Creating Brave Athletes with Lesley Paterson | Koopcast Episode 70

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is with professional coach athlete and all-around fireball hailing from the hardy hills of scotland it is leslie patterson for those of you unfamiliar with leslie she has had an illustrious career as an endurance athlete where she has won not one not two but three exterra world championships but as all of you listeners know i just don't bring on fast athletes to talk about how they have individually found success paired with leslie's athletic accomplishments comes a rich coaching history which includes working with all different types of athletes in a multitude of sports from adventure racing to running and the sport of triathlon her new book which is titled the brave athlete calm the f down and rise to the occasion which i really appreciate that title by the way that she wrote with her partner in crime simon marshall PhD is an homage to how she has approached her professional coaching and athletic career with a blend of tough love compassion and science-backed psychology and i can think of no better sport to put her psychological framework to good use than the

sport of ultra running which is rife with uncertainty anxiety and we all certainly need to calm the f down at times especially in those aid stations where things can get kind of chaotic you guys have seen it you all know this podcast does contain several four-letter words every so often which in my humble opinion enhance and brighten up the conversation and allow leslie's personality and my personality for that for that matter to really shine so don't say i didn't warn you i hope you find this podcast insightful in your journey to become a more resilient and psychologically prepared ultra runner this podcast pairs well with KoopCast number 64 with kareem ramadan KoopCast number 22 with my good friend and fellow coach adam polford and KoopCast number 14 with the incomparable dr justin ross all of which have similar themes of resilience compassion and psychological preparedness woven throughout them all right i'm going to get out of the way let's get right into it here's my conversation with the fireball herself leslie patterson let's get it rocking and rolling yep let's get it rocking and rolling um i kind of want to know first off like i think it it's going to be important for the listeners to understand a little bit more about the types of athletes that you work with because yep as you're aware i have mainly a ultra marathon audience and we all tend to stay in our own little silos you triathletes know that more than

anything else but once you kind of explain to listeners like like who are the types of athletes that you typically see in your practice yeah so it's it's really interesting you know um i've been coaching now for about 15 years and to be honest you know it really runs the gamut and because i've been in all sports from endurance running to endurance cycling to mountain biking to road racing to road triathlon to off-road triathlon to adventure racing so i really have done everything and and as a consequence we we coach everything um and we coach every level i'm a big believer in um supporting the community of endurance sport and by that i mean anyone that comes to the table with passion for what they do i want to coach them whether that's i just want to get off my sofa and do a 5k or whether that's i'm a professional athlete going for a world world title um and i've i've both been around and been those athletes all along the way so um yeah it really really runs a gamut and and that's what i love that's what i love about coaching every different experience possible it helps me learn and grow so what i want to know just to get into some banter before we start talking about the technical stuff you have the title of the book that you wrote is salacious and i'm going to read the whole title for the listeners it's got an f-bomb in it so if you've got kids in the car or whatever just mute it for the next like 20 or 30 seconds but i think that it's the perfect title for a lot of endurance athletes

that i know and i'm sure a lot of endurance athletes that you know so the title of the book is brave athlete calm the fuck down and i have used that phrase in my in my coaching practice particularly before races leading like not just right before the races but like leading up to races numerous times and when i saw it i was like i i want credit for that because i've used that like so many times so i'm i'm kind of assuming that this is coming from like the the subtitle of the book is kind of coming from a lot of personal experience can you give us just like a little bit of background on what the impetus for the book was yes i think it really boils down to those inner demons that you have inside those inner voices that kind of talk to you about a whole lot of nonsense um and um it's about calming those voices down right and understanding why they're there and why your brain operates in that way and telling them to calm the fuck down so you can get on and do what it is you know you can do based upon your training based upon sort of uh your passion your hopes your dreams so it's just like settle down man you know just kind of get on with it one foot in front of the other one pedal stroke in front of the other and i of course grew up in a a scottish household as you can tell from my accent no it's not texas um so or texan rather um so yeah so so it was all you know i grew up in that kind of household where my

father was very much you know don't whine don't moan don't complain just crack on and get it done um and so yeah i mean my first sport was rugby right i played with 250 boys and me um and so you just had to crack on and get it done because i love playing the sports so anybody that was making fun of me making jokes um i didn't have changing rooms to change in you know all of those things again it was just like calm down settle down just crack on and get it done so that's sort of the the the mantra behind it all um and then of course the brave heart right you know being brave enough to face your fears um because we all have them it doesn't matter what level you're competing at what it is that you're doing everyone is facing that kind of fear whatever that is so it's about being brave enough to face it overcome it and learn and grow from it i like the two i like the teeter-totter aspect of it right because it's a little bit of carrot and a little bit of stick kind of simultaneously almost right that's exactly you know and i think that's probably why i've managed to sort of be successful in my career is that my parents were very much you know crack on with a stick but at the same time their love was absolutely unconditional and there wasn't anything they wouldn't do for me so it was both tough love and and rewards so that really is a perfect combination to get out there know that if you fail you're going to pick yourself up and keep on going but there's someone there to help you do it

