplish some big things at the elite level of running. I don’t want to give too much away. So I’m just gonna let you Ian kind of tell us like, how you got your start, like, why running for you? You know, sure. What, what was it that got you to be interested in that?
Ian Burrell
Yeah, absolutely. So running for me, kind of started with my family. My dad was a runner in college. And it was something that he tried to get me into an early age, I resisted quite a bit. When I was younger, I wanted to play soccer, I wanted to play basketball, I wanted to play other sports. And I wasn’t too interested in running.
But as I kind of got older, and realized that my 5’6 130 pound found frame wasn’t going to be the next all star point guard, I started looking at some other running or some other sports. And that kind of led me to running as an outlet. And I always had a ton of energy as a kid as well. So my parents were probably pretty happy when I started running, to kind of mellow me out a little bit.
So as I started, you know, I probably didn’t run seriously until maybe sophomore or junior year of high school. And before that point, you know, I’ve never really trained a whole lot just kind of off and on. And those years, probably later, sophomore year, early junior year is when I started to become more dedicated towards it. I started training in the summers, and really started putting in miles in pursuit of accomplishing my goals.
And from there, it was just, you know, kind of one goal after the other. I will say, in starting running, one of the things that I always remember is, I remember telling my Dad, I want to be a really good runner. And I was expecting to get this, “Oh, that sounds great. Let’s get started. That’s awesome.”
But as soon as I said that, he turned to me and said, All right, well, talk is cheap. So you better go out and start doing it then. And so I kind of always had that in the back of my mind that all right, yeah, you know, I have the goals. I can say it, but it’s time to go out and actually do it. And you know, I kind of put my head down from there and just started accomplishing one goal after the other obviously did and, you know, accomplished all my goals that I wanted to. But that’s the way it goes with running. But that’s what kind of led me to my start.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Was there a moment in time when you can look back and go, like, that was the moment that like, got me hooked on running? I know for me, it was running my first marathon, you know, I had run a couple of 5k’s and like a 10k.
But then when I ran my first marathon, I, you know, I trained, terribly trained on my own, didn’t really know what I was doing. I think my longest run was 16 miles. And I was like, close enough, you know. And then the moment I crossed that finish line at my first Flying Pig marathon in Cincinnati, the moment I crossed that finish line, I felt all the feelings, you know, just that elation, the joy, the sense of accomplishment. And my first thought was, man, I need to do that again. And it was just like, hooked. I was hooked on that. Was there a moment like that for you, that was just like, man, that I need to do more of this?
Ian Burrell
To an extent, yes. But you know, I think you hit the nail on the head, that if you kind of can boil it down to a decision that you make where you make a decision, and it said, hey, I need to do this, I need to start running more I need to train. For me, that decision is something I made. And it was kind of around that same time of, you know, my sophomore/freshman year in high school, where my decision wasn’t necessarily that, hey, I love to run, this is something that I really enjoyed doing and want to be a part of, it was a, I want to be really good at something.
And I have this talent right now in running, and I want to get everything I can out of it. And try to be the best runner that, you know, that I can possibly be through training, you know, my goal, at the very beginning was to be you know, gold medal at the Olympics. And that was my singular focus. And that was my decision that I made at that time. And it was, no matter where my career took me it was, it always was going to end up on the top box at the Olympics.
That’s what I wanted more than anything. And from that age. Most of my goals, and my training was geared towards that that was what I was going to do. And it was that decision that, you know, similar to your experience, when you finish your marathon, you had that, you know, kind of moment where you said, Okay, this is what I’m going to do. My moment was sometime in early high school where I said, this is what I want to do, and I need to do everything I can in order to accomplish that.
Patrick McGilvray
So first of all, amazing that you, how old were you when you said you made that decision to like you’re gonna go to the Olympics?
Ian Burrell
You know, I was probably 13/14 years old. Oh, my God, maybe a freshman. So yeah, I always wanted to do something like that. And I was pretty determined to get there.
Patrick McGilvray
You know, I work with a lot of runners. And one of the things I tell them is like, you know, if you want to be a marathon runner, then you have to become a marathon runner. You know, months before that race. You know, if you want to be a Boston qualifier, then you need to be a Boston qualifier today. So that in six months, you are ready to do that.
