View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Neal Palles is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Mental Performance Coach, and CTS Ultrarunning coach based in Longmont, Colorado.
Have you ever felt the weight of failure pressing down on you after a season of unmet athletic goals? Join Coach Jason Koop and CTS coach Neal Palles as we dissect the emotional journey of resilience in the face of athletic disappointment. In our heart-to-heart, Neil shares his eloquent insights from his latest article, guiding us through the storm of DNFs and injuries and charting a course toward using these setbacks as the building blocks for future triumphs.
Episode highlights:
(12:05) Moving past failure: practical example, find what failure means to you, breaking down standards and process goals, reframing failure into a growth mindset, personal Leadville example, taking failure as a challenge rather than a threat
(33:55) Diffusing from stories: recognizing the personal stories we tell ourselves, examples, sources, write the story you want
(42:45) Intentional catalysts: pacers, recognizing you can use help, getting help from friends and family, taking care of yourself, communicating with your tea,
Additional resources:
Neal’s article ‘The Freedom to Fail’-https://coloradopsychotherapyandsport.com/blog/2023/12/6/the-freedom-to-fail
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Neal Palles is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Mental Performance Coach, and CTS Ultrarunning coach based in Longmont, Colorado.
Have you ever felt the weight of failure pressing down on you after a season of unmet athletic goals? Join Coach Jason Koop and CTS coach Neal Palles as we dissect the emotional journey of resilience in the face of athletic disappointment. In our heart-to-heart, Neil shares his eloquent insights from his latest article, guiding us through the storm of DNFs and injuries and charting a course toward using these setbacks as the building blocks for future triumphs.
Episode highlights:
(12:05) Moving past failure: practical example, find what failure means to you, breaking down standards and process goals, reframing failure into a growth mindset, personal Leadville example, taking failure as a challenge rather than a threat
(33:55) Diffusing from stories: recognizing the personal stories we tell ourselves, examples, sources, write the story you want
(42:45) Intentional catalysts: pacers, recognizing you can use help, getting help from friends and family, taking care of yourself, communicating with your tea,
Additional resources:
Neal’s article ‘The Freedom to Fail’-https://coloradopsychotherapyandsport.com/blog/2023/12/6/the-freedom-to-fail
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon or Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media: Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast.
Speaker 1:As always, I am your humble host, Coach Jason Coupe, and this episode of the podcast might be a little bit of a gut punch for you, the listeners out there, and that is because it is all about failure and how we can process failure and how we can move forward with it. The genesis of this podcast is all based around interactions that I have had with you out there in the community. You guys have contacted me through my website and on social media and over the course of the last several weeks, very specifically, I have had this question pop up time and time again, and that is how do I deal with a failure of a season? Well, unbeknownst to me, one of our CTS coaches, neil Palace, who is our guest today, was working on an article about that very subject, based on some failures that he has had at the Leadville Trail 100 and during Leadman itself, and so what I wanted to do over the course of this podcast is to add some color commentary to that particular article that he wrote, which is on his website. There will be a link and the show notes to that, the title of which is the Freedom to Fail.
Speaker 1:We wanted to peel back the curtain a little bit and really dig into the details about some skills and some techniques that you can use to armor yourself for the season going forward, so that, when you do happen to have these failure points, you can process them in a much in a much more effective fashion as well as, if you're struggling with this right now, something that you can do to reconcile those feelings right now so that you can move forward and begin the training process. I've always appreciated Neil's counsel and his commentary in this area. He has a wonderful way with words, as you guys are about to find out throughout the course of this podcast. All right, folks, with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with CTS coach Neil Palace all about failure and how to move forward from it.
Speaker 2:A lot of athletes are looking at that right now. I mean just like, oh God, the season sucked. Well, that one's good.
Speaker 1:Let's get right into it, then You'll get with that. Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2:I personally go yeah, whatever Out of the next.
Speaker 1:Well. So I think, like it was like your post, which I would have already kind of referred to in the intro, it was really timely because, honestly, I maybe had a dozen people reach out to me, all through different venues social media and through my website, and just friends of friends and they were all asking the same kind of question I had a really bad season, for whatever reason. I got injured, I didn't accomplish my goals, I DNF'd in my goal races, all those kind of things, and how do I deal with it? Right, how do I manage this? What they were referring to or how they were verbalizing as a failed season, and literally at the exact same time, within six hours of all of this transpiring, these dozen people kind of contacting me, you came out with this article.
Speaker 1:So obviously I take that as a little bit of a temperature check across the community where a lot of people are sizing up their season and it's a realistic outcome to not achieve your goals that you set out to accomplish and to frame that as a failed year, right, which is the vocabulary that the people were using, that were kind of like contacting me, and so this all kind of came together. So I'm like, okay, I got to get Neil on the horn because this is my exposure to it. I guarantee you that the podcast community that listens to this podcast there's probably a hundred times more people that are experiencing the exact same thing, and then, when you spider that network out even more, there's kind of more people. So it becomes pertinent right now. But I want to hear from your perspective first what was like driving you to write that content, because this is something that exists on your website. Obviously you were stimulated to put the content together somehow. So take us through that before we get into it.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you had a weekend where you had these lotteries, big lotteries go on, and then you had some lotteries open up, and so there's this sense of renewal, what's next? And that brings us to conclusion, kind of in my book, is okay, last year was last year, what's next? Let's keep going, let's keep driving this forward. And I think for a lot of people you jump into those lotteries and like, ah, you know, or you couldn't get into those lotteries. I didn't get into the Western States lottery this year because I didn't have a finish, and so it's okay, what's driving that? And so you have all the stuff coming up and it's like what's next?
Speaker 2:And I think a lot of folks can get hooked on I didn't finish, I didn't have the outcome that I wanted, and that drives your sense. It could drive your emotions for months For some people. I think there's ways to address that almost immediately and even preventatively beforehand, as you look towards your season next year. But what drove it for me was that you're signing up for Lead Challenge again and just diving into it. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and give it a shot again for my sixth time and just keep going. We'll see what I learned from last year.