and and that has allowed me to excel and and my husband plays that role for me now you know as as well as my parents continuing to do so i kind of feel that there's a whole social offshoot that we could take with this in terms of no how i know you know where i'm going with this with this yeah in terms of how a lot of young and developing athletes are are coddled coddled you can say it yeah i mean yeah coddled they're coddled absolutely 100 you know it's a everyone's a winner or let's say a move away from competitiveness or um you know i think there's just because they've grown up in this world of comparison through social media they have at their fingertips people that have achieved such success whether that's athletes business people people that are famous um and they assume that that it's easy that it just happens overnight that they can just do it and they don't understand or they maybe haven't recognized the sheer hard work that it takes to get there the amount of failure that it takes to get there and um yeah i think i think parents are coddling their children and as a consequence they're not dealing with adversity and it's only really through adversity that we learn and we grow i mean truly well this leads into one of the themes that i've heard you speak about a lot and one of the themes in the book as well and this is this theme of resiliency and right it's something that it gets a lot of lip service particularly in the endurance space because we think we're resilient athletes you know

we go and we do tough things and the endurance events are hard and there's a certain amount of grit which is another buzzword that kind of gets thrown around a lot but as it turns out like it doesn't just happen by talking about it it's a it's a developed skill and there's a lot of neurobiology behind how you can actually develop resiliency correct oh big time and it's you know it kind of boils down to a part of your brain that's just so it's like a sausage and it's behind your eyes called the anterior cingulate cortex and that um it tells us it's it's about your perception of um pain basically both emotional and physical and so that actually changes and grows um if you have dealt with adversity and as a consequence it allows you to deal with more moving forward and in fact there were some amazing studies done on professional cyclists and they found that um the top percent of of professional cyclists uh had actually had um you know some sort of abusive uh experiences in their background and their accs were actually larger and denser and denser in size and so of course you know there's a lot of kind of um uh caveats to that but what that suggests is that if you do have adversity that that will grow it the neuroplasticity will help you change your brain and as a consequence cope with more in the future so you know my my thing has always been as an athlete what is the most challenging

a session i can do and i'm not just talking physiologically based i'm talking mentally based as well and i'm going to go out and i'm going to try it and i'm going to do it and and and that's going to work that part of my brain and it might be as simple as i'm going to do a running race on the sunday where um everybody knows me everybody is expecting me to win and the day before i go out and run a you know ride 100 miles with with a group ride with a massive stress score because i want to show up to that line compromised to put myself on the back foot and to be able to cope with that um and that is resiliency um and there's so many different ways that you can create that um artificially to help you so that on race day or event day you feel like you've covered all bases and you feel like you have teflon on the outside because you really know how to to deal with anything that comes your way here's the balance point with that though because we hear we hear a lot in sports science and in coaching philosophy that whenever you're working out hard or you're scheduling some sort of hard session you want to leave a little bit on the table you don't want to dig into the very deepest deep parts of the well because of the physical there are the potential physical consequences of that yep and the listeners will remember i had a i had a podcast uh maybe about a year ago now that i'm actually

remembering it because it's one of the last podcasts that i recorded in person it was before the whole covet thing went down uh with one of our coaches adam polford who i have a a lot of respect for and we talked about how to how to kind of create resilient athletes and this is one of the themes that kept revolving around that discussion is how do we balance giving the athletes something that's extremely challenging in order to help foster this resiliency right and how to not just completely bury them because that's easy right any coach can just bury athletes and things like that how do you look how do you look at that yeah i think there's so many things that you need to to put on the table to assess right we have wonderful tools now to see where someone's physiology is at any given time and whether that's you you know you're utilizing training peaks and data or hrv or you know maybe you've got an ordering or you're using whoop or any one of these metrics just to track where someone someone's physiology is and you can play with that right and so as long as you're aware of of how an athlete is responding and where they're at from a physical state then you can start manipulating some other factors to really you know have a day where you're saying okay this this athlete is is is somewhat fresh or or they're at this point of fatigue let's just have a really tough session where we're going to push them to the edge but know that they've got a recovery period after that or they're fresh going into it and then there's other ways to create resiliency it might not be that it's just purely physiologically physiologically based right it might be the the the type of activity if it's an

activity that they don't like that they've shied away from in the past so it's very emotionally demanding for them it might be the group that they're around you know there's a stigma attached to it there's a competitor that's out there that always does this group ride and they've always been scared of it you know there's so many other ways to create resiliency right um it doesn't have to be just physiologically so yeah i think it's just kind of taking all of those uh parameters in mind and then knowing your athlete knowing the things that that kind of make them tick the things that they love the things that they hate knowing on that scale how to balance all of those things and and it's like those little dials right and work through that to create that resiliency and so for the listeners out there that not everybody's coached right and there's there's some coaches that are listening to this podcast if there's a good but predominantly it's going to be a lot of self-directed and self-coached athletes for the people that are out there that are doing this self-direction they're trying to determine okay i need to do this tomorrow and this long run on this next day and these intervals on the day after that what are like some of the specific skills that they can take underneath that whole umbrella of training if they feel that they need to like reinforce their their resiliency for whatever reason yes i think it's being self-aware and a lot of people are not self-aware and by that i mean knowing how you tick emotionally and physically so the things that um create a lot of stress in you

