Mental skills · the archive
Mental skills for
endurance athletes.
Essays on the inner game of endurance sport: doubt, fear, pain, focus and the habits of mind that hold up on race day.
You can't outtrain doubt
It’s the silent prediction of your own failure that does the real damage…
The 3-2-1 Resilience Hack
Most athletes don’t break because they’re weak. They break because they can’t tolerate feeling weak.
Giving Up
Because it’s about attitude not aptitude…
Attention
If you aren’t happy with what you’re doing, take the information and act on it.
Hope is Hopeless
That will lead you to your knowing, not your doubting...
Toxic Self Abuse
We’ve bought into the idea that we have to flog ourselves ten different ways to Sunday just to get the most from ourselves.
The Power Of One
A life organised around fear is a contracted life. You will never know how far you can go unless you are willing to go too far.
Overthinking
The only way to step into your power is to let go of who you were pretending to be.
Valour
The main problem is …We don’t actually allow ourselves to feel fear. We think it.
Blind Ambition
When reality doesn’t meet the ambition you built, that’s your moment of truth.
Settle
Force travels through its own relaxation, not its tension.
The Enemy At The Gate
The problem isn’t the bad races. It’s the script you run that says, I can’t allow imperfection.
Surrender To Victory
In the end, you surrender to victory…You bend to its measure, not yours.
Deep In The Pit
What’s the lesson? You can’t trust your thoughts!
Hanging Onto Pain
So indeed, pain is temporary and suffering is optional.
Guts
The most dangerous thing an athlete can do is work toward fulfilling someone else’s expectations. They generally produce their worst training and racing that way.
In The Trenches
You’ve got to stop having an opinion on what happens, and start looking at your response to it.
Grind
Someone out there with half your talent is winning with twice your consistency.
Do You Really Wanna Get After It?
Then you begin to truly understand that the uncomfortable trials you face will also introduce you to your own strengths.
Quiet Quitting
The quitting we do when we cave in on ourselves is the most destructive. That voice of dissent in training is the same voice that leads to desperation in races.
Grace Under Pressure
Grace is flow. Grace is trust that the moment itself is carrying your development. A damaged ego will chase, push, force, overanalyse, and overwhelm itself.
The Goldilocks Zone
Chaos is an idea we are not comfortable with, but there’s no growth without it. You have to get what you don’t want so you can attract what you do want.
It's Messy, Get Over It
Perfect and tidy is a myth. You start, you suck… get over it.
If you don't Mind, It don't Matter
Instead… break bread with it. Sit down with the resistance. With the suck. Have it out.
Get Real With Yourself
You’ve got to find a way to be there for all of it—not just the parts you approve of—if you want to truly know yourself.
It Ain't Relaxing
It’s not about the armchair. Truth is, you can suffer at the hands of your own mind anywhere.
Shape Shift
If you can’t regulate your emotions in training, you won’t regulate them when it matters most.
The Power Of Attitude
Complaining isn’t just venting—it’s reinforcing. It’s like telling your brain, “Hey, turn this pain up to eleven!”
Turn Worrier Into Warrior
Worrying is like worshiping the problem. Better you worship the solution and take any action you can to mitigate the issue.
Fight For Survival
The war between seeking the known and dealing with the unknown. But here’s the thing, trying to make things safe and known makes you unsafe. You’ve got to let that go.
Going Through It
The avoidance we use in our heads to escape suffering increases its intensity because your body is intelligent, it wants to be listened to.
The Warriors Hat
There is a power play at work in most challenges. It’s not about overcoming anything, it’s about meeting the power and matching its energy.
Wreckage
If it breaks, it breaks for a reason. Don’t do the same, do different. It’s not about being courageous either, that just confirms that you are afraid.
Real Power
You are no longer bartering your body for fitness or comprising your personal integrity for the goal. Strength comes in the quiet groundedness of self-reclamation.
Anxiety - Do it Anyway
No longer a victim, you begin to rise in the shadow of what you thought was your ultimate downfall.