Speaker 1:What is it about? I'm gonna kind of keep using the word failure, but if you want to reframe it into your vocabulary, please do. But what is it about failure that is so powerful? I mean, you just mentioned something that was really poignant is that a lot of times this mentality or this framework can kind of last for months? Right, you go through an entire year and then you get to the end of it, and then all of a sudden February is rolling around and you're still thinking about the missed opportunities or whatever you quote unquote fail that for that period of time. The opposite is not sometimes, but not always, true. Right, when you get to the finish line and you know you get your Chinese big belt buckle and then next week you gotta go back to work in your normal person again. What is it about failing in a task that kind of makes it so powerful and so pervasive over like long periods of time to where we kind of dwell on it more?
Speaker 2:Well, I think a lot of it is your relationship to failure at the get go. The experience of failure is a normal human experience and if we looked, we were to talk evolutionary. I don't want to offend anyone who doesn't believe in that, but if we look, evolutionary failure is designed for us to learn. It's like, hey, I don't want to get eaten by the saber-toothed tiger that's hanging outside of the cave or whatever. So we get that pit in our stomach, so it drives us to get better next time. But it also can lead us to this sense of hopelessness and helplessness.
Speaker 2:The other aspect of that is how we believe other people view us. And if we get this, live in this world where, hey, I have to have these accomplishments, I have to have these belt buckles, I have to have this pickaxe from Leadman, you know, and I have to show all my clients on social media. Look what Neil did. He's an accomplished coach and he's accomplished therapist, a mental performance coach. If I'm living like that, I'm not going to get anywhere. It's just going to keep driving me crazy and so. But we also I mean that evolutionarily we want to fit in and that's one of the drivers there. But if we can step out of that and go okay, what did I learn? How can I grow from this experience? Yeah, it okay. It sucks.
Speaker 1:I mean I got to the.
Speaker 2:You know, I got to Twin Lakes and you know like, oh, coop's there, all the coaches are there, my wife's there, all my crew's there. I'm like here we go again, you know, and it's like, but at the same time I was like you know what? There's always next year or the following year or whenever, and I can keep trying at this. So, yeah, I think, you know we get hooked on it as a part of our identity, part of our self worth, and if we're making that outcome part of that of who we are and some, for some of us, it's strong part of our identities of, hey, I need to. You know, I'm a professional athlete, you know, and I think it's really important to keep striving. But if you let it knock you down like that, it's going to be hard to get back up.
Speaker 1:You know you mentioned that one of the reasons it's so powerful kind of two pieces one, the evolutionary piece, which I don't want to fix on, fixate on too much. But the second piece is this comparison piece that kind of amplifies the failure. Because if you're just looking at it in isolation, it's one thing, but if you're looking at it and comparing it to the opposite side of the spectrum, which is a big win, which is what a lot of people do right, especially at the elite, you know, at the elite level, like yeah, I was 11th at Western States, I didn't get, you know, my automatic 10, and then the first place was here, and then that gap in comparison is actually kind of kind of quite big. Or you DNF and you look at the people that finished, those are two very polarizing opposite ends of the spectrum. When athletes recognize that like hey, I'm comparing myself to this, that's not a fair comparison. What's the pathway out of that? To just to kind of learn from it or to diffuse this pervasive sense of failure?
Speaker 2:You know I like how you use the word. Diffuse, you know I love. You know, first of all is wrecking. You know, a is that self knowledge. You know self awareness is going to be is so key and noticing, when you are not just hooked on the comparisons but the language that's associated with it. I should, I must.
Speaker 2:These imperatives that you create, these rules that you create in those are pushing you around. You know, and if you're able to notice, hey, look, how my mind is pushing me around here, I'm going to start diffusing from that a little bit. All right, what's going to be more helpful? Well, let's go back to our values. You know, maybe my values are working hard. You know, courage, adventure. Let's go back to that and helping to identify who we are in that aspect. But you've got to diffuse from it first. You've got to have that self awareness and put a name to what's going on there.
Speaker 2:I'm getting hooked on these comparisons. Or more you know in depth is the rules that you're creating around those comparisons. I must you know, I need you know. Yeah, if you have a bad day at Western States and yeah, you've got your sponsored athlete. You know there's that, you know that challenge there, but at the same time, if you take a step back also, you know, hey, this is what's going on, let's go back to this and start. You know, what did I learn from this? What do I gain from this? You're starting to separate from those rules a little bit.
Speaker 2:You know identify them, notice them, you know. Hey, that's what's going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we kind of jumped into the middle a little bit and started talking about?
Speaker 1:no, that's totally fine, like once again, these things have such little, such little framework that I've put into them every once in a while. But I want to, kind of, I want you to put your sports psychologist and therapist hat on a little bit right, because you serve all these different roles coach, therapist, you know sports like mental coach or you want to describe it, yeah, and I want to use a little bit of the latter kind of throughout this next question, but also combined with your athletic background. So if you had an athlete that came to you and said I just had a failure of a season, I'm having a hard time getting over it, which is the position that a lot of these athletes that were contacting me are in right now, how would you like, just you working in, putting on your practitioner hat, how would you initially start working with them to diagnose what's going on and then help them move forward?
Speaker 2:There's a lot of pieces of that, but I want to know what that means to them, what that failure means to them. Where is it hitting them? You know, you know how is that hitting them? How is that, you know, impacting them on a day-to-day basis. You know, are you not getting up in the morning now? So I'm looking at it, so I'm kind of I've got a couple different hats on I'm putting on here. You know, and this is my problem is that I have got three different lenses and I start looking at things through.
Speaker 2:But as far as even a coach is like, what does this mean to you? What does the failure mean to you? Let's go back. It was what was the goal, what were the outcomes that you were seeking and what were the other Goals that you were working with there? What were the standards that you were holding yourself to that day? How are you? What were your process goals? So we're breaking this down a little bit to go wait a second.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, let's see if we can. You know, and I'm gonna, you know you're jumping around and you're a tenor issue for a little bit, but how do we reframe this? How do we look at this a little differently and start putting on that growth mindset Hat. You know how can we look at this? Not as this is fixed, that I am, I'm a failure. So let's go back to you know my experience.