A lot of people think they have to, you know, do all this work to become that thing. And then they will, you know, accomplish the goal. But it’s a matter of making that decision, like you made at such an early age, to be a gold medalist, you know, to be in the Olympics, and you got very close to that, you know, you got very close. So tell us a little bit about that story in that arc and how that worked out for you.
Ian Burrell
Um, yeah, so since that choice, you know, I kind of had a love-hate relationship with running because, obviously, as you know, I didn’t become a gold medalist, never became an Olympian. Made a couple of world teams for the United States and represented the United States at the 2012 half marathon championships and then the 2015 World Championships in the marathon track and field in Bulgaria.
And Beijing was where the World Championships were, Bulgaria was the half marathon. So some cool parts along the way, and I had to learn acceptance towards the later part of my career that, you know, everything that I’ve been striving for, probably isn’t going to happen. And I’m not going to, you know, I had to pivot.
And my pivot was to go to law school, become an attorney and help support my family. And that’s where, you know, I kind of had that moment where I said, okay, that that’s what I need to do. And that’s what helped suit my family. But it was difficult. And there were certainly some very depressing times, you know, months of kind of dark, depressing stretches where I had to go through until I kind of accepted hey, you know, this is where my path is going.
And it was actually when I accepted that, that I actually had some of my best races, because I wasn’t racing as tense as I was. So you know, it’s interesting, you make this decision, and it’s a very firm decision of this is what I want to do. But then the folks that I saw having the most success, were the folks that said, okay, I’ve made this decision, this is what I’m going to do.
And then it was okay, now I can relax, let’s just go do it. I didn’t always nail the relaxing part of it. And I knew a lot of guys who also didn’t nail the relaxed part of it. And the guys that could relax and accomplish it and, and still strive towards their goals, with the guys that I saw having probably some of the most success.
And I think I you know, it wasn’t until I had that frame of mind that I actually had some of my better races, which you can learn after years of kind of beating, you’re beating your head against the wall, why am I not racing? Well, then after you have that acceptance of, hey, whatever happens, I’m just gonna go out there and do what I can. And once you kind of have that mentality, I felt like you had I had some of my best races, and that seemed to be a constant throughout the elite running.
Patrick McGilvray
Interesting. So you sort of let go of zero, you set the goal, you know, obviously, you want to be at the top, but then you kind of let go of the outcome a little bit, you let go of the or you don’t have such a hard grip on the on the outcome, and then things become easier.
Ian Burrell
Yeah, yeah, you can’t be you kind of let go of being so results oriented, where you kind of have it in the back of your mind. But with running, you’re always pushing yourself to the limit. And sometimes you can push yourself too far with me, I was pushing myself too far. You learn that as you get older, and as you run more and more, you’ll get better and better. And you’ll need to find it.
That’s why having a coach is so important. Because a coach that understands, hey, this is a person that needs to be pushed. Some coaches say this guy doesn’t need any pushing at all, because if I push him, I’m gonna push them over the edge. That’s why having someone advising you on hey, you need to rein it in a little bit. Or if you’re someone that needs to be pushed, you have a coach that kind of helps in that regard.
And that’s why that’s so, so important. I had a, I think my best coach I’ve had was in college. And he knew not to push me, because I had that deep down. And he knew that if he pushed me, I would go into a tailspin because I’d go over my limit, I’d get sick, I’d get injured. And that would be that actually went back to him.
When I made my pivot to law school, I went back to that coach and we had a great working relationship together. And he was just an advisor who’s someone I bounced ideas off of, and sometimes that’s what a coach is. But sometimes your coaches are your motivator, too, if you need to be pushed your coaches instrumental for that.
For me, that wasn’t a good fit. And I had some folks that were, you know, more of a motivational type, more the pushing type. And that didn’t work for me. But having someone in that corner to kind of keep that decision alive and running. That’s invaluable.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. And I want to go back to something you said about like setting your goals and maybe not being so you know, having that hard grip on the outcome. Loosening the grip a little bit. And one thing I’d like to remind people is like, Okay, it’s good to set this goal. Let’s say you set a goal of like, you know, qualifying for Boston and, and you work hard and you’ll become that Boston qualifier and then you work hard.