emotionally and physically and writing those things down and being very very aware of them so i know the types of sessions that stress me emotionally and the types of sessions that stress me physically and then if i combine them together on any given day that's going to be a high score right so what is that for you by the way i want to you're a good athlete and i want to hear this i want to hear this specifically from you what is it yep so the hardest session i would say for me that i get the most nervous about is our group rides with a lot of guys a lot of big guys that are you know first cat first cat second cat riders on the flat because i am very small and very light and i don't like the flat i don't like it i don't like riding it i get frustrated i love the mountains i love the hills so there's a huge you know i hate those big open roads or windy um yeah so i hate that and there's a specific group right here in san diego that's pretty famous and it's called the the camp pendleton ride and it gets on the camp pendleton base and there's a lot of big hitters i mean some tour de france riders have shown up on it um and uh and and sorry i remember riding with chris horner on it one day and um yeah so i really have to get myself up for that you know emotionally and physically to be ready to be able to hang the wheel because the thing about it is is you know that session for me as well as a real it comes generally at the point of my season where i'm prepping for a big race and that's a real critical session and if i miss it i feel like i've missed a really critical piece of the preparation

and if i get dropped which can happen within 10 minutes i feel like my whole session's gone so i get so anxious about i'm like oh i need to be in the right position if i get dropped if there's a crosswind if someone launches an attack and i can't steal that's it my ride's over my ride's over and i've got to try and recreate that my own and uh you know so you know i could almost hear your training log coming out as you're speaking about this this is like i think one of the things that the athletes that are listening can take away from this is a training log that is not solely representative of the mileage and in trail running we talk about vertical gain vertical loss a lot yeah heart rate paces a training log that encompasses more than the data that can be extracted from your watch is extremely valuable so so valuable and i think that you know training peaks or other other systems either haven't quite got a good metrics for that yet they haven't got a good system other than you just log down your comments and that's a very difficult thing to track um but it is important you can look back at phases where things were going well and you can look at the comments that you had or you know i would even say to athletes what's really important is to have a a diary of what went on in your personal life and you know whether that's you know a stressful time with your partner whether your kid is sick whether you know your job is really stressful because they have that has such a massive impact on on on the stress on your body and we just don't take that into consideration yeah here here's a here's a trick that i use uh with the athletes that i have if i'm trying to figure out

if i haven't been working with an athlete for a long period of time i'm just trying to like figure out what is like emotionally challenging for them is i just go back and i search the training by keyword and training peaks will let you do that you can search all of the comments by good or bad or terrible or whatever it is you know sluggish flat is a is a word that a lot of runners use i felt flat and you can use that if they've been keeping up with it as like little clues as to actually like actually what's going on and then you paint the picture of okay these are the sessions or these are the types of workouts just like the group ride that you described that are particularly challenging in a certain way that's really cool actually it would be nice to get some sort of a data data on that you know certain search words that you could utilize that maybe have a negative impact a you know on a person and actually have a value to that how many times that word is mentioned in their logs at what period of time and that would be kind of interesting i'm gonna ping our mutual friend uh dirk friel over at training peaks now we're gonna get a word cloud we're gonna get a word cloud going that would be great actually that would be great i'm gonna pile more work on dirk sorry about that man he's a good friend of both of ours oh cool he's a great guy um okay so paired with resiliency one of the one of the outcomes of creating a resilient athlete is that athlete is then able to cope better during really stressful times and that and i think that that stressful times even transcends athletics and that's another conversation but when we talk about rate

when we talk about races and trying to perform at an athlete's peak season after season year after year it's never perfect or very very very rarely perfect and if if you think it's perfect you're not scrutinizing things enough that's what i've always told my athletes but part of a consequence of of intentionally creating resilient athletes is they can cope through those low points in order to create outstanding performances you've had a lot of framework and themes around all of these different types of of coping skills that athletes can develop why don't we take the listeners through that for a little bit yeah so um uh gosh in terms of like coping with injury or coping with uh uh dive into that just just just everything coping with everything um yeah so that's i guess i kind of big question i'll talk about my personal experiences so um i have dealt with chronic lyme's disease as well as multiple injuries that have been just absolutely mind-blowingly awful and one of which has meant really i've not been able to run properly for about eight years which is just horrible because that was my first sport and my my absolute love and joy um and i think in all what is common across all of these coping mechanisms is getting down to both gratitude and your why so being grateful for what it is that you can do

