The Athlete's Way: Training Your Mind and Body to Experience the Joy of Exercise

INTRODUCTION: THE ATHLETE’S WAY TO HEALTH AND FITNESS

A RÉSUMÉ

FARTHER, FASTER, HIGHER

Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

FRANK OUTLAW

I am a world-class endurance athlete with multiple triathlon championship titles and a Guinness World Record. I manage a specialty sporting goods store based in New York City now, but I’ve also done a lot of coaching. While running a triathlon program at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers, I developed the concept of The Athlete’s Way. A native New Yorker, I’ve done almost all of my training for endurance sports either in Central Park or inside a Manhattan gym. I understand what the daily exercise routine entails for most people through observation and personal experience. I train side by side with all kinds of people. I am an expert when it comes to sports and human motivation, and I have incorporated everything I know into a program for people from all walks of life and levels of fitness.

My preference for training indoors, rare for a long-distance runner, enables me to connect to the exercise experience of most people. Today, many of us do our cardiovascular exercise and strength conditioning indoors. I am an expert in the field of indoor training. Treadmills are currently the number one method people use to get exercise, and I know treadmills well.

I hold the Guinness World Record for running farther and faster on a treadmill than any other human being ever has, logging 153.76 miles in twenty-four hours. I have run at least thirty to fifty miles on a treadmill every week since 1984, which adds up to about 50,000 miles. I have won the Triple Iron Man, the longest nonstop triathlon in the world, three times. It includes a 7.2-mile swim, a 336-mile bike ride, and a 78.6-mile run. I have competed in dozens of regular Ironman races—2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike and 26.2-mile run—all over the world, including five appearances at the Hawaii World Championships. I have finished the Kiehl’s Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile run through Death Valley in July, twice. I have spent a lot of my time analyzing and experimenting with the athletic process like a lab rat on an exercise wheel, and I will share everything I’ve learned with you in this book, so that you can apply it to your daily workouts.

Many people think that ultra-endurance sports are crazy. Even though I loved doing them, I have to agree. This book is not written to teach you how to be an ultra-runner. Unless it is in your blood as something you have to do, I would not encourage you to be an ultra-athlete. It is not good for you. The physical strain on the body is, in fact, probably bad for you. My joints are fine, but my kidneys have been pushed to the verge of shutdown a few times. Twenty to sixty minutes a day is good for you, but running nonstop for twenty-four hours is not. I did it because it was my calling—my life’s passion.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

ALBERT CAMUS

I am not coming back from the depths of Death Valley or the lava fields of Hawaii or the shark-infested waters of South Africa to hand a map and instructions to another crazy conquistador and send him or her off to those places. Instead, I am coming back to what I see as my village to tell you about what I have learned from my explorations and how you can apply it to your day-to-day life. This program is about applying the tools that I’ve used to do superhuman feats to performing everyday feats, like climbing the Stairmaster for thirty minutes or jogging around the block.

I have always been fascinated by the science and creative process of sport. I want to break new ground, but I believe that the same hard work and discipline that the classical Greeks brought to athletics are essential for us today. This book focuses on the classic core tenets of the athletic process and explains them in terms of my own experiences as an athlete and also in terms of current neuroscientific and psychological research.

THE CORE PHILOSOPHY:

AIM HIGH, WORK HARD, HAVE FUN, AND TRUST YOURSELF

I know very well that many others might, in this matter, as in others, do better than I can; and though I believe that I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some times since, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here. I must do the best I can and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

All the theory in the world is useless if you can’t put it into action. The information here has been road tested by me. Now you have to take it out for a test drive, personalize it, and incorporate it into your life. Exercise is a source of joy, and I hope to persuade you to make it a bigger part of your life. My mission is to get this message to you so that you can use neurobiology and behavioral models to help improve your life through exercise. I am a zealot about the power of sweat to transform people’s lives by transforming their minds. My conviction is strong and authentic because I have lived it.

I sweat real sweat and I shake real shakes.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Shifting the focus from thinner thighs to stronger minds makes this exercise book unique. The Athlete’s Way is about the process of creating a healthier mind and happier brain through physical activity and positive psychology. This exercise book does not focus just on sculpting six-pack abs or molding buns of steel. We are more interested in bulking up your neurons and reshaping your synapses to create an optimistic, resilient, and determined mind-set.

