Get A Mentor
If you want to be a better athlete, join a group, recommends Peter Bales, long distance runner and first South African to swim the English Channel. “Everybody helps one another and you can always get very useful advice from groups like that.” One of the successes of Farouk Meyer’s expanding club is its ability to unite people with a common ground. “People can relate to one another,” says Farouk, who is a runner and the founder of the biggest running club in the Western Cape.. “Find yourself someone who’s been there and done that, and learn from their mistakes,” advises David Crombie, a marathon runner who ran 3 000km along the Mekong River in three months. “We need to find mentors: someone to inspire us but we also need to discover for ourselves what is possible.” Take your time in choosing the right one though. Having done something for years doesn’t necessarily make you better at it, he explains. “Not everyone learns from experience,” he warns. “You can keep making the same mistake and get the same outcome.” Three years ago Crombie became a mentor to a brigade of running novices whom he’d invited to run the Two Oceans Half Marathon to raise funds for his charity, Home from Home. “They were morbidly obese,” he says. “They all said they were never made to run. And I said: ‘Read my lips: kak.’ What you mean to say is: ‘You can’t run a half marathon yet.’ When they finished and got their medals, a plastic surgeon could not take away the smile on their faces.”
Smash Through Your Comfort Zone
“I’ve always had this thing that if somebody else did something, I can too,” says Derrick Hill, a crossfit champion who placed second in the Masters division at the Reebok CrossFit Games 2012. “It would always sound like a challenge to me.” This – as proven by the expanding waistlines of our generation – is not a typical approach to life. Crombie explains that the difference between an attitude like Hill’s and the sedentary majority has to do with one’s essence. “It’s got nothing to do with your training, it’s your fundamental way of being in the world.” When Crombie announced his plans to do the Mekong River Run, people told him he would never be able to do it. “What they’re saying is that they would never be able to do that, by virtue of their perspective.” Ignore the intimidating numbers, Meyer says. “What I’ve realised when writing programmes, people look at a running programme, they look at the total at the end and they think, ‘I cant do this.’” When you go beyond your limits, you’re on a mission to transcend what could be considered normative performance, says Crombie. “This is a very unknown area. Most of us don’t go there. Most of us live a life where when the tough gets going, we back off.”
Up Your Game - Strategically
Like Bales’s steady, year-round swimming routine, Borg Stannius, weights pentathlete and Masters Athletic Champion, keeps a regular gym routine to maintain his strength. Usually, he’ll gym three times a week and practise throwing once a week. He is yet to buy into boutique gyms. “If you know what you’re doing you don’t need all the fancy stuff.” “You’ve got to be strong in your shoulders, arms and legs so I do special exercises to stay particularly fit in those areas.” Derrick Hill alternates the intensity of his training according to weeks. “In week one I’ll do light weights, then second week it’s a bit more intense, third week is intense and fourth week is your hardest week. My fifth week goes back to week one but a little bit harder.” For Meyer, stockpiling a base of hefty mileage is paramount in training. “Build up time on the legs,” he advises. And do it slowly. “You can’t do everything at race pace.” Meyer focuses on speed work just before a race. “It’s more important to get time and kilometres on the legs.”
Stay Injury-Free
Bales is an advocate of cross training. “Whenever I’m not swimming, I cycle,” he says. “It strengthens your legs and, mentally, I find cycling is a lot easier than swimming in cold water.” “Don’t do your sport flat-out the whole year round,” says Crombie. “Don’t try to push it because you’ll get burn-out. Don’t go chasing PBs every time – just take part. You need to have time when you’re not pushing to let the body recover. The body will reward you.” Hill says through using swimming as cross training he’s been able to dramatically improve his lung capacity. “Get in the swimming pool on your rest day,” advises Crombie. “Doing more cardiovascular training won’t do any harm, he says, and it will take off any pressure on your weight and joints.”
Fuel Up
Hill’s menu isn’t dictated by a diet. “I never gave up drinking soft drinks or eating sweets, but on average I have a fairly good eating plan and I think that’s a healthy way of doing it.” Keep your protein stocks up, though. “An absence of protein was a huge challenge on the Mekong River Run,” says Crombie. “It confirmed that if you don’t have enough nutrition, you will lose weight and your lean body mass will be cannibalised.” Also, drink when you’re thirsty, advises Crombie. “I never got dehydrated. I made sure of that. I wasn’t drinking a litre every hour, I was drinking for thirst.”