Speaker 2:I didn't have success at leadville. That doesn't mean I'm a failure at this race. What it means is I didn't have success on whenever August 20th and then via on the cycling portion, I didn't have success that day. Okay, what are the pieces of that? Why didn't I have success? Well, you know, there may have been some training errors. It was really hot that day. There's all these other little pieces of that I could learn from. Okay, now I get that. What's the next step is taking that challenge to the next level. Take this as a challenge instead of a threat. Take this as a learning experience Instead of this is fixed, this is who I am. I'm a failure. You know this is so we're gonna. Moving away from that.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense. It's so the phrase that I'm reminded of is winter learn, and I really like that. Right. You either win yeah, whatever your version of win is right. You know that's like win the race outright or whatever. Whatever your version of win is, you're either doing that or you're learning. Right one of those two, because you can, and sometimes it's both. Sometimes you can win and learn Absolutely absolutely, but if, for whatever reason, you fail at a race, you don't accomplish your goals, you DNF kind of whatever negative piece of a framework we want to use, the.
Speaker 1:My approach on that is is what can we learn About this to get better the next time? And then put that into place? Because there's always something, there's absolutely a reason or reasons More often than not, in fact, almost always, reasons plural of this underperformance, this failure, this DNF kind of whatever it is that you can take away and you're in control of it, Like you can actually fix those going forward. Very few of those are not amenable by the individual right, right you know you, somebody vandalizes the course and you get off course.
Speaker 1:Sure, you can't prevent that, but you can prevent how you react to it. So there's certain Exactly, yeah, so there's certain parts where you can learn from and certain parts where you just got to chalk it up to just the cosmos, you know, like going against you or whatever, and I've actually had that with athletes before.
Speaker 2:I remember an athlete, you know, he got a leadville who was a frontrunner and he got turned around and that was the end of his day, you know, and how, why not just get back on course? You know, that's what it's all about. You know, I, I didn't get my gels at twin lakes, what you know outbound, and it's like, uh, you know, and I, okay, I'm gonna adapt here, I'm gonna use the dried up rice cake. I've gotten my pocket and a piece of potato.
Speaker 2:And a little bit of water. And you know I was a suffer fast going up that hill and I was like, ah, can I gone back?
Speaker 2:Yeah you know, did I have where my ears? I had some, you know little errors add up. You know, and accept that and it's how you're accepting of that. You know the. The other piece that I want to bring out about failure is at, you know, looking at how you know, you know we think other people view us and you know I could have in the back of my mind oh, my god, you know, yeah, the head coach Koopa's down here. All these coaches are looking at me horribly. You know I just suck at this. Oh, you know he's a bad coach. He can't even finish this. Right, I could look at it like that or not, neil, you just had a bad day. You know Koopa was at the bottom, you know, at twin legs. I saw him there. And Do you think any different of me because I didn't finish? No, not one single bit.
Speaker 1:No one single bit exactly, but I will say in like all honesty, there's a little bit from a coaching perspective, because I've been at races where athletes do Great, athletes do really poorly and everything in between, right all across, all across the spectrum. I'm disappointed as well and I'm disappointed in me. There's something that I should have done. I'll attend in advance of this to prevent whatever kind of happened. So I'm always, you know, people who work with me, both in a professional capacity and also in a coach athlete capacity, will Recognize that I'm pretty straight, straight shooter. I'm very compassionate, but I'm also a very straight shooter. I don't sugarcoat a lot of things and I do believe just in in kind of like real time when those things happen. That's that slider that I have to use as a, as a coach, has to go more towards the compassion side initially and then towards the straight shooter side, once you know the 24 hours of fog.
Speaker 2:And we're gonna dig into this and and look at, you know what I could have done differently. I mean, I look at that as athletes all the time is what could I do differently? And now let's figure out. You know, let's look back at this training here. You had this huge block and you had all these life stressors, all this other stuff going on. You missed it. You know a lot of, you know weeks. You know what's going on. Okay, let's. How do we develop from there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me give I'm gonna give athletes kind of like a personal story of how how coaches should and how I actually have viewed this and actually turned it into an advantage. So in February of this year I had a kind of a relatively new athlete that a lot of people will recognize because he's had a lot of, he's had a lot of success To do trans grand canary. His name is jai sheng shen from china, and he and I started working together in maybe October and November of last year and the first race that he had on the docket was trans grand canary, which is in February, and there's a little bit more of a background to it. He does not speak any english and he always has his wife Translate for him whenever we get on calls. We get on calls every week, just like with the rest of my athletes, and that language barrier is it's a very real point of consideration, and so I decided to fly out to trans grand canaria Just to meet him and his wife and sit down and start to create more of a personal rapport. I had no other athletes in the race and that's a big lift right. That's a week out of pocket for me. I absorb all of that expense and I'm more than happy to do that. I think that's kind of my charge as a coach, with working with the lead athletes is to Try to do anything I can to help catalyze their performance.
Speaker 1:Well, anyway, long story short, he ends up dropping out of that race, and which is an even bigger deal culturally For a chinese athlete because they take so much pride In in in their performance. And so now you have this constellation of a lot of different things. You have a new coach athlete relationship. You have a coach who literally is going to the ends of the earth to go and just meet this athlete and see them at the races. Like I said, it's my only athlete there. I have no other business being there other than to meet this person. You have this cultural element of there's simultaneously a language barrier combined with this kind of enhanced view of we should do whatever we can to perform at our best, and it kind of ultimately results in failure.
Speaker 1:And I remember when the whole thing transpired and he decided to drop out and his wife was communicating to me what was going on and the first thing that I wanted to do is to let him know that I still have all of the faith that I had in him as an athlete 24 hours previous to that.
Speaker 1:None of that has had absolutely changed and I wanted to over communicate that from the onset in order to kind of accomplish this overall goal that I had by going out there of kind of improving our coach athlete rapport because of all of these hurdles, and it ended up being kind of a little bit of a blessing in disguise, because you know now he had somebody who had seen him in the dumps right, who had seen him. I think he's only dropped out of one other race and he's a really prolific racer. If you guys go and look at his UTMB index you will see races like everywhere. They race a lot in China and I'm pretty sure that was only his second DNF, so anyway. So now you've got this situation which could have been a negative right, all of this effort and things like that athlete kind of like drops out that I deliberately turned into a positive by saying listen, I got your back. Nothing has changed in the last 24 hours.
Speaker 1:In fact we're gonna learn how to make this better. And the outcome of that was a really positive one. Right For the rest of the season he was going gangbusters. He was fourth at Western States, he was second at CCC. He had a great you know great kind of like ladder half of the year, and our coach athlete relationship, even in spite of all of the communication barriers and things like that, is very good, and one of the catalyst for that was this was this storyline of he goes to a race. He fails. I was kind of like there for him to pick him up and say, listen, nothing's different, man, we're gonna still figure this whole thing out.