Defeat Is Psychological
In sport in general, we attend to our thoughts way too much, and not anywhere near enough to our body’s direct messaging.
The Extra Mile
You need your passion, your will and your lust. That’s fuel not to be fucked with.
Nobody Cares
Here’s the thing, if you are going to do what you please, then you are going to have to let go of what you think pleases others.
War and Peace
Not one second should be wasted on aversion, avoidance and resistance.
Stop The Chase
Everything you reject about yourself is a rejection of your experience!
No Quarter
You gotta reconnect with your refusal to make yourself a mental victim over and over again. You have to stay out of that rabbit hole.
Purposeful Intent
You are going to need to re-connect and re-remember your why over and over again to make that habit an automatic action.
Get After It
Here’s the thing: that Stoic idea of challenge weakens you…I’m dead serious, the tension and resistance adds to the hurt exponentially.
Reverberation
The repercussions of the reverb are happening in your body and nervous system, they will continue to choose the familiar path of chaos until you learn how to choose consciously and differently.
Dedication
As Stuart Wilde put it: Dedication is the warrior's prayer… A Fierce concentration! Its fierceness is only measured by the totality of…
Embracing the Symphony
Discover how integrating mind, body, and heart fuels exceptional athletic performance.
A Sacred Drive
Embracing life's difficulties and discomfort is true bravery. True aliveness requires accepting the inevitable challenges, heartbreaks and vulnerabilities that come with it.
Coaching: It's About Bringing Out What You Hide Within
Grant Giles redefines coaching as a transformative journey, guiding athletes to unearth their inner strengths and innovate through self-discovery
True Intelligence: Gilesy’s Insight on Thought Hygiene and Inner Clarity
The essence of true intelligence, advocating for self-examination, inner clarity, and mindful expression to navigate life and sports effectively.
Breaking Free from Athletic Prisons: A Journey Within 🏊♂️🚴♂️🏃♂️
Unlock the barriers limiting your athletic potential by embracing the present, avoiding judgment, and celebrating every step of your unique journey.
Get Busy Living
The conditions of life do not predetermine how we live. But trying to live life on a purely mental level predisposes us to a…
The River flows
When you really pay attention to life, you become aware that it’s all a flow. Sometimes it’s a meandering creek, sometimes it’…
The Punisher
When we won’t face what is difficult, we make things difficult. Most of our aversion to difficulty is wrapped up in avoiding the…
Elegance
Worrying about worrying. It drives us all into a neurotic scan for an equilibrium that does not exist. But we can make the choice…
Masks
We each build an image and a persona that we present to the world. Our mask as it were. Our best practice is to…
The Dream
That’s how we live it. In a dream state of waiting. I’ve been waiting for something my whole life.The next goddam…
Disappearance
Fairly certain I am going to look back and regret the time I have wasted in this life of doing and stressing once all…
Normalise
Normal is a crazy idea. A projection made based on pure statistics. We are not robots and you can’t throw a blanket across…
The Moment of Truth
The true measure of strength lies in facing the truth head-on, without flinching. It's as simple as that. Your ability to…
Shackled
We follow our thoughts and those of the collective into a type of living oblivion. An oblivion devoid of any real tangible meaning. We…
Let It Die
Hanging on when we should let go is a road paved to hell. We invite suffering when we hold onto anything. Letting go is…
Toxic Positivity
Sounds paradoxical, right? How could positivity be negative? What you don’t accept in yourself goes deeper into the subconscious and comes out in…
Growing Pains
Pain is the price we pay to play. The play of life. In Hindu philosophy, the word māyā refers to life’s play, the…
THE FEAR IS NEAR
It is an intimate feeling, right? The lump in your throat, the racing thoughts, elevated heart rate, increased respiration and pumping adrenaline. Often, it…
Identified
The fundamental cause of much of our suffering is the misidentification of form caused by the pure ignorance of the true nature of our…
Flowering
One hundred years from now, you, and no one you know, will be alive. Isn’t that a stunning reflection on how we should…
Observation