The goal is transformation from the inside out. As William James said, We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh. I would go further: we don’t exercise because we are happy; we are happy because we exercise. By taking you inside the athletic mind, The Athlete’s Way illustrates the characteristics of the athletic mind-set and shows you how to incorporate these traits into your daily routine. The program lays the groundwork for attitudinal and behavioral changes through neuroplasticity. Unlike most exercise books, the weight loss and improved physical appearance that will result from this plan are actually by-products of the program, not goals. The goal is to tap your bliss and have an athletic conversion.

NEUROPLASTICITY AND NEUROGENESIS

COMBINING NEUROSCIENCE AND SPORT

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

All too often, scientific knowledge and brain chemical engineering with drugs is used only to bring people with depression, anxiety, or ADD back to normal. My goal is to use this information to help people move beyond normal. We can feel better and live better without drugs. Neurochemical improvement is possible through this program. My mission is to help people tap their own biology and apply neuroscience to their own lives so that they can become better athletes and better human beings.

For many people, exercise is a dreaded task rather than a source of bliss. I believe that the joy I find in movement is something I can share. It is universal. No matter how much you dread exercise now, you can transform your attitudes. I aim to convince you that you can rewire your mind to enjoy exercise because of the neuroplasticity of the brain.

Yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks. The human brain is not a static organ but rather a malleable web of neurons designed to change shape in response to internal and external stimuli. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change its structure and function, by expanding or strengthening the neural circuits that are used, while shrinking or weakening those that are rarely engaged. This process is also called synaptic plasticity or Neural Darwinism. Neuroplasticity offers a scientific model that shows that we all have the ability to reinvent ourselves. The Athlete’s Way is going to reshape your brain to think, train, and behave like an athlete—making you a more optimistic, resilient, and intense human being.

The Athlete’s Way not only reshapes the mind through the physical experience itself, but also the thoughts and mental signals used in this program to achieve your daily fitness goals weave the neural nets of the athletic mind-set into your daily perspective. According to the laws of Neural Darwinism, when exercise is perceived as a pleasurable experience, these pathways are strengthened, and the neural pathways associating exercise with discomfort and drudgery atrophy.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (WALDEN)

Recent brain imaging proves that you have the power to reshape your mind by rewiring your brain based on your patterns of thought and your patterns of behavior. With consistent use, networks of neurons get stronger; with lack of use, they get weaker. The stronger networks are where your thoughts and actions will gravitate. The human brain is designed to reshape its circuitry in response to life experience and psychological mind-set. Neuroplasticity is the foundation of all learning and memory. The brain wants to be streamlined and cuts the fat of what is not used. If you never think positive thoughts, those neurons will be cut, and you become a cynic. The good news is you can always wake them up and build new ones. The brain is never fixed, nor are your patterns of behavior.

Be patient. Studies on addictive behavior have shown that if people who are hooked on drugs can stay clean for eight weeks the odds of them staying sober are exponentially greater than people who fall off the wagon after four weeks of sobriety. Stick with this program consistently for at least fifty-six days (eight weeks) and your brain will be restructured. You will break old patterns of behavior once and for all because your brain will change. Exercise triggers new cell growth in the hippocampus (memory hub), in the cerebellum (motor function), and in the frontal lobes (executive function), which makes you happier, more agile, sharper, and less stressed out. This growth of new neurons is called neurogenesis.

Contrary to the original idea that antidepressants (especially serotonin reuptake inhibitors) work solely by keeping serotonin in circulation longer, the latest research shows that the key to their effectiveness may in fact lie in neurogenesis. Like exercise, antidepressants work by stimulating cell structures associated with antidepression to grow and strengthen.

Whether neurogenesis is caused by antidepressants or by exercise, changes in cell growth take time, which explains why it takes two to four weeks for exercise or antidepressants to kick in. The Athlete’s Way exercise program triggers changes in brain structure and perception by improving the delivery of neurochemicals that make you feel good, which will make exercise something that you seek regularly, rather than avoid. I will talk about the key neurochemicals behind athletic bliss and athletic calm, namely dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, endorphin, and the star of the show, endocannabinoids, your brain’s own cannabis, which is primarily responsible for creating runner’s high.