Speaker 2:So powerful. It's so powerful I mean, it's just that rapport that you have, that relationship that you have just totally enabled that. You know, you think, the difference between transactional relationships and transformational relationships and that's transformational. There it's like hey, that's okay, I got your back, let's focus on figure out what's up and work on what's next.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I mean I wanted to tell that story for a lot of the athletes that are out there that have coaches that are afraid of part of, or that are they're amplifying this failure component when they are working with a coach because they think that they've let their coach down. And my message to them is if you have a relational coach as opposed to a transactional coach, it's actually quite the opposite. We will utilize this to catalyze everything being better the coach athlete relationship, the athletic component of it, like the whole nine yards. So yeah, we're disappointed, you know, and our heart melts as well and our pride melts as well, because we wanna see athletes succeed. That absolutely hurts. But if we have a skilled coach behind the wheel, so to speak, they're normally able to take those and turn them into more positive outcomes than they would have been otherwise.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah that transformation. It's just so. The transformational coach is so powerful.
Speaker 1:So we spent a little bit of time talking about. Okay, people are in this position in the first place because they've gone through some point of failure and because of some aspect of their psyche. That failure is kind of like on amplification, right, they're taking three months to get over things, when it should take a few hours or a few days or something like that, and it's weighing on them kind of like unnecessarily I guess is the way that I can put it. You put together almost like a bullet point toolkit for something that athletes can do almost to either stay out of it or I'm gonna use the word diffuse again Diffuse it almost from the onset, which I think is even more powerful, right, if you have this mindset going into it, then you're able to take things with the right context.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna leave a link in the show notes to this article that's on your website, because I think it's really succinct, neil. But why don't you take the listeners through this so that they can start working on it now, right? So that whenever this happens again and it's inevitable you just went through your whole storyline. Everybody's been an athlete for a long enough, as has had their fair share of failures, and so we're going to deal with it at some point or another. But why don't you take the listeners through this toolkit, so to speak, so that they can kind of armor themselves a little bit?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I mean, I start out by saying I think, get go right now, start cultivating this growth mindset, this idea that things aren't fixed necessarily. This is I could grow here, even though I am 55 years old I'm gonna be 56 next year I could still keep growing. I might not have a great 5K time, I might not get 15 minutes in the 5K, but I could still get better where I am right now, so I could still continuously get better. I can continuously learn. Okay, the other piece of this, and these are all things start now. Don't wait till after race day. This, you know, and we talked about this when we talked about my mental skills course it's like you gotta do this stuff now. You know it. Start building a toolkit of self compassion.
Speaker 1:That's my whole thing with training. Start now.
Speaker 2:All the libraries just happen you know your races like start now.
Speaker 1:Don't start a February, don't start after Christmas, don't start after New Year's start now.
Speaker 2:I will continue. I'll work with athletes on the mental performance perspective. You know, and you're coming to me a week or two before your race, but I'm gonna tell you right now I could give you some tools and we might get so far, but your best bet is starting right now, after the race, now, waiting until you know a week or two or a month before. Let's start working right now. And so this is why I'm actually starting that course again in January.
Speaker 1:Oh cool.
Speaker 2:And opening it up for endurance athletes Okay, for all endurance athletes, not just ultra runners, because I think everyone can benefit from it. Anyways, self compassion, next piece of this. So there's a couple pieces of self compassion, as one is bringing that kindness to yourself. And I know there's athletes squirming right now. Are you squirming?
Speaker 1:You're self compassion. What do you mean?
Speaker 2:You gotta have that kindness because if you, what's gonna win? The carrot or the stick and training a donkey, what's gonna win? The carrot or the stick? Ultimately the carrot is gonna motivate more. If you're continuously beating yourself up you know I really suck at this, I'm no good at this that's not gonna help you. But if you bring in the self kindness you're gonna be able to get back and say, hey, you know what I fell. You know what are you? A little kid falls, trips in front of you. A little toddler are you gonna?
Speaker 1:you know, you don't know how to walk.
Speaker 2:No, help them up. Hey, it's okay, just brush it off. Let's bring that kindness in the other pieces of self compassion, mindfulness being present. You know, hey, I'm right here right now, Not over there, not in the past, not in the future, but I'm right here right now. The other, the third piece, is the common humanity in self compassion. It's like you know what 40% of the people at Leadville this year did not oh no, it was half 60% 60% didn't finish.
Speaker 2:And you know, I look at lead challenge. There was only one guy my age and over that finished. Okay, the entire lead challenge. Okay, there's this commonality. There's other guys who started. You know a lot of folks started but they didn't necessarily finish. Okay, there's this common humanity there. That's where that self compassion comes in. Then you know, then I say diffusion from the stories, oh, go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, before we get into the diffusion for the stories, I wanna stay on the self compassion piece for a little bit, because I wanna make a distinction between being compassionate either to somebody that you're advising, that you're helping out to yourself, right, that type of compassion versus I'm gonna. This is a term that one of my former colleagues who's really influential on my career I can give him credits from JT Kearney being dissociatively enthusiastic. So being enthusiastic despite the situation around yourself and you know, once again, I'm kinda known for being like brutally honest, so some people might actually think that that is a part of it. I want you to try to kind of create a distinction between being compassionate but not being so enthusiastic, despite the situation that it comes off as unauthentic.
Speaker 2:Well, there's that, you know. I think we use now the term toxic positivity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've never understood that, but okay.
Speaker 2:You know where it's disingenuous. You know, and you are you really in touch with what's going on inside? It is okay. Part of that self compassion is also understanding that this hurts. This, you know, not finishing for a fifth time hurt, you know, and it sucked. Now be compassionate with that emotion. You know that's okay to be. You know it's okay to feel that way and it's okay to you know, feel the weight of you know the failure, but be compassionate with it. Don't beat yourself up on this. This is the next step is okay. How do I get to that? Being kind to yourself, not beating yourself up over it? Now, that toxic positivity is. It's not truthful. You know you're lying to yourself. You say it doesn't hurt, right? You know that it hurts.