We are multidimensional beings that are simultaneously able to process inner and outer information at the same time. It’s nothing short of an…
Neutral
The mind is so powerful, like a magnet, it attracts the flowing energy, regardless of what that energy contains. While ever we define ourselves…
The Beginning of the End
You can’t have a beginning without an end. When we really do get to the end of our tether, that’s where we…
A racing Mind is a Bursting Heart
What does your heart long for? This cavernous gap in between what our heart really longs for and where we find ourselves leaves us…
Trapped in Pain
I find it nearly impossible to stop my mind from slipping into nostalgia and remembrance. I’ve spent a lot of time seeing it…
Dialogues n Epilogues
Mental toughness, as it turns out, is the lack there-of. You can’t be mentally tough. If you are up in your head,…
Spontaneity
Let go of the tow ropes that keep you anchored to safety. In the world of goals and performance, we rob ourselves blind of…
You Know It Ends
The movement of our mind is dynamic. It is not stable. Emotions, feelings, sense perceptions, are all in a constant state of flux. We…
Dark Clouds
These dark clouds keep invading our space. Collectively, we perpetuate these cycles of darkness, war and madness. This f..king genetic chain that we…
A painful Story
Anyone can play good cards, but it’s really about playing bad cards well. When the shit really hits the fan in an endurance…
Rock Bottom
The problem with getting what you want is that it breeds an expectation into you. Privilege teaches you to expect privilege. It snuffs out…
Entertaining Trouble
What do our instincts really know? This is a profound question for me as a coach. I mean, as athletes, we set scary goals.…
Motivations Shadow
The battle between motivation and apathy is real. Like anything in life, there is always light and darkness. Apathy is just a motivation shadow.…
Consider This
We are always strategising and thinking about how we are going to achieve our goals. Doubtful, worrying, anxious and fearful are the thought modes…
Fear Flows
What’s wrong with being scared shitless? Fear is only fear until you have met the challenge. Once you are present with the challenge,…
En-Courage-Ment
Courage is in the vacuum of “not knowing”. That is where we get stretched beyond what we “think” we are capable of. This is…
Faith On Trial
As a collective, we lack trust. We fail to trust each other because we lack faith in ourselves.So yes, faith is on trial…
Just Breathe
How did pressure become a badge of honour? When did the level of our anxiety become the measure of our effort? How did the…
En-Courage-Ment
Courage is in the vacuum of “not knowing”. That is where we get stretched beyond what we “think” we are capable of. This is…
Dance On The Edge
We are always standing on a precipice. Reality is an edge. That edge is where the three rivers of life intersect; past, present and…
Destiny
It’s out there, on the periphery of your mind's eye, this goal that you hang out there. You want to believe…
Walk Away
If you are any type of athlete, in fact, if you are anyone at all wanting a higher level of performance from yourself and/…
The Love of Your Fate
Getting the hell out of your own road, that’s what this quote means. We make this profound choice to allow life to strengthen…
Focus
We lose focus for one simple reason. We are not focused. The problem is that we try to use the mind to focus. We…
Mens Mental Health
Young men are 10 feet tall and bulletproof. A time will come though, from about 40 years of age, plus when the whole world…
Pressure
If you gain something, it is tainted by the same energy as not having it, which is the fear of losing it. It’s…
An Inconvenient Truth
No one really wants to hear from a guy that tells you that success is a slow, inconvenient process.We are a society that…
Conqueror or Saboteur?
There is the possibility to utterly conquer a performance. But it’s not about what you do. It’s about what you are willing…
Toughness
When we face the cold hard steel of challenge, that’s the moment of real truth. The hardest course, that deadly cross wind, that…
Fiction n Friction
Move out of the resistance to what you don’t want and accept it fully as part of the learning in this goal that you have set yourself.
Three Pillars of Process and Progress
I discuss the subsets of each pillar. The idea here is to provide you a short cut in your own athletic endeavors through the experience of my own and the observation of those I have coached over the last 25 years.