and figuring out your why as to to why maybe what you've lost or what you're challenged with is so important to you um and i think that that certainly dealing with something like chronic lyme's disease where there's so many symptoms you're up and down all the time you never really know what's wrong with you you're going through multiple doctors it's very confusing and frustrating it's difficult to find structure um and there's a lot of unknowns which we know creates you know a lot of stress on the brain a lot of stress on the body um so it's it's finding a way to uh make those unknowns part of your growth so for me i call it my investigative health hustle whether that's with injury or health is i use a lot of the energy that i would be putting into my training that i can no longer do see and i put it towards figuring out the whys behind why i'm injured why am i sick how do i resolve this and i really dig into the weeds on a lot of that stuff i i educate myself in it i gain a lot of knowledge that hopefully i can pass on to other people um and that's been a huge part of my coping mechanism so educating and knowledge around the whys behind both why i'm doing the things i'm doing but also why has this happened to me and then how do i sort that uh how do i fix it um and with injury and illness it's you know how am i treating both the symptoms and the cause um and uh and then finding if

i am injured or sick or dealing with a tough time how do i still have a positive outlook and for me it's about um again knowing my why behind what i'm doing so for endurance sport it's very much about being out in nature experiencing the wilderness being out on trails being at one with my body and all of the endorphins that come from that all of the sort of mental happiness and joy that come from that um and so in order to cope in certain situations if i know that that's my key even if i can't run but say i can bike it's making sure i get out in the mountains to have that experience to really sort of nourish the soul in that way um if i am injured how can i get that that that sort of quality of emotion through something else and that's where for me i'm an artist as well i'm a screenwriter a filmmaker that's what i studied uh in school both graduate and undergraduate so that's what i find that other thing that can nourish my soul that maybe is now not i'm not able to through sport i can do that through art and for some people that might be their children for some people that might be their business um and then i think um coping with stress having a network of people around you having great friends great family everything i would say in my career as an athlete has been because of my training partners so making sure you have awesome training partners that become your soul mates because they are going

to take you through those vulnerable moments you're going to take them through their vulnerable moments and we know that we bond over vulnerability not over strength and so there's no and all you guys all your listeners will know that either there's no greater bond than your training buddy that's out there with you at 5 a.m climbing a mountain you know and you're sharing your deepest deepest most fears when you're you know at threshold heart rate i mean you know it's just it's just that that's anyway so all of those things i think they refuel our our neurochemistry and and in so many different ways yeah i think going back to your why statement um we we that got exposed a lot during covid where the what i would call the what athletes what are you training for right and they would they could answer with i'm training for the boss of marathon i'm training for this ultra run or whatever they had a hard time dealing with the uncertainty of not having those what's out on the calendar the why athletes the ones that had like strong internal whys okay i trained to make myself feel better or because it's a bigger part of my life i like my training partners as you mentioned and things like that they didn't skip as much of a beat they still had challenges don't get me wrong because the events are extremely important but they weren't affected nearly as much as the what centered athletes that all of a sudden got the rug pulled out from underneath them big time and i think that i mean that's that is a very astute point and and we've experienced that

too with all of our athletes and um i think truly to be the best athlete that you can be again you have to be self-aware and i think you have to know your why because then it boils down to focusing on the craft on the process of what you're doing and that that will that will help your what if you're only ever focused on your watch you're gonna miss the the the golden nuggets of things that you can do to to move beyond anything that you could ever have dreamt of and i think that that's what i experienced personally as an athlete i always wanted to be the best in the world i always wanted to be go to olympics or win gold medals or all the rest of it and certainly there was a point in my career where i was beating professional men consistently and having performances i just couldn't ever have dreamed of and neither could simon i mean he was just like what and it was because i focused on the process and i got into the nitty-gritty of the why behind what it is that i do and if it's purely about the win i just don't think you're gonna have longevity and you've got to and that's uncomfortable for people to drill into that isn't it i mean because you're getting into some of your deeper emotions and and you know uh some of my why boils down to you know my relationship with my father you know because it's it's you know i wanted to to have this

perfection uh so that i could be special and i wanted to be special because i was the fourth child of a family that just kind of was given all the hand-me-downs and you you just can nothing is ever really good enough in scotland you know i mean it's always about what you haven't done that's the general attitude so you know i think if you really drill down into some of that deeper psychology of it it's it's fascinating and it can enlighten you as to how to better proceed and get the most out of yourself 100 um i want to pivot a little bit to something that's it's not unique to ultra running which is which is my audience but i think that it's definitely heightened or it's got a little bit of a magnifying glass on and ultra running and this is this aspect of how uncertainty can create anxiety and we i know it's a loaded topic right yeah we we see we see this play out in ultra running in a couple of different in a couple of different fashion in a couple different fashions so i'm going to kind of set this up for you and then let you let you take it over the first of which is during training and it typically happens with first time ultra runners they're running their first 50 or their first 100 in particular and there's a lot of uncertainty between the length of their longest long run and the length of the race so they're going to go out and do a 50 mile long run and their race is 100 miles it's double right double that's a lot of uncertainty and when you think about it from a duration standpoint it's even bigger than