Speaker 1:So I almost kind of view this through like the caveat of as opposed to saying like, oh, it's okay, or some sort of amplified version of your awesome or whatever to it's okay. You feel like that, right, because you're being specific within the. You're being specific with recognizing that actual emotion and not being kind of complacent as opposed to or you're not being complacent and not analyzing it.
Speaker 2:Exactly, so you're not taking that emotion. I mean, if you just, oh yeah, everything was great, everything's great.
Speaker 1:That was awesome.
Speaker 2:I'm taking that emotion and I am trying to shove it up. I should shove it away for myself, but you know what it's like? That beach ball, you know at the pool, you push it down, it's got a pop pack up and that's. You know, no matter how many times you say I'm awesome, I'm awesome. Okay, you know there's some pieces that might be helpful. But let's be real, this hurts. Okay. Once you're open to the emotion and able to sit with it and be compassionate with it, that's okay. To cry about it, it's okay to cry that you didn't get it finished, that's okay. Being open to it is part of that process of compassion and acceptance. And then, all, right now, how do we go on to the next step? You know, let's look also at the common humanity. Let's come back to the present, where we are right now, what I can control, and work with my coach to figure out, okay, what are the little things that I need to work on this next season?
Speaker 1:and move forward. That's perfect. I appreciate that distinction between those two because we see a lot of athletes and also a lot of coaches and practitioners out there that will immediately jump to the it's okay, versus recognizing the emotion and putting that emotion into context and counseling around that and then moving forward Right right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's powerful when you're able to do that and that gives you, I think, that self-compassion piece, gives you the power to move forward, you know it's like yeah, you're human, right, it feels uncomfortable, it hurts when we don't finish something and it's normal too, Like I said, evolutionarily, if we wanna go there, it's like that's a normal process to feel that Okay. But the next step is you gotta learn how. What I needed differently?
Speaker 1:Yeah 100% Okay. So the next piece is diffusion from the stories. You got into it a little bit before we came up with it, so why don't you go over this piece?
Speaker 2:So, you know, diffusing from the stories that we have of ourselves. You know, do you have this story? Is that somehow you're telling yourself that you're a failure? You know, or I always suck at lead man Like Neil is just you know, or the story. Here's the story I was telling myself and it started right after COVID. For whatever reason, is that you're getting older, your VO2 max is going down, You're getting weaker. You know, this is the story Neil's telling himself.
Speaker 1:It's like wait a second wait a second.
Speaker 2:That's a story and a lot of times sometimes those stories you know and I talked about this in a coaches meeting a couple of weeks ago as those stories come from, you know us growing up, my family. You know what are you doing when you're you know you don't run 100 miles when you're 55. Notice when these stories are coming up, notice them, name them. You know, acknowledge them. You know, and we're going to start putting them over here. You know, these are the stories. How are these stories that you may have grown up with are pushing you around? Maybe they're the story you're creating right now, but let's create this next story and you know how we're going to do this differently over the next five or six years of my life. Or even, you know, I'm looking at this guy in his 90s who just did, you know, was a champion cycle cross. I'm like, yeah, that's it. How could I keep doing that? That's the story I want to create.
Speaker 1:I want to pick on one part of it that you just mentioned that I think is really powerful. It's name them. So not just kind of process it or whatever, but give it like the time I got beat up story right. Or the time that I fell off the swing story. I mean you're, you're like, what are you trying to accomplish by giving it? Or what is accomplished by giving the story a proper name or going through the exercise of saying this is the? I failed my college biochemistry test story.
Speaker 1:This is you know that's why I'm picking up on this.
Speaker 2:This is the drill sergeant story. This is the drill sergeant coming up. This is I. I was a wimp story. You know, I was a slowest runner. What happens is you start by naming it, by even writing it down, drawing a picture of it. You could draw a picture of it, you could. You know, you could put it in bubbly ledgy, and I'm not to make light of it. This is the thing that it, once you start bringing this stuff to awareness and it's right there, you're starting to diffuse from it it. Sometimes it can have less power over of you, but you got to be aware of that you. You know, if you're not aware of it, it's going to be in the background pushing you around a little bit. Once you start naming it and noticing it and giving it a name, it gives it a little bit less power. Does that make sense? Does that make sense to you A little bit? I mean yeah, yeah, yeah it's?
Speaker 1:is it through, like the compartmentalization of like, almost like putting it in a box, like I'm going to contain this story in this thing that I'm going to put a label on, and because of that whole construct, whenever it comes up that that put like, like mentally putting it in a box, to kind of disables or we keep using the word to use is probably a better word Diffuses it from like creeping out into other areas?
Speaker 2:I would use another metaphor for it Because I think I put it in a box and I'm trying to lock it in.
Speaker 2:I want to diffuse from it, I want it to go off into the atmosphere, cause what's happening right now is I'm fused with the story, I am hooked on this story, and what I'm doing by bringing it to my awareness is I am, you know, ideally. You know there's that story again and we could look at it at different angles. How is it pushing me around? You have to have this other piece too. It's like you know what that's the story. Here's where we're going to go and what we're going to create tomorrow, and focusing on this is where I love talking about our values, our goals or aspirations, what we're, what gives us meaning in life. You know what that story is pushing me around. I'm going to go over here and focus on this. You know this is where being present and you're opening up to this yeah, that's you're and diffusing from it by naming it. If you don't, if you're not aware of it pushing you around, you know I was like I always I'm like running. You know I was like, oh, there's that story pushing me around again.
Speaker 1:Well, and everybody can I, everybody can identify with those two or three key things in their life that has happened to them in the past that come into our psyche when we're out there on these long runs and races. I mean, trust me, it just happened into everybody. Every time I do a really in depth race debrief with an athlete, something like that comes up during this part of the race. I thought about this thing, that happened 10 years ago and usually it's a conversation started. So it is. That happened before. It's in every race, or 80% of the races or some or something like that where it constantly comes up. But I've never thought about the technique or the aspect of actually giving that story a name to help this diffusion process, which I think is kind of cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, write it down. You know, write it down. The more you're aware of it pushing you around, the more you're starting to become present and you're getting a 30,000 foot view of it. Yeah, there, it is there. It is moving around. Okay, it's pushing me around, I'm gonna refocus You're becoming more present and refocus on hey, what are the things I can control right now? Well, I don't have to let this story push me around. I'm gonna go back and get my gels between legs and then go up this. Oh you know it's like yeah.