You do the things that a Boston qualifier would do, you train the way they would train, you eat the way they would eat, you know, you rest the way where they would rest. And then when that time comes, whether you accomplish that goal or not, who are you now? Who have you become on the way?
You know, and that’s such a such a important thing that people miss sometimes, because they think my goal was to set out to be a gold medalist, the top in the world, but you accomplish so much on your way to that whether you hit that particular goal or not, you became one of the top marathoners in the world, right? And, you know, that’s an amazing accomplishment. You know, I would never look at you and say, oh, you failed.
Ian Burrell
It took me a while to not not think that way too. And say, look back with some fondness on the career and say, hey, you know, you did the best you could with the information you had. Did you screw up in certain areas? Yeah, absolutely. We all do. But the journey was pretty amazing. So now that it’s kind of run its course, pun intended, I guess. It’s kind of fun to look, look back and say, okay, you know that that was a pretty cool period.
You know, my wife and I accomplished a lot because I couldn’t have done it without her. We had our first child in law school. And if she wasn’t on board with my training, I wouldn’t have made those world teams. She was there supporting me, in many other ways. So without that, it couldn’t have happened. So we kind of look back and say, wow, that was, that was a lot of fun. It was cool that we did that. And that took some time to kind of accept but yeah, looking back now it was, we had a good a good time.
Patrick McGilvray
What would you say is your I don’t want to say like your biggest accomplishment, but like, what’s like your proudest moment running?
Ian Burrell
When I look back, and there were two, two points of my life, where I kind of stopped and finished the race and was just elated for, you know, a couple hours saying, man, I finally accomplished what I wanted to, this was a big goal. Got it? And it was, you know, kind of looked back and said, Yeah, that was, that was amazing.
It was my first state championship as a high schooler. That’s what I, you know, that was kind of the first step in high school is to win that state title. And I remember that was probably one of the biggest positive feelings I had. And then the second was the first time I broke 14 minutes in the 5k. And that was my senior year of college, I think, in Arkansas. I remember getting down with that and thinking, wow, that was truly amazing.
After that, you know, there were some highs, but some real lows when I was really driving. But after that, there was just a lot of positivity. In my law school days, and then post law school, getting my career started when I was still running very competitively. The highs were never super, super high, but the lows weren’t very low. And I thought that was a pretty good way to handle it. Where it was very even keel. And it was mostly just a positive experience overall. More even after that.
Patrick McGilvray
That’s awesome. For you, you said 14 minutes, and then I was gonna I was thinking you were gonna say, like, a two mile run or something like that. And you said a 5k. I was like, Yeah, smoking fast.
Ian Burrell
Yeah. It was a fun day.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So you know, I know you’ve run, you know, a 2:13 marathon. I mean, that’s just I can’t imagine that. I did a 2:13 half recently, so I felt good, but like how do you mentally prepare for that? Like, what was something that you do to mentally prepare for a really grueling you know, really tough marathon like that?
Ian Burrell
Yeah. So you kind of mentioned it earlier when you said you know, you become a Boston qualifier before you qualify. And for me, it’s that preparation that gets you ready. I feel that the hardest point or the most difficult point mentally, in leading up to a marathon, isn’t necessarily mile 20 or mile 21. It’s Day 75 of your training block. And you have to get up at 5am.
Where there’s no energy in the world, you have to manufacture all your energy. It’s cold, you know, you’re in Cincinnati, I’m in Colorado Springs, we both get snow, we both get cold weather, it’s 5am, you’ve already had 75 days of high intensity, high volume running, and you have 45 to 60 days more to go.
And here you are, you know, you have to get this run done, and you’re running on fumes or feel like you are at that point. And you have to get out there and do it. And I feel like that’s the most mentally difficult point of the race, once you’re in the race, you’re you know, that’s when it’s showtime. That’s when you have, you know, the spotlight there. And that’s kind of the big test.