that right because you're slowing down you're running that 50 and training a little bit faster and on and on and on and that uncertainty creates anxiety within the training process and the way that it revealed the way that anxiety is really revealed is this obsession about what the longest long run actually is is it going to be 45 miles is it 47 miles is 100k is it you know whatever so that's the first situation the second way that this that this anxiety and uncertainty unfolds is actually out on the race course so same situation first time you know ultra marathoner they get to mile 60 of 100 they don't know what the next 40 miles is they've never been there before they feel like crap they sit down in an aid station and they think like i can't i can't imagine going another 40 miles and they get all wrapped up in the uncertainty of the situation can they actually handle it and they either underperform or drop out or on and on and on and on and on i want to hear what you have to say about this because you you've mentioned this you know this concept of a gas pedal and a brake pedal before and how athletes can kind of cope with this uncertainty element which is so prevalent in ultra marathon running yeah you know i think uncertainty you know i mean it actually changes the telomeres um at the end of our chromosomes right so it actually damages uh our our our chromosomes right so it has a profound impact but i think it kind of boils down to dopamine pathways and um so much

of uncertainty um you know halts that dopamine pathway and we know that dopamine what it does is it fuels motivation to want to continue so if you don't create your own dopamine pathway in times of uncertainty you're going to be screwed um you know so and and ultimately that's about segmenting it's really pretty simple as as complex as it is you know the tools to help it are somewhat simple um so and and by that i mean you've got to really anticipate what might happen and write that list of things that might happen in your brain and your body do your research understand that talk to other people that have experienced it do your homework about the most common things that happen in that last 20 30 miles of 100 miler and write out what you think might happen to you and go down the path of imagining it happening and how you would cope with it and come up with a strategy for every potential outcome that might happen and um and and simon does this with his his athletes um i think it's like the chess board of chess pieces and he's like i want you to to literally write out a hundred things you might think might happen in that in that last 20 miles and then i want you to come up with a potential solution to that and we're going to walk through

and talk every potential outcome and that that just takes away a lot of that uncertainty because you have a plan for every eventuality um and then and then it's simply segmenting it never ever thinking about oh my god i've got another 40 miles to go you have to think about what are the reward systems that i can put in in place to ensure that i get a dopamine hit every you know when you're starting out probably every hour once you get on into sort of 12 14 16 hours of of of running uh running walking then you know it's got to be every 30 minutes or every 20 minutes now is it a piece of food is it a piece of music can you listen to music is it a podcast is it your your um a pacing partner is it you know you get to change your socks and shoes is it you know any one of these things but you have to have a list you have to write it out all of the things you know will give you a reward and that's where you start to insert them and you have a stopwatch on it and that's how you continue that motivation so you never think about the full distance you break it down like that and so i think a couple of those strategies are really important and then you know taking it away from mileage again the resiliency piece you know what we do a lot of with our athletes is is stressing them in different ways right so saying okay i'm gonna have you go out and do your longest run after you've stayed up all night for example yeah you know so you're doing it on no sleep but you know your longest run might only

be able to be 40 miles yeah um or we're saying you're going to do that entire long run with nobody else no stimulation um you know you know so there's so many different ways that you can actually bring about that potential stress that you might have and recreate that without it just being pure mileage i want to go back to the chessboard that you mentioned earlier because i i find this i find this aspect fascinating as a tool to deal with the unknown and the the way that you're kind of proposing is is if you're going into this unknown situation and i actually remember and you probably remember this from your adventure racing days i remember talking to a lot of adventure racers they would do this in a form of kind of contingency planning like let's go through all the things that could go wrong exactly and how are we going to get ourselves out of that situation and one of the things that i took from from consulting with all these adventure racers and trying to make the parallel into into the ultra running world is that you can always figure out the solution to something when you're sitting there at your desk in a conference room with a group of people and the stress of the race isn't clouding your judgment right you can do that in that situation it's hard to translate it to the field but if you don't do it in the calm situation how are you ever going to be able to translate that into the field of play when you do have all those complicating factors 100 and i think people are lazy right they think their brain is just gonna open and figure it out yeah i'm just gonna figure it out and they

also don't see your brain as being something that you can train or you know manipulate or be prepared with the only look at you know the data the numbers the mileage i mean runners especially right mile you know minute mile pace you know kilometer per hour pace i mean you know how many feet of a cent you know all this kind of stuff it's just you know again we're sort of obsessed with the numbers right without really prepping maybe for everything that might go on and so there's actually a really interesting strategy that some in fact some mountain bikers were using for a while to deal with technical terrain when they were tired they'd have to do a puzzle they'd have to actually use another piece of their brain right and really sort of drill down when they're tired and they have that quite a lot i did quite a lot of the high-tech series way back when and you know we would have some puzzles and bits and bobs that we had to to try and uh do during our activities um so so you can put that in your training you know um you can force yourself to have to do a math problem um you know halfway through a really tough workout yeah um one of the things uh one of the things that i actually have have my athletes do is related to this is i have them go through just like you mentioned with the chessboard what are all these things that could go wrong and it's your standard list of like four or five things my quads are shot i have blisters i i can't keep anything down i'm way behind on my splits and my