Speaker 1:It always comes back to getting more gels. It's getting more gels.
Speaker 2:More ice cakes, more gels.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's move on to the last piece of this, which is certainly not the final piece, right, but the last piece in this article which really resonated with me, because this is a kind of a coaching goal that I have for 2024 and beyond. There's elements of that kind of views with this coaching goal that I've had going forward and that's be open to assistance and build a team. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So it kind of goes back to that growth mindset but you know, in the, you know the research with growth mindset, if you know it's the kid who is able to go to the math teacher and go hey, can you help me with this problem? I loved when I heard my daughter do this and she did it so many times and she's really you become an advocate for yourself. And what happens? You know we've got this thing in our society. You know, and I don't know if it's just here in the US, it might be international, might be different parts of the world where I need to do this myself. You know I've got this broken leg. I'm going to fix it and you know I'm going to. You know it's that mental toughness stuff that I, you know like. You know that's going to push you around a little bit If you start opening up to that assistance and getting a coach. I got better.
Speaker 2:When I first got a coach marathoning, I was like, oh yeah, this can work. Here I'm now. I'm not now. I'm like you know, now my coach is holding me back. I'm like what do you mean? Eight hours a week, man, you know, but this is, but that's helping me, that's, you know, going to your physical therapist, bringing a crew to your race of select people, you know, finding those Pacers that you know are going to work with you and that you are able to communicate with. Well, you know, but it's bringing your team with, creating your team. If you're not able to do that, you know, yeah, when you struggle it's going to be a little bit harder, but if you open up to that team, it's.
Speaker 2:It was so powerful to see, you know, when I got into Twin Lakes and see the group of coaches there, it was. You know there's a team. You know they were just boom and so helpful and such a loving group of people. You know, to experience that and I'm not, you know, I'm not just trying to sell our coaches, but I'm just saying that was a team. You know, the my group of people that were with me, that was a team, you know. And but you got to create that to have to help develop that growth mindset, to help grow, you know.
Speaker 1:The intentional catalyst piece is, I think, something that everybody can take home, meaning you know you're not just bringing on a pacer at the last minute to like help drag you.
Speaker 1:You know a power line at the towards the end of the race or drag you around turquoise lake at the end of the race. You're bringing them in an intimate way, kind of into the entirety of the process, right Cause you're letting them know hey, you know, this is how I train, this is where I was really good in training, this is where I was really bad. Here's where I need help from you and here's how you can pick me up if I'm down and help catalyze. You know, this part of the performance or whatever that requires a lot of humility. Right To say I need help. I'm doing everything I can in this area and I still need help from you all, whoever you all is and we started mentioning the professionals, but it can also be friends, family, training partners and things like that. The humility of letting part of that go can also be kind of liberating for athletes as well, because then they know that other people kind of have their back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. Would you do that for somebody else? Of course you know, and this is the self-compassion piece you know it's part of that is, you know, this growth mindset piece. It is also bringing this compassion in. It's like, yeah, I'm gonna take care of myself by having this team, you know, and I look and communicating with the team, I mean I look at my Leadville experience and I go, okay, I even got the feedback. You didn't really communicate with us and I just kind of came in with this assumption. Oh, I got this.
Speaker 1:You know, I know what I'm doing, you know.
Speaker 2:And there was this reality. It's like no, I needed to really direct people like who is gonna be in the crew, tent who? You know? These are the gels that I need. You know, this is what we need to happen and you're in charge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, if I step back a little bit, this is kind of moving from an athletic framework to more of a professional framework and, specifically, my professional framework. This is what I mentioned earlier. This is one of the things that I'm doing. New in 2024 is I'm building a better team around each athlete, essentially, and helping all of those different people kind of coordinate themselves as a team, and it's because that it's so powerful. I mean, at the end of the day, I'm a coach. My job is to get my athletes better, have them get the finish line, accomplish their goals and things like that. And one of the things that I'm realizing is that building this team around the athletes who are all better individual professionals than I am. But I wanna make that clear from the get go People like you, Neil, people like our mutual colleague Justin Ross, who's part of this group they all do elements of their specific whatever they're offering as counsel better than I can.
Speaker 1:They're better mental coaches than I am. They can analyze blood work better than I can. They can do strength training prescription better than I can, and I'm humble enough to recognize that it's a in some in certain cases. Hey, listen, athlete X, I want this strength training coach to take over your strength training programming. I'm gonna get the heck out of the way and act as a coordinator between this person and me in order to make sure that the strength training is coordinated with the run training. And there's a lot of power in that, because all of those individual members of the team are essentially gonna be better than the sum of their parts in helping this athlete do whatever that they wanna do.
Speaker 2:Totally and looking at it as a therapist and a mental performance coach. If I get releases to talk to like a physical therapist or a doctor to go, hey, if we have this team, we're gonna be helping this athlete a lot more than just me trying to do this alone. That's gonna move that athlete forward.
Speaker 1:Oh, 100%, you know what. I'll just give a really simple example. I know you do this, but I actually have this experience where. So another mental skills coach, sports psychologist, justin Ross, works a couple with my athletes. He'll program not all of, but a lot of their stuff in training peaks, so specifically, so I can see it and it also gives him framework. When I see it in training peaks and I'm prescribing workouts and then I have a conversation with that athlete, I can then reinforce what Justin wanted that athlete to do.
Speaker 1:It is so immensely powerful it's almost hard to describe how impactful that reinforcement can actually be. And then you multiply that across different people physical therapist that talks to a coach, or a strength training person that talks to a mental skills coach or whatever. There's all these different spider webs that actually happen. It's not easy to coordinate. The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the harder it is to make the meal, so to speak. But when you do it right, it's just extremely impactful. And it's so hard to put into words why it actually is impactful, but we've seen it work time and time again.
Speaker 2:Oh, we see it work in healthcare when everyone's working as a team and there's different ways to do that. But I like I come from that social work background where it's we gotta do this, we gotta bring ABC and D in here to do that. I love that Justin's doing that too, and I've actually started sketching out ways to figure out how to do that myself.
Speaker 1:It's weird, cause it's not like that wasn't the intent of the delivery system. Right, it's like practitioners have kind of co-opted it into the delivery system because training peaks being the delivery system, because it's the one that the athletes kind of interface with. And you know I'm not sold, that's the ultimate end, all be all, best solution. I'm just using that as an example of when there is some at least very cursory coordination, and here the coordination is, let's be honest, it's very limited. It's me reading kind of the prescription or the feedback that Justin has had.