So the energy I think, is there, and I think it’s fun, you have folks around you, you have the atmosphere. And you know, if you need to you kind of go back and say, okay, you know, I put in the hard yards before, when there was no one out there cheering for me, and there was no atmosphere. And it was tough. And if I was able to do that, I certainly will be able to put one foot in front of the other and keep on truckin’ until this marathon is done.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, so you sort of treat the race as like as the celebration of the training, in a way.
Ian Burrell
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Hardest thing is to get to a marathon starting line, feeling good, feeling fresh. And you’re feeling healthy and feeling positive. That’s the toughest thing, I think, is the preparation more so than the actual race. And that says a lot because the race is a bear. The race is tough. You go into some different emotions during the race, but training as well. So if you’re able to do the prep, you certainly are able to do the marathon.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So what do you do in those moments? When you’re in that race? And you’re feeling those emotions? Or the self doubt, or the fear, or the anxiety? Or the, you get those voices in your head? Like, how do you quiet those voices? What do you, how do you deal with that?
Ian Burrell
Yeah, you simplify. Everything is one foot in front of the other, keep going, keep your momentum, keep springing off your back foot, keep putting out your front foot and just keep going. And you’d be surprised.
With a marathon, you go through peaks and valleys, where you’ll have high points, and you’ll have low points. And if you can get through those low points by just keeping one foot in front of the other, you’re going to have a pretty good result.
And for me, it was the 2015 World Champs in Beijing. I was feeling horrible, from about 15k on. So about nine miles into the marathon. I’m thinking holy cow, this is going to be a long day, it was about 100 degrees on the surface level. And I was getting dropped. That was probably in about 70 of the place. And having people screaming by me.
And you’re nine miles in you’re thinking, all right, well, what’s gonna happen next? And I remember just thinking, Alright, just one foot in front of the other. Let’s see what happens, get to the next mile, then get to the next mile, then get to the next mile and win the miles and break it down into increments.
And as I was doing that, I noticed that people were starting to come back to me. And you would pick people off one at a time. And every once in a while you’d have a Go USA in Beijing, which is a lot of fun to hear. So that would pick you up and you know, you just kind of keep fighting and keep punching until eventually, you know, I’d gotten to about 30th place with a couple miles to go.
And I had an individual say hey, you’re in 30th place and I thought holy cow, how did I get here? And then you just continue to pick people off. You know, at that point I was riding high and ended up being 25th in the world on that day running the Olympic Stadium in Beijing. That was a lot of fun. Really cool.
And I actually timed it right because I went into the stadium right with Chinese guys. So they loved seeing their nation there. I just figured it was all for me. So there was probably about as loud as cheers I’ve ever heard. That was a lot of fun. Boston Marathon was the exact same story where I was feeling terrible, or I was getting passed up, and just kept putting one foot in front of the other and ended up getting 13 that Boston.
But it was amazing how similar those two stories were, it was the exact same race strategy. Were it was difficult conditions, and you didn’t run as fast, but you’re placed well. And it was if those two stories, didn’t hammer that idea at home that, hey, the marathon is something that you’re going to have tough times, you just need to put one foot in front of the other and win a few miles before you start feeling better again, I don’t know what does, because those were two prime examples for me.
Patrick McGilvray
And that I got goosebumps, like that story of Beijing is amazing. Just yeah, I can just imagine being there and feeling all those feelings, you know, running into that stadium, how amazing. But it sounds like one of the things you did, and one of the things that you do to kind of quiet those voices in your head, so to speak, is to get out of your head and get into your body.
You know, you said things like one foot in front of the other just, you know, kick in with that back foot, you know, when the mile so you’re just getting into your body, like, you know, taking out the emotional, mental part of it, and making it more about the physical part of it. Because you’ve done the work. You’ve done the training, you’re there, you showed up.
And yeah, showing up to the start line. I did a 100 miler a couple years ago. And I, you know, I said the whole during my training is like, if I get to the start line of that race, I will have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Absolutely. Yeah.
You know, because that’s the hard part. I mean, it was like, you know, 9-10 months of a lot of miles, you know, I put in a lot of miles. And showing up at that start line, no matter what happened during that race, whether I finished it or not. I did. But I felt inside, like just getting to the start line is more than most people would even dream of happening.