headlamp ran out of batteries like those five things and i say okay listen let's imagine that all five of those happen all at the same time right all at the same time what are you going to do to get yourself out of it and usually once again they can list through okay first i'm going to do this and then i'm going to do this and then it is okay now let's take that into a visualization exercise let's get into a meditative setting or some sort of mindfulness setting or whatever whether you want to do it actively or passively that's another conversation but go ahead and mentally rehearse how how you would actually get yourself out of that situation and i found that the athletes that do that almost all the time they're never in that bad of a situation normally you can kind of conjure up the worst you know artificially as opposed to what actually happens so let's go let's say they get through three they are they actually get to experience three out of the five deleterious things that they that they conjured up like oh no problem i'm totally going to solve this this is easy because i've gone through it i've kind of gone through it in training yeah yeah no i mean that's so so true and i think probably uh what is even harder to predict is how you're going to cope mentally what are going to be the demons in the head that are going to face you when the going gets tough and so um certainly in our book we talk about this but we talk about the chimp which is essentially your limbic system right um and that's like the sort of tantruming child um that is is most worried about

embarrassment inadequacy uh you know judgment uh all of those kinds of things and so i think that what we really try and get our athletes to do is to get to know their chimp so what are those deepest darkest thoughts that might come out at those times and when you are familiar with that it's no longer shocking and it's not something that you can just brush aside because we know from a a neurochemistry a neurochemical perspective that your your limbic system is five times stronger than your frontal cortex so your professor brain and let's let's back up just one second before we let's paint the picture because we're going to get into this and i don't want the like listeners to get lost you've given this a lot and i've heard you talk about this a lot but the chimp brain the professor brain and the computer brain we can go by then we can go and talk about the chimp brain a little bit more and kind of dive down that rabbit hole but let's set that up first okay so so i'm i'm probably going to butcher this just because this is more size field than it is mine because i'm not a a scientist he's a PhD and all the rest of it but essentially it's the parts of our brain that were developed uh across thousands of millions of years and the um the limbic system is is is also known is kind of like your lizard brain your chimp brain and that was formed in the earliest times and so it's most concerned with protecting you from danger right so it's your urges essentially and then you have your frontal cortex which is your professor brain

with which deals with facts and logic and then you have your computer brain which is more about sort of your memories and what you have experienced in the past um and so and so all of those parts of your brain this is very i'm sort of explaining this i'm probably good you're good that was great okay okay okay okay um and they all sort of work simultaneously right but what we do know is that when athletes when people in general have thoughts or feelings that they don't want generally they've been hijacked by their chimp right and your chimp just wants to protect you and it doesn't want to feel an ag inadequate embarrassed or you know or judged right so or left or or or um uh pushed aside from the group right because in the past of course if you weren't part of your your your group if you're inadequate you could die and so all of those are still left over from from those millions of years ago so um you know because this frontal cortex your facts and logic that that say hey listen this doesn't matter it's only a race it's only an endurance race what you know i'm not it's not life or death well sometimes it might be if you're 85 miles into a hundred miler and you're in your and your kidneys are starting to you know give up but um but uh but largely it's not and so and yet your limbic system is that much more powerful so how do we kind of wrangle that in uh to to stop that fight from happening because a lot of the thoughts and feelings that we have that we don't want is about that fight

between those two brains um and so that's definitely what we jump into in our in our book we sort of well at least simon lays out that brain mental model and then a lot of the the things that we deal with in the book or issues that we have with our athletes we come back to that brain mental model as kind of the the jumping off point to deal with issues and one of the techniques that to deal with your chimp brain that's going out of control that i found fascinating is this is this concept that you need to purge it and completely let it run dry which is on the surface and when listeners hear this they're going to think it's the most counterintuitive strategy ever contrived but i have seen people unbeknownst to them do this out on the trail and it's surprisingly effective so let's talk about that for a little bit well you know it's fascinating because it actually changes the neurochemistry in your brain it actually reduces cortisol on a bunch of hormones in your limbic system um because when you purge that that's the effect that it has right so all of those inner demons all of those things that are really building up and building up to create this anxiety and frustration when you're out there in the moment is because of that limbic system response right so if we get it out and we purge it and it has to be for you know a decent amount of time you know 90 seconds or more even two minutes and out loud is better um then then we know that it actually calms the blood flow to that part of the brain and it's