Speaker 2:You were paying on self-talk, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're working on motivation now.
Speaker 1:Exactly, that's exactly what it is, and that's not the same as the three of us getting on the phone and going through the entirety of the plan. But even when it's that simple you're working on self-talk, you're working on this, you're working on that it still becomes really like remarkably powerful.
Speaker 2:Summarizing it, you know, and sometimes as healthcare providers, that's all we have time for. But if you summarize it you're communicating this information. It's like now, coop knows okay, this is what we're working on. I'm gonna reinforce that, and that is immensely powerful. I learned from the PT, or the PT learns from me, that, hey, we're gonna be working on this. Ask back, you know, this is where we're going with that. Or I know, oh, now I know the prognosis here. The prognosis isn't as bad. This is. That gives me more information.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna do a whole podcast once. I flush this thing out with the like, the people, like a kind of a selection of the people that I'm putting in this team to go like peel the curtain back on. This is how we do it. This is where it works really well. This is where we kind of struggle, things like that. That's awesome. Just like with everything else I've done, I'm just gonna peel the curtain back. Here's the model that we're using. I think it's gonna be awesome, but it fits. Once again, we didn't coordinate on this in advance it fits right in line with this, even if you don't have all of those resources available to you, right? You don't have to be a high level athlete to bring in a team of friends, family members, things like that that have impacted you, training partners and things like that. That can actually be extremely impactful.
Speaker 2:Huge, absolutely, you know, absolutely. Yeah, I can go on about that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we've gone through it and, like I said, I'm gonna link up the article and the show notes. But to wrap things up, neil, I kind of wanna like lean on your personal experience a little bit. What are you gonna do next year? You've kind of gone through this process. You're an experienced endurance athlete. Like, where are you sitting with all of this?
Speaker 2:What am I gonna do next year? I'm putting you on the spot with this. Is my wife listening?
Speaker 1:I don't know if she tunes in or not.
Speaker 2:So I signed up for lead challenge this year and we are approaching it a little bit differently and we're tackling a little bit more. As we know, as we age, we do need a little bit more VO2 max work, and we're tackling that a little bit more power early on. I'm already noticing significant improvements from where I was a couple of months ago, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:So there's some training adjustment, that's one part of it. Right, You're taking the feedback and you're like, okay, this is the training adjustment I'm gonna make. This is the training adjustment.
Speaker 2:And then I look seriously at my crew. I love the people that I worked with, but I'm like, okay, here's the learning experience, you've gotta communicate. And I have a buddy. Hopefully now, if he gets an alleged well, it's a different story, but he's trying to get into the lottery. But if he doesn't, then he's gonna be crewing me and he's an extremely experienced athlete and he's the one who got me into this initially and he was been excited. You never asked me as well. I'm sorry, you were always doing something, but he's gonna be working with me. My wife has also asked to work with me again If she's not busy. Our daughter runs cross country. That might be a weekend for cross country, but I know he's there and I know I've gotta communicate with that crew.
Speaker 2:Also, again, going back to the training, there's a strength training component that, yep, I gotta hit this. This is serious. This is not something I gotta put aside and I think, maybe, working on my own mental skills, I teach it and I practice it, but I gotta practice a little bit more here. And the other advantage I have is I've had changes in my work situation, so I have some a different free time and then I could actually go and get to the trails a bit more and actually get on the technical sections on the mountain bike and work a little bit more. Maybe take that Friday off and go and train up in Leadville. So there's these other components that are like, oh yeah. And then this also acknowledging this is the compassion side is I also acknowledge is that last year I got a lot going on.
Speaker 2:I'm a therapist a mental performance coach, a coach for CTS, and then I have a family and I'm doing my own training for Lead Challenge, which requires a lot of time. Where do you find the hours in the day to do that? And as I look back I'm like how did I do that?
Speaker 1:But do your reflection of the athletes that you work with man like all that? Like not all, but the vast majority of athletes that you work with. That's the blueprint.
Speaker 2:That's the blueprint and that gives me a lot of you know able to go okay, how do we structure this differently for you? You know how do I? You know, okay, let's, but let's have the compassion If you're not able to get that work done on, how do we and I'm educating my athletes how do we adapt this workout? You know that we're doing so. You come into this and go okay, I don't have time for this hour and a half, but how could I adapt this a little differently? And you know, without you know a thousand texts or emails, you know, which I may not be able to respond to in that moment. And so what do we? How do we adapt and how do we grow?
Speaker 2:And that for me, is a super power too. For me as a coach and as me as an athlete is like, okay, I'm getting into this workout, what is the purpose of this workout? Why am I doing this? Okay, how could I get this and maybe kind of shorten this up or move things around here? You know, if I need to do that, and that's I like that. It's proving powerful. You know people are like oh, you mean, I don't have to do four hours today. You know, on top of every. You know mowing the lawn and taking care of the.
Speaker 1:You know it's like yeah, well, be able to move it to Sunday. You get it, you get it, you get it.
Speaker 2:Let's look at it.
Speaker 1:It sounds like you're fighting like the personal battle, right, the personal battle of you finishing lead challenge on all fronts. Right, you've got the training side. You recognize there's some training things that you're doing both from a structural standpoint, but also your life is freeing up. You are working on your own mental skills. I have a quick question Is it the same in the mental skills and the therapy world, where the people that are the practitioners are the worst at taking their own advice? Cause that's the same in coaching when are you, and you know our coaches we're the worst at taking our own advice. Is it the same in that world I am getting better at it.
Speaker 2:Okay, I guess I mean it is. You know, you have a lot of people coming into these both these fields mental performance or psychotherapy because they had run into their own stuff. And, yeah, you probably have a thousand people talking about mindfulness and have never practiced or don't practice mindfulness like they talk about it, you know, and it's like oh, you gotta practice these skills.
Speaker 1:Some of the coaches are the worst. Yeah, that's another story. Okay so, and then that's the second front mental skills. And a third piece was crew. Right, you're reinforcing the people that you're bringing on to the actual crew. That's not only supporting you during the race, but also supporting you day to day?