SO HUMAN AN ATHLETE

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave…not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

MARTHA GRAHAM

In the 1960s, before I was born, my mother worked for René Dubos, a microbiologist, environmentalist, author, U.N. ambassador, and humanist from Rockefeller University. Dubos wrote So Human an Animal, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, and my mother typed the manuscript. The humanist ideals of René Dubos seeped deeply into my cells and shaped my earliest view of the world. His idea of our intellectual human selves and our physical, animal selves coexisting in harmony to create complete and wonderful human beings is the core of The Athlete’s Way philosophy. This program is about maximizing the human and the animal in each of us as athletes and returns to the classical value of a healthy mind in a healthy body: mens sana in corpore sano.

The Athlete’s Way is a new approach to exercise and the mind-body connection. More than 2,000 years ago Plato wrote that it is as important to exercise the body as it is to exercise the mind, in order to preserve an equal and healthy balance between them. The Athlete’s Way updates this timeless message for the twenty-first century. By incorporating modern brain science, positive psychology, behaviorism, and a lifetime of athletic training, racing, and coaching experience, I have created a program that will teach you how to rewire your mind and reshape your brain to enjoy exercise and maximize your human potential in the process. The goal of this book is to improve your mental and physical well-being and get your body and brain into terrific shape so that you can pump up the volume in your life. The Athlete’s Way is also a method for anything in life. You can transfer the skill set you learn here to your professional and personal life. It’s not just about sports.

I owe my successful career as an endurance athlete to my understanding of psychology and neurophysiology, but I am not a scientist. I am an athlete. Even though I haven’t had formal training in the sciences, I grew up with neuroscience since my father is both a neurosurgeon and a neuroscientific researcher.

When I was growing up, neuroscience was a constant topic of conversation, and discussions with my father have continued over the years. The Athlete’s Way is based on the hypothesis that humans have two brains: an animal feeling-and-doing athletic brain called the cerebellum (Latin: little brain), and a human thinking-and-reasoning brain called the cerebrum (Latin: brain).

My dad and I refer to this brain model as "down brain-up brain. The up brain is the cerebrum, based on its position north of the mid-brain, which is midway between the two brains. The cerebellum is the down brain, the southern hemisphere in the cranial globe as it were, based on its position south of the mid-brain. The simple names down brain-up brain may sound grammatically incorrect but are a direct and cogent response to the 1970s split-brain model of left brain-right brain." I coined the new names in early conversations with my father about the differences between the cerebrum and the cerebellum, and I like the new terminology for its simplicity.

As I will show you throughout this book, the salient divide in the brain is not from east to west or from right to left. Instead, it is from north to south. New brain imaging unavailable in the 1970s has confirmed the power of the cerebellum (the down brain) to do more than just keep our balance, posture coordination, and proprioception, a sense of body position. The down brain is our emotional and intuitive center and may even hold our personal and collective unconscious mind. It stores all long-term memories, an ancient primal defense mechanism. In trying to decode the cerebellum, I have uncovered new ideas about the mysterious and exotic little brain. The down brain has been hidden under the surface for far too long. This book puts the cerebellum in the spotlight.

THE LAYOUT OF THE BOOK

End in what all begins and ends in—yes.

EDWARD FITZ GERALD

In The Athlete’s Way I explain the anatomy of athletic process from the psychological, behavioral, and neuroscientific perspectives as these elements intertwine and overlap with mind, body, and brain during exercise. We will look at the mind mechanics of the brain under the categories of architecture (structure), electricity (firing rate/brain waves), and chemicals (neurotransmitters). Specific topics we’ll cover will be neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, and endocannabinoids as well as mirror cells, olfaction, and the source of human free will, which I call volition.

The extensive research I’ve done on neuroscience is from the perspective of an athlete. I believe this makes me a better communicator to other like-minded athletes. All of the scientific information has been checked with my father, who has been an extraordinary resource and inspiration. I have filtered all the research I’ve done to keep it accessible and applicable. I comprehend brain science in a practical way. My goal as an author is to make complex ideas of neuroscience simpler, without dumbing them down.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

First I will deal with the philosophy and principles of The Athlete’s Way. I reflect back on my experiences as a coach and my father’s role in shaping my perspective on the connection between brain science and sport that I bring to you here. I will show you how to get started by teaching you about fundamentals from buying equipment and joining a gym to creating runner’s high. I’ll show you how to set up a training log, kick-start your program, and keep tabs on your progress.