almost like uh you know when you're having a massive argument with with your partner with a child and you you kind of cry your way out the other side to the point at which you're exhausted it's exactly the same uh principle here um and so you'll see me leading up to a big race having those moments and in the past i was like what the fuck is going on you know and the thing about it is is it would often it would often happen at the most stupidest of moments you know maybe someone someone had eaten something out of the fridge and i'm like what the fuck you know you're just like oh my goodness um you know and and the classic one for me and i realized this pretty early on in my exterra career was i had a lot of fear on the mountain bike of um of descending uh of technical descents and so uh the day before the race you know you're pre-riding a course um and i would need to pre-ride that course with someone that knew me because chances are i couldn't even bump up a curb i was so i was just rubbish rubbish absolute rubbish i'm like how the fuck am i gonna get to get through this race just total whap in the middle of the of of you know pre-riding this course and i had to be with a friend that knew me otherwise it'd be really embarrassing and then of course the next day i'd go out and absolutely nail it so um knowing what those triggers are for you knowing the types of um a dialogue that your chimp inner chimp is gonna have being familiar with that and then letting it go and letting it run dry to the point where it's not repeating itself you know when it starts to repeat itself with the same themes with

the same topics and then you know you've kind of gotten to that point where you're no longer judging it you can't you can't judge those thoughts you really have to just let them out this is silly but no no no let it go so i want to paint the pictures the paint paint the picture here for the listeners a little bit so you have you have some sort of hang up on technical descents yes part of an intentional technique that you would deploy is to have essentially a targeted temper tantrum yes around the fact that that's not a good part of your athletic game totally and you verbalize it in a very outward way you're yelling and screaming at yourself you have to have somebody that knows you that doesn't you know that can just kind of like monitor the situation and go hey she's really okay this is this is this is all part of the game plan she's gonna win tomorrow and this is why and this is why but it seems like such a counterintuitive strategy to a lot of athletes and a lot of people listening because they're going to view it as just that somebody throwing a temper tantrum but when you do it in a targeted precise and deliberate way you're i can't i don't know how better to describe it but you're basically just depleting your brain of being able to handle it yes and you're and you're changing your brain chemistry you're changing the blood flow to the part of the brain where you have those inner fears and doubts the things that are going to hold you back and it challenges that and it

lets it go it releases it um and i mean i mean to give you guys some kind of example the types of inner dialogue that i might have if if i was on that trail would be i knew i was never good at this everyone thinks i can do it and i can i'm a fucking fraud now i'm going to be found out you know so all of those all of those types of dialogue for me are quite thematic um to my chimp and getting to understand and really dig down into why they are there is also going to help you move past that the i think the key between that and a true temper tantrum that is going to that is not going to be beneficial to the athlete if you're pacing somebody this is a really common situation is you know that you're intentionally doing it and you're targeting something that you need to very deliberately target because we can get i don't want people to come away with oh this is an excuse just to have a temper tantrum on the trails right also good also good no and and you know generally like i would say to people do it in private do it with someone that you trust this is not something that you're just going to do in front of the world right and you're not just going to do it at the drop of a hat but it is a technique that can be really helpful in the moment just to you know just to release but also as well as it what's really handy about it is is you recognize it in other people so maybe they have a bit of their own little temper tantrum and you get to see their

chimp and that's going to help you cope with them and this is we've actually talked to various companies businesses in terms of how to cope with other people because you cannot fight a chimp with a chimp chimp on chimp action no bueno you know so it's like you gotta have your professor brain on if you're gonna talk someone off a ledge so if you can see that their chimp is out and it's triggering your chimp walk away because it's not gonna end in a good way and it really has it helped me in my relationships in terms of dealing with people yeah i've had a tough time if you know i'm always trans pretty transparent on this podcast i've always had a tough time as a coach in the middle of a race and things like that trying to find when i'm working with athletes and helping them like guide through the race giving them motivation or what you know whatever i can do during the during the heat of the moment to like let them spiral off and create that create that dumping sensation right to where there's nothing left and then making move on versus trying to course correct them into right working back towards optimism to quote one of my sports psychologist friends you should always work back towards optimism and there's that's that definitely can be a fork for a lot of athletes in terms of how they choose to handle challenging situations whether it's in a workout or in a race they can either choose to like let it all go and let the dump happen and then get on with life or they can choose to like work back towards optimism and

always have you know the sunny outlook right and i think it's it depends on any individual scenario but certainly i think there's a time and place to allow yourself to quote unquote grieve right and you give yourself that period of time and then you say i'm going to move on from this and it's a very scheduled period of time and even in a race in the heat of the moment you're going to give yourself that time to wallow in the fact that you've just been dropped to wallow in the fact that you don't feel as good as as you thought you should or your data suggests you should or on and on and on and then you hit a mark and for me it's often i'll use a physical location so maybe it's at the the next rock it's maybe at the next pole it's maybe at the top of the top of this hill i'm changing my attitude and this is how i'm going to do it i'm going to focus on this this and this and that can reverse into that optimism and again those goals for me generally certainly if it's in the middle of training if it's the middle of racing and they have to be process goals they have to be things i know i can control and that will then give me that dopamine hit to get me motivated to then get me positive um so it's you know it it's manipulating your brain and how you know the chemistry works in order to get the best out of yourself and then certainly as a coach for me um i find one of the best ways is let your your athlete rant as you say let them have their dump and then i'll try and relate to them so hopefully i've gone through some kind of experience where i've felt the same because really you're going to bond again over

