There are some basic actions that we can all do right now to live more powerfully. The first step is simple. It’s a decision to accept a natural truth. It’s a decision that we can make every morning when we wake up. Many modern Americans don’t ever make this first step. We’ve built so many walls to hide behind that we’ve forgotten our truth.
Human beings each have the capacity for unbelievable physical and mental strength. Even the most high level examination of history demonstrates the strength of our blueprint. As a general matter, human lives have been epic tales of strength and endurance. Our ancestors learned to endure and thrive in practically every terrestrial habitat with only rudimentary tools. We also have billions of examples today of people in the “developing world” and in our own communities surviving great hardships and often still smiling and laughing. They might not look quite how we expect strength to look, but that’s often because they are malnourished and toiling away at the “base of the pyramid” to support the upper levels of the pyramid.
We don’t even need to spend our lives living in caves and hunting mammoths in the ice or to live in poverty to start realizing some of our own strength potential in a substantial way. Among those of us with the privilege of modern affluence there are plenty of inspiring examples of people claiming their strength. Here are a few examples that have made the news in recent years:
Ross Edgley swam 2,000 miles around Great Britain in 157 days in 2018. (I really love this guy, by the way. He has also completed an Olympic distance triathlon carrying a 100 lb. tree and has run a marathon pulling a car.)
Wim Hof, the Dutch “Iceman” has climbed to 24,500 feet on Mt. Everest in nothing but shorts and open-toed sandals.
Colin O’Brady and Louis Rudd each crossed Antarctica solo and unassisted in 2018 in 54 and 56 days, respectively. They were dragging sleds that weighed 375 lbs and 330 lbs to start, respectively.
Scottish endurance cyclist (and 37 year old mother with a full time job) Jenny Graham rode her bicycle around the globe in 124 days in 2018.
As incredible as these feats are, equally inspiring is that these athletes are far from alone in demonstrating jaw-dropping strength. Wild feats of strength are performed all the time, and I just picked a few relatively recent headlines that impressed me and illustrate the point particularly well. Other than Ross (who does admittedly look a bit like a comic book hero), the people in these examples all appear to be fairly ordinary mortals. And when I read about their stories, none of these athletes really seem like they have some sort of outlier genetic gift that allows them to do things other people can’t.
As a lifelong student of both history and strength training, it is my understanding that such types of feats are simply within the general capability of the human body, mind, and spirit. It is only in privileged modern lives that we are really starting to fall dramatically short of our personal capabilities for physical and mental strength. As ultramarathons have increased roughly tenfold worldwide in the last decade, normal people with jobs and families everywhere are beginning to understand the truth of how far their bodies and minds can go with a bit of intent, training, and adaptation. I’ve experienced my own little glimpse into human endurance capability when I spent eight years competing in 24 hour solo mountain bike races. What really stands out to me in this experience is that a group of non-professional athletes can pedal at a fairly swift pace for 24 hours straight without needing to stop for more than a few minutes here and there to hit the port-a-potties, lube our bike chains, clean and grease our asses, and change our bike shorts.
Such mass entry ultra endurance events appear to only scratch the surface of an ordinary human’s endurance potential. One unusual event that has me wondering about the actual meaning of limits is the Self Transcendence 3100. In this year’s event, seven people who are relatively unknown and who are not professional athletes, aged 40 to 52, each ran 3100 miles in the course of 52 days around the same New York City block repeatedly (that’s an average of at least 59.6 miles per day). I don’t know that it is healthy for anyone to run this much - I’ll leave that question to some open-minded doctors and physical therapists. I imagine that it may be quite risky from an injury perspective but it seems that the participants are willing to break their bodies to pursue some spiritual goals. (To be fair, I note that none of the starters actually dropped out of the race.) I highlight this race merely to raise the question of whether a “limit” might simply be a measure of how far each of us is willing to go. Ross Edgley in particular raises the same question with his epic swim.
The point of all these examples is that no generally healthy person should ever feel like they lack the potential to be mentally and physically tough enough to realize practically any inspiration. It is of course true that there are differences in our natural genetic strengths and abilities but focusing on relative differences should not overshadow our shared truth as the descendents of extremely tough survivors. People like Ross Edgley are truly inspiring because they have come quite far in realizing certain of our natural gifts as human beings. Rather than just be impressed that he can swim around Great Britain, we can celebrate that as a species we can swim around Great Britain. We are prone to over-complicating matters on our path back to our strength (seeking the “optimal” workouts, the best fitness gadgets, or some “superfoods”), but connecting with our strength is in a way simply a matter of claiming our birthright and adopting some affirming habits.
1. Start today by adopting an identity of strength. Consider your ancestors and what they endured. Think about what people who really test themselves today manage to do. You were born to be strong because you are human. This natural strength will manifest as you wash away limitations with regular habits of strength.
2. If you are struggling with this first step, there could be a number of reasons:
We might find ourselves focusing on a current incapability to act in strength. Perhaps our bodies and minds are not currently well conditioned. Recognize that this is just a temporary state of underdevelopment. Particularly in modern life, all of us need continuing work in this area. What matters for the first step is that we believe in human potential.
We might be discouraged with ourselves for a past inability to maintain strong habits or for giving up in the past when things have become difficult. This may have led to certain feelings of weakness infiltrating our identity. This is a fairly common but rather dysfunctional approach to framing reality, one that can have devastating consequences. We can reboot our minds starting with the truth of human potential. Connecting with our strengths involves a set of skills and we can forgive ourselves for not learning them earlier. In modern life, most of us haven’t really been taught many of these skills and it’s never too late to learn. We often need to keep reminding ourselves of this as we work on different strengths that we have not yet developed. I am personally in very new territory and I think about this every day.
We might have a limited concept of strength based on what we have learned in the past about strength by our culture, our families of origin, our teachers, etc. We might be blocked by certain beliefs about our relative strength. We’ll discuss this in a future blog post but for now let’s remind ourselves that strength is holistic and manifests in many different ways. Some of the most powerful forces of nature are tiny quiet ones. If the bridge to believing in our own personal strength is too far it could be time to shatter our beliefs about strength.
3. Consider your ancestors and loved ones who have passed. Honor them by seizing the human opportunity to live strongly.
4. This is not just a feel good self-talk exercise. Affirm your identity of strength by going to train today. A trail run, a bike ride, a gym workout… for right now, whatever. Let’s just make sure the thoughts are linked to actions.
5. This is not a one-time exercise. We adopt our identity of strength every day when we wake up.
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