The first section will also cover positive psychology. As humans, we have evolved to need individual achievement, and a sense of purpose and community. Optimism, resilience, and determination are innate. We will explore the work of René Dubos, Martin Seligman, and Abraham Maslow, as well as my own trials, tribulations, and triumphs.

Next I will show you how to put theory into action by reshaping your mind-set and behavior. The key to reshaping your mind is to employ cognitive therapy and behaviorism. To reprogram the mind, I take a two-pronged approach. I deal with psychology for reshaping mind-set in the cerebrum, and I use behaviorism for the animal brain, the cerebellum. Neuroscientific terms will all be explained throughout this book. In order to rewire your mind, I will identify the ideal athletic mind-set by examining the athletic mind and will turn to other professions and even creatures for inspiration you can use to build an alter ego and new athletic mind-set.

All animals seek pleasure and avoid pain. If you make exercise pleasurable, it will become something that you seek. This is called Pleasure Principle or The Law of Effect as described by the behaviorist Edward L. Thorndike. The Athlete’s Way includes such behavioral principles as classical conditioning, reward conditioning, contiguity, and token economy as part of making exercise a habit. I will elaborate on these behavioral principles in chapter 10, when we talk more about reprogramming your mind and building an athletic alter ego to help you stick with this program.

Finally, I provide practical athletic advice on cardio, strength, stretching, balance, and nutrition that can apply to any level of fitness. We will look at the importance of sleep and dreaming for improving athletic performance as well as the spiritual aspects of the athletic process. Research has proven that we learn in our sleep by transferring short-term memory to long-term memory. We will examine the importance of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and circadian rhythms.

In closing I will show you how you can take yourself to the next level—how to create a state of superfluid performance and enlightenment. In this chapter I compare the work of scientists and scholars. I examine the writings of Joseph Campbell and the research of Marghanita Laski—who both explored the realm of peak experience, rapture, and ecstasy from different angles. I compare their insights with my own observations inside the athletic process by defining a new term I coined called superfluidity. In closing I talk about trance and transcendence as something you can achieve anywhere, anytime either through sport or doing anything so absorbing that you lose yourself.

USING QUOTATIONS AS SIGNPOSTS OFFERS A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW

Strong reasons make strong actions.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

I have been collecting quotations that help me inside the athletic process since I started racing more than twenty years ago. I have amassed thousands. Each day the nuggets of thought held in these quotes have inspired me in my workouts and races. They have been a key ingredient in my recipe for success, which is why I share them with you here. Some of the quotes come from athletes, but in general they come from all sorts of people from all generations, and serve to illustrate that the ideals of The Athlete’s Way are timeless, universal, and transferable.

I have inserted these quotes as signposts throughout the book to complement the text. They are also a subtext that can stand completely on its own. In most cases the quotes relate directly to the text, but I had fun with them, and many are used to create a playful dynamic with the text. I encourage you to read the quotes anytime you need a quick refresher course on The Athlete’s Way—and to extract them for motivation in your daily life. If a particular quote resonates with you, write it on a notecard and put it somewhere that you will see it often. I include them here so that you can draw inspiration and humor from them, too.

We learn when we sleep. Keep this book on your nightstand and skim the quotes for a few minutes before bed; the nugget of wisdom held in each will meld with your dreams to help shape your athletic mind-set. Their simplicity allows them to slip past the cerebrum’s intellectual guard into the subconscious cerebellum. Reviewing important things before bed helps to weave them into your dreams and from there into long-term memory. I find that when I’m exercising that one of these quotes will often pop into my mind—always at the moment that I need it most. They keep me entertained and help me to stay on course and achieve my goals. I hope these quotes reveal themselves to you as well inside your athletic process, bring a smile to your face, and make you charge on. They offer a range of insights and viewpoint that my single perspective alone could not.

PHYSICALITY IS SPIRITUALITY

SWEAT TAKES YOU