Automaticity
This is really simple. You are as you practise. What are you practising? Specificity Performance is the sum parts of what you have practised…
Discomfort
This is what our whole bag is right? Dealing with discomfort. This is not physical, this puppy is all wrapped up in how you…
Learn to Thrive
Consistency Consistency is the absolute king, forget whatever you’ve read, this is your first priority. Over days, weeks, months, years, it builds upon…
Battlegrounds of Illusion
The battleground of sports performance and life. Sport is nothing other than a metaphor for life. Nothing is as tortured as an athletes un-…
Critical Mass
It’s so easy to be critical. We are brought up on it, but why? It occurs to me that my inner critic is…
Fragments
When we live life through projections, judgments, achievements, goals and outcomes, we live a life of fragmentation. I know this myself as I lived…
Haunted and Deluded
Don’t be deluded by imagination nor haunted or by memory, both of them are illusions created in the mind. The mind projects it’…
Precluding Opposites
Sometimes we just have to stop to learn key life lessons. I have just had such a period, painfully chaotic and wonderfully illuminating in…
The Wounded Mind
The uncomfortable, the unchartered, the unknown, the unfound, the unbound, the unlimited, all of them engender a feeling of aliveness, don’t they? The…
Functional Dysfunction
We train our bodies to function efficiently, and we train it for patterned movement. When we do that consistently we can reasonably expect that…
Motive
Attach to the process, not to the outcome. The outcome is a simple product of the process. External motivation will always eventually come up…
Mindset Setmind!
That word pretty much sums it up for me. A set of thoughts that I try to program into my mind. I set my…
The Athlete Stress Redress
I am stressed, I am anxious, I am doubtful, I am frightened, I am negative, I am frustrated. They are just some of the…
The Truth About Our Potential
Don’t ask your head to operate your heart, It can’t. There’s no reality to a life lived in thought. There’s…
Hitting the Ground
Having it go wrong. Bad luck, injury, sickness, covid 19, but what about my goals? What about my dreams and outcomes? What about the…
The Soft Skills
Interesting that when we talk about the soft skills in coaching, it basically refers to anything that is psychological, in most coaching courses we…
Success and Failure
Failure is simply the left hand side of success’s face. Turn one way or the other but make no mistake, they are one…
The Power of Ground
Pressure to perform? Head spinning like a top? That congested, compressed, claustrophobic feeling of having no time and no space. That voice telling you…
Feeling Stuck
Often feeling stuck is a simple resistance to reality. The presentation of reality is as it is. That in of itself is not a…
Performance Anxiety
Anxiety itself is lack of one key ingredient, when it comes to any type of performance, presence. Anxiety fuels it’s tanks on ideas,…
Make Change or Stay the Same
If you make something a definition, you are going to stay in it, no matter how bad “you think” you want to change. We…
The Unforgettable Fire
Intrinsic motivation, a reason to act that comes from within. Doing something without any obvious external reward. When we really look into the nature…
What is the Goal?
As a coach of the physical, mental and yes spiritual if that word is important to you, my goal is very clear to me…
Taught to Win - Conditioned to Fail
Pressured by parents, teachers and peers to succeed from day one and god help you if you don’t. Our conditioning is a negative…
Transforming Pain
I never considered myself talented. Yet I still got some decent results competing as a professional athlete. With experience and hindsight I can now…
Surrender As Performance Power
Endurance sport is hard! Is that not why we do it? Life is hard, is that not why we are living it? How hard…
Defeat is a state of mind
No one is ever defeated until defeat is accepted. Defeat takes many forms; competition loss is only one form of defeat. You are defeated…
Your X-Factor
If you really want to find the x-factor of the athlete in you, there’s only one rule to apply. Refuse to impersonate.
Competitiveness
We so misunderstand the meaning of this word. If we use it to mean we want to get the zenith of performance from ourselves…
Perception
We make unconscious decisions about challenges and difficulties. Things are only as hard as they seem. So my question is, how hard are you…
The Winners Pillars
Four simple pillars to a personal athletic success you never thought possible.
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Beyond reading
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