Speaker 2:It seems like yeah yeah, and you know I mean you look at it too. Also, the coaching perspective and who I you know may be periphery from that crew is we've been working together for a year now and it's like, oh, now he really kind of gets an idea where I'm at.
Speaker 2:And this is what I'm finding out as a coach, having worked with athletes for almost two years. It's like, now that I, we've been working together, we've got this rapport, we got this relationship, we kind of know where we're going. You know, and that is so powerful. You know, when you start working with someone for over, you know, three months, you know it's like where you know, hey, we're coaching for this race. It's more than that. If you could work with someone for over a year, that's where you get a lot out of that.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really big thing in both coaching and crewing athletes for races is the consistency, and that it takes 12 months to really drill that in.
Speaker 1:In fact I've I mean, you've heard me tell this to our younger coaches all the time is you kind of make your, you kind of earn your keep after year two, three and four, now year one, you can kind of do anything as long as you don't screw it up, and you're usually going to get an athlete better.
Speaker 1:But it's looking at year one what worked and what didn't work. This is why training history is so important. And building off of that for years two, three and four, that's the real skill. That's where real coaching skill kind of comes into play. And the similar thing is true with, with the crewing side of things, where, if you know so and so is going to be there and they're going to be able to figure it out, you know, it doesn't matter what's going on there, just because they know you. That's a really. That's a really powerful. That's a really powerful ergogenic aid. As I described it in our recent coaching conference. It's a really powerful ergogenic aid that athletes can actually put out on the race course is having the right people in their crew so that they can just essentially trust them to not only execute the plan that they made but also deviate from the plan whenever it's necessary.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah, I mean it's all of it comes together. I mean, you know, I'm just kind of thinking about, I was thinking about, I've been thinking about what happens, you know, at that wind field side where you don't have a crew, where you don't have a pacer anymore, and that is like how do you? You got to be able to mentally prepare for your, you know, 50 miles in, I got 50 miles to go. How you got to have that? Okay, if I don't have crew here, I don't have that. Okay, let's work on our minds to prepare for that moment so you can rally.
Speaker 1:I think that's one of. I mean just speaking to Leadville specifically and not to get too ingrained within Leadville, but they're learning lessons for this outside of that race.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They changed the wind field aid station to just being a aid station, versus one that crews can come out and one that pacers can come out to. And for the people that the listeners out there that aren't familiar with, the Leadville Trial 100, the Almbach course, the three aid stations that are in question are Twin Lakes Outbound, which is about mile 40. The Windfield turnaround aid station, which is mile 50. And then you come back to the Twin Lakes aid station again, which is about mile 60. I can't remember. The exact mileage is off the top of my head, 63.2.
Speaker 2:Yeah, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:My point with that is is at one point you could get crew and a pacer at Windfield Typical for most ultramarathons Halfway point pick up your crew or you pick up your pacer and then you come back over Hope Pass.
Speaker 1:But when they changed it to Twin Lakes which they did for very good reasons I'm not, you know, dismissing the reasons that they needed to actually change that aid station it dramatically altered the kind of the conditions of the race, because now you have literally the hardest section of the race, which is about 20 miles, the longest section of the race, paired with the section where you're not going to see your crew again.
Speaker 1:So you go up and over Hope Pass, which is the biggest climb, you turn around and then you go up and over Hope Pass again, which is the biggest climb again, and you come back and see your crew and it's a big period of time that you don't see and there's a lot of people out on the course but you don't see the people that are actually there to support you. And I think that dramatically altered kind of the dynamics of the race, especially for the less experienced runners, which Leadville actually gets a lot of, and that's a hard thing to manage to be out there for eight hours over a really big mountain pass, in the middle of the race, when you're already fatigued, without a lot of comfort, without a lot of people to like help and comfort you, you kind of you, have to be self-reliant. I guess is what I'm saying. It's way different than it was before.
Speaker 2:So self-reliant, in not just that physical sense but that mental sense of being able to okay these. You know what's pushing me around right now. Let's, you know, let's focus on the things that I can control, which is, you know, my attitude. I could use myself, talk strategies I could get, I could work in becoming more present with where I'm at right now.
Speaker 1:You know, the rocks and the altitude and the terrain are pushing you around like literally.
Speaker 2:The rocks, altitude, everything. Because that well, that impacts your psychological state, your mental state, is the altitude. Lack of oxygen to your brain, that's going to lack of food, you know, as you're getting back to those survival skills. But you know, if you're able to manage that and the mental skills, the mental piece of that's where that's going to help you tremendously 100%.
Speaker 1:Alright, neil, we're going to let you go. Man, this is fascinating. I'm going to leave links in the show notes to the article and also to your website, but is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with Like any kind of like last nuggets of wisdom as they're navigating this time frame right now?
Speaker 2:Start now practicing this stuff. Start now, you know, give yourself the compassion. You know. If you just finish a race, it's okay to grieve it. You know it's okay to grieve it. You know. Give yourself the 24 hours, 36 hours. I'm not going to give you a timeline, you know, but grieve it. Yeah, put closure on it. Start refocusing on what you learned and putting that into action right now. Start working on your mental skills right now. I'll plug my course, which is starting January 24th, and we're going to just I've introduced three individual coaching sessions for athletes on top of the webinar. It's not necessarily it's a webinar, it's a dialogue, you know it's. You know we're going to be working together as a team and then I will work with people individually to kind of help prepare their mental skills for the race season.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, man. I'll make sure we point people in that right direction all in the show. No, it's Neil. Once again, thanks for coming out the pot, coming on the podcast. I've always appreciated your counsel and your perspective on these things.
Speaker 2:No worries. Thank you, sir, I appreciate it had fun.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Neil for coming on the podcast today. As I mentioned during the intro, he has a wonderful way with words and explaining things.
Speaker 1:I hope that a lot of the messages that we went through during the course of this podcast about how to manage failure resonates with you, irrespective of if you have experienced this in the past or you're currently kind of managing it and figuring out how to go forward. Links will be in the show notes to Neil's work, as well as anything else that we that we mentioned in the podcast. If you think that Neil or any one of our other CTS coaches would be the right fit for you, for you preparing for your goals in 2024, hit me up on social media. I would love to connect you with one of our coaches, or you can just go to our website, trainrightcom, and fill and fill out one of the coach consultation forums. That is actually one of the easiest ways to get started with one of our fantastic coaches. Alright, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.