Think Counter-intuitively
One of the most significant reasons why Hill, Stannius, Bales, Meyer and Crombie can still train well beyond middle age is because they never burnt out. Once you get this mindset, it frees you up to be yourself, Crombie says. Therein lies the paradox: he can still compete today because he’s not competitive. “I’ve never tried to run a faster time, I’ve tried to run better and naturally you get better as you train more. But it was taking part that was important, that doesn’t mean I’m an underachiever.” “It should be about personal achievement as opposed to being better than someone,” says Meyer, “Whether you make it before the cut-off time of shave off five seconds of your personal best.” “I don’t like the label ‘elite’ and ‘amateur’,” says Crombie. “We’re all just individuals. You shouldn’t have to compare yourself to anyone and flagellate yourself because you’re not doing a PB. We can’t all be on the podium. Once you get that, you will run more naturally and you’ll be able to run a lot longer. I’ve never been competitive, and I’ve just run 62 marathons back-to-back.”
Pace Yourself
Stannius, who recently recovered from a back operation that kept him out of training for eight months, knows the importance of pacing yourself. “There’s a difference between what you want to do and what you’re able to do. You have to find out what you’re able to do, and then do that,” he says. “And that takes patience.” Crombie uses weightlifting to explain pacing. “If you lifted a five kilo dumbbell 20 times, it would become painful towards the end. But if you did 10, drank a coffee, came back, you’ll do 60. That’s the science of allowing the muscle to recover and stopping before you get muscle tears.” It’s the same with any discipline, he explains. “If you train really hard one day and do an easier one the next, it’s easier to recover. On the third day when you go out again, it’s recovered sufficiently to do another hard one,” he says. “It’s not debatable, that’s the way it is.” “You need to know how to run slowly,” Meyer says. “If you can’t run slowly, you’ll never be able to run properly.” “You don’t need to be a sports scientist, you just need to become a thinking athlete,” says Crombie. “‘Listen to your body’ is my catch phrase, but it means a lot. You need to know what to listen for, and you should learn that when you can’t run any further, your pace was wrong.” Stannius has fine-tuned his pace by following his own advice. “I’ve never had a coach but I’m doing alright. It’s like they say, ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it’.”
Win Your Mind Over
“If you can get the mind right, the body will follow,” insists Meyer, whose running career was largely influenced by Noakes’s emphasis on psychological fitness. It’s his first step when he starts coaching an athlete. “I spend half an hour motivating and inspiring because I need to be sure the mind is right first.” “During competitions, Stannius makes sure his mind is as calm as possible. “There’s a difference to being excited about something and being nervous. Hopefully you’re excited about something because it helps you,” he says. The long-distance swims that Bales throws himself into always test more than just his limbs and lungs. Long swims are like going into a state of meditation, he explains. Making peace with the discomfort and the fear is Bales’s strategy. “You develop a mental approach where you actually even start enjoying it. The secret of most cold water swimmers is not to try to fight it, but to invite it in.” Crombie agrees. “You need to embrace that you’re going to take it on the chin,” he says. “So when those things happen, you say: ‘Bring it on.’ You say, ‘Okay sun, so it’s 38°C and there’s no wind and there’s no shade – fantastic. That’s why I’m here. I’m here to confront those demons and to transcend them. Because that’s who I am.’” Hill has completed five Comrades Marathons and believes endurance sports have strengthened his approach to challenges. “Over those kilometres on the road you have that mental capacity that if you want to get to the end you actually have to keep going.”
Harden Up
A professor of psychology and social behaviour at Harvard, has researched the concept of a “hardy personality” and defined it as a balance of commitment, control and challenges. “You’re not born with a hardy personality, explains Crombie, who lectures in emotional intelligence. Your ability to defeat obstacles in life is directly related to one’s physical challenges, he explains. When you survive running an “up” Comrades, it offers perspective for the next difficulty in life. “Whether it’s a relationship or on a run, you can ask the question: ‘What am I dealing with? Is this Field’s Hill or is this Polly Shortts? Because I’ve been there, so bring it on .” “Build up those experiential reference points and you can take them as far as you like,” advises Crombie. “I’ve just had a few cancers. I’ve had a bone marrow transplant,” he says. “How hard can it get?”
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