Ian Burrell
Right, right. Yeah, I got an intruder. Yeah. Yeah, cute. All right. Give me a quick second. Just as a as a side note, for any of your athletes or anyone else that you coach, thinking that they don’t have the mental toughness or the fortitude to take on a marathon, I’ve taken on a marathon, and I’ve been a dad and being a dad is far more difficult and far more. So if you can, if you can raise children, you can do a marathon.
Patrick McGilvray
I love it. Yeah. And I look at people like you, who are like the elite athletes, and I look at, you know, some of the top ultra runners or marathon runners in the world today. And I can’t help but think that there’s not that much difference between you and I, you know, you made that decision at a very early age that you were going to be a world class athlete. And when you made that decision, you became that world class athlete, and then every decision you made from then on, was easy for you, because you knew exactly where you were going.
You know, and I don’t think it’s like, oh, well, certain people are just built differently, or, you know, you know, have more natural talent. I think it’s more about the decision making, you know, it’s just about the mindset, you know, it’s really about the, you know, and this, this idea of, like, we’ve, you know, talked about it a couple of times now, like, you know, stepping into that identity of a ultra marathoner or a marathon, or a Boston qualifier, or whatever it is, and then all those decisions you make along the way, set you up for that, because you’re you have this clear path of where you want to go.
So it’s not really a matter of like, oh, well, this guy’s special in some way. You know, although I think you know, you’ve accomplished some amazing things. We all have that in us. We all have that ability in us. And it almost breaks my heart. Sometimes when I hear people say like, oh, you know, you know that I’ll post something on Facebook about running or something. Oh, I could never do that. You know, you’ve got you know, something different, you know, there’s something different about you. And I could never run a half marathon or a 10k, or whatever it is, and it kind of breaks my heart.
Ian Burrell
Yeah, I agree with you, 100%, you know, the elite runners are, you’re exactly right, that we’re really no different from everyone else that lines up on the starting line. I mean, we’re in our own heads. Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies, we’re neurotic. And we, you know, make a lot of errors along the way.
But it’s the exact same, some of the same personalities out there. So they’re, I wouldn’t think that there’s really all that much different. And in fact, you’d be surprised. You know, if you walk into a room full of, you know, elite runners, and you say, you know, just a regular bar or something, you probably wouldn’t be able to pick them out from, from the regular fare. Because we do fit in pretty well. And we’re really not not all that different from everyone else.
Patrick McGilvray
They’d be the guys that are drinking more and eating more than everybody else at the bar probably, right?
Ian Burrell
Consume a bit more. That’s probably true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, when you’re running 100 miles a week, it’s easy to eat.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah. So I’m going to ask you this question. And I’m not sure exactly how to phrase it. So I’m just gonna say it the way I have it kind of written here, which is like, in order to perform at that elite level, in order to accomplish these goals, what do you have to believe about yourself?
Ian Burrell
I think you have to believe that you’re going to get it done. You have to believe that you can. If you don’t think you can, then you’re not going to wake up in the morning to go run because there’s that sliver of doubt. You have to believe that your process and that your training plan is going to get you to where you’re going.
There can’t be any doubt. Because if there is doubt, the sport is too physically grueling, to have doubts and still get to where you want to go. It’s too easy to say, well, I don’t really want to go for this run. I don’t want to put in this week. You have to be 100% committed to doing it. Otherwise, you’ll cut corners just because of how physically demanding the sport is.
Patrick McGilvray
It is a physically demanding sport, isn’t it?
Ian Burrell
Oh, yeah. Yeah, the highest impact sport there is you know, football is tough. And certainly difficult. But running, you know, you’re catching, catching your body weight on every step. You go on through asphalt, concrete, trails, hopefully, sometimes rocks, roots, twisted ankles, all sorts of things. So it can be, it’s death.
Patrick McGilvray
And the mental toughness too, I think, is definitely a factor to consider, you know, as far as the toughness of the sport goes. Because you know, you’re not it’s, you’re typically not part of a team of runners, you’re not part of, you know, a group of people that are, you know, they’re like a football player on a team or something like that. You know, you’re out there on your own, and it’s just, you gotta make it happen. You know, you’re not relying on anybody else. And sometimes that can be overwhelming sometimes for you?