you know adversity over vulnerability the strongest thing i've had is when i'm vulnerable with my athletes and i talk about my deepest fears and when i've had my biggest downfalls and then all of a sudden they trust me they open up to me and we can take that journey together and then we work on the positive pathway and we say well you know what this kind of worked for me and this is how i got out of that state of mind or this is how i go over this issue that happened this is what i did but maybe for you we could try this or that or that but but if you walk hand in hand with how they're feeling through empathy it just changes their level of trust and willingness to want to move past it right dissociative enthusiasm can negatively reinforce the situation yes if you if you encounter a person a fellow runner don't worry about it oh my god you'll be fine come on come on it's like fuck off no i won't do you i mean whereas whereas if it's like you know oh oh man you know if you're sharing stories and this one race has happened to me or you'll never guess this was just awful and that or my deepest fear has always been that this and that and it's just so so different you know it's it's authentic and i think people crave that so here here's the take home for the listeners is if you're having these situations where you're either out on a race course you're pacing somebody or whatever and you or the athlete or the person your friend or whatever that you're pacing if they start to

start to have these bad patches let them have the bad patch and then redirect it don't dissociatively try to force them out of it because yeah well it pisses them off but it also i think it com it compounds what can already be a negative situation right back time back time and then recognize you know i think as well being forgiving of other people that are out there that maybe have a moment and that then piss you off or they're acting in a certain way which pisses you off or there's so many different interactions that can take place you know during endurance races it's just unbelievable and and that might even be with your support crew um so it's it's just trying to sort of maybe understand where their chimp is sitting um and being aware of that and not taking it so personally or or if you do take it personally forgive that person put yourself in their shoes and say well fucking hell they've been out here all night for me and this and that maybe they're just worried or maybe they wish they were doing it or maybe any one of the reasons uh you know there's so i think it's just putting yourself in other people's shoes and that's being self-aware about where you're at how you think you're why what your chimp is telling you is going to help you with you know the people around you in your world as well yeah i love it so if needless to say if you ever see leslie on the side of a trail having a tantrum realize that it's deliberate that's all part of the process right that's right probably hey just feed me a piece of chocolate and i'll probably be told chocolate will solve

everything okay let's leave the listeners with like the high level overview here i mean we've kind of gone through some really specific um like techniques and ways ways that they can think about pursuing their athletic endeavors having a strong why making sure they know what what is kind of like triggering to them and things like that but what's the high level overview of trying to create a resilient athlete and athletes that can deal with adversity getting to know yourself really understanding who you are and what your weaknesses are and i don't just mean physically i mean mentally and then putting yourself in scenarios that are going to test that and it's interesting because i'm a screenwriter as well and that's what we do with our main characters you find their flaw you find their heart of darkness and then you test that all the time and hopefully throughout the film by the end of the film they've had some kind of arc of change and that's what we relate to in storytelling it's exactly the same here um find your flaw find your heart of darkness and then test it and that's going to make you more resilient and change for the future i hope some i hope people take that to heart like to heart to use upon there because i don't think a lot of people are willing to do that unless they get prompted to and that's why people like yourself and and other and other coaches out there are so valuable because they'll provide the carrot and the stick and the impetus to actually not force but coax the

athlete into those yes definitely and again i think if more if more athletes if more people shared their fears and shared unfortunately we live in that world of social media where everyone is you know posturing and wanting to talk about how wonderful they are and how skinny they are and look at this picture of me where i'm showing my ribs or whatever you know and it just kind of you know it it compounds that that you know unattainableness and we always need to keep stoic and talk about how awesome we are and really again i think the most powerful thing we can do is talk about our weaknesses yeah 100 i'm with you there well leslie this is great i had a lot of fun with this it was all it was cracked up to be we got to throw a few f-bombs around which the listeners are getting used to by now um where can where can people find more about you and follow you on social media yeah so you can follow me uh on instagram at leslie does try l-e-s-l-e-y does try t-r-i and then you can check out our website braveheartcoach.com and you can check out our book as well uh the brave athletes calm the f down and rise to the occasion so you can get that on amazon and you can also get it on audio and in fact i read it along with simon and i know jason is looking forward to him uh recording his own book coming up no you can just do lots of mouth exercises you'll be fine next yeah next week i have to do it i do not come from a movie and screenwriting background like you do so i'm completely terrified of it and it will be i will bumble over myself at

every single step well you know you know one of the biggest things is just slow down yeah slow it down so no coffee beforehand for me i'll have to like take some melatonin before i might ping you for some advice on this after we get off the horn thanks for your time as always this is great i i really appreciate your time i hope the listeners take everything that we went over to heart thanks jason all right folks there you have it much thanks to leslie for coming on the podcast today that was really fun i need to have more conversations with leslie go and check her out on social media give her a follow on instagram give her a follow on twitter and go check her book out i have no financial interest in the book as always there are no entanglements here you guys all know that i just appreciate what she does and i also appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners out there thank you all for tuning in today and as always we will see you out on the trails