Ian Burrell
That’s a good question. I wouldn’t say overwhelming. You know, you’re certainly kind of the hero of your own narrative out there. Because you kind of have to be, I’d say it gets lonely, certainly. Because you’ll have runs where you’re the only one out there because everyone is doing something else or you know, schedules don’t match up and you have to go slog through a 20 mile long run on your own.
But you try to handle it as best you can. In law school, I had two great friends that will come out with a bike every once in a while on the long runs. And hand me water. That was amazing. Those guys are I’ll forever be thankful for them. But there were plenty of days. You know, remember my 2:13 marathon I needed to do my 27 miler on my own out there in Tucson. and Did you know when you’re doing a 27 miler you’re probably averaging about 5:30 to 5:50 pace overall. And that was yeah, you kind of have to play every cliche in the book to keep yourself rolling on that one just because you’re, you’re out on your own.
Patrick McGilvray
It’s good to have those guys hand in your water and stuff, though out there with you.
Ian Burrell
Oh, it’s amazing. Yeah, yeah, if you have friends, and they’re willing, it’s just the energy of them being there that makes a difference.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, I’ve had some really grueling runs where, you know, I’ve been running with other people. And we’ve gotten through it. I’ve had some other runs, that shouldn’t have been so grueling. And I was by myself, and I was just like, This is terrible.
I think having people with you is just paramount, too. You know, I mean, it’s more fun, first of all, but also, it’s great to have that other energy there to help get you through the tough stuff. And that’s why I recommend people join like a local running club or running group, to do the training with other people.
Because you’re, you’ll always find people that kind of run it, you’re about your pace, and then you start to develop friendships and mana mix that training so much easier. And it makes it easier to just show up on those cold, dark, rainy, you know, Saturday mornings, you know, and nobody else feels like getting out there.
Ian Burrell
Yeah, it holds you accountable. Again, you know, it’s that decision process, you want to have one decision that you make. And that’s what I want to do. If I’m deciding I want to be in Boston, then there shouldn’t be too many other decisions left. And having a group that keeps you accountable makes it so that your morning run isn’t a decision. It’s just something you do when you go meet your friends, you have to do it. So it’s not getting up and saying, Oh, should I go that never even comes into play. And the fewer times you have that, the more likely you’ll be successful.
Patrick McGilvray
Awesome. So what’s next for you, you got any goals coming up here?
Ian Burrell
I’m trying to figure out what to do. You know, I’ve been a lawyer here in Colorado Springs for five years now. And so relatively, I guess my practice is still new. So the goal is to continue that. That’s going well and really just enjoying practicing. And I’ve got a good firm right now. But I do need to like to get something else out there. And I haven’t quite decided what it is. And I guess stay tuned, we’re still kind of figuring out what’s going to be the replacement because it is nice to have those goals. I missed that.
Patrick McGilvray
Yeah, do you still get out and run regularly?
Ian Burrell
I haven’t done a whole lot of running in the past couple years, I’ll do a little bit of mountain biking and try to get out there. I’ve always loved skiing and snowboarding. So that’s, that’s been a lot of fun. And I think I might pick it up again. But maybe we want to have a bit more time to kind of focus on the therapy portion of it towards the later part of my career.
My hips were so tight that I couldn’t sit for more than 10 minutes at a time. So maybe when the kids are a little older and in the you have a little bit more time to focus on physical therapy part of it. Maybe I’ll pick them up, but ya know, we’ll see.
Patrick McGilvray
Well, you live in a great place. And you’ve got lots of options out there. So you know, it sounds like you’re staying plenty active.
Ian Burrell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, it just kind of takes one of those things to get excited about. So I’m kind of looking for some to get fired up about that and then once we see that we’ll get the family on board and go after that. But yeah, still looking.
Patrick McGilvray
Cool. Well Ian, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to chat with me about your running experience and you know how you’ve managed to accomplish some amazing things. It’s been really fun.
Ian Burrell
Yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Patrick McGilvray
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