Don't be afraid of the nerves

Meditations on the eve of a 50mile ultra

Welcoming the Butterflies

In 1994 the New York Knicks made the NBA finals largely on the hot hand of sharpshooter Jon Starks. But in the pivotal game 7, he lost the magic touch and went a miserable 2-18 shooting. I remember him describing what he felt before that game 7 and what led to him having such a disastrous performance. It’s burned into my mind.

I’m paraphrasing here, but he said something like this. “I always have butterflies in my stomach before big games. The butterflies keep me on my toes. But before that game, I didn’t have any butterflies.”

So the nerves and anxiety help him rise to the occasion, and without those nerves he’s almost too calm to capitalize on the urgency of the contest.

On the eve of my biggest ever race, I am leaning into those butterflies.

Nerves aren’t a sign of doubt, they are a sign of anticipation.

Nerves aren’t a sign of fear, they are a sign of respect for the difficulty of the challenge.

Nerves aren’t a sign of weakness, they keep you alert for when you need to be at your strongest.

Running an ultramarathon is a terrifying proposition anybody. But I’m not feeling that dread even if I’m feeling the nerves.

Instead I’m ready to rise to the occasion that I’ve been building towards longer than I even realized.

The butterflies in my stomach tell me that I’m about to do something amazing, in the right place, with the right people, at the right time, in order to realize something incredible about who I am and where I should aim my true potential.

50 mile team race

Ok, I can’t hold it in. I wrote these words on the eve of our last team ultra in April 2024 but I didn’t finish the draft and it’s been sitting here in my substack pile collecting ‘digital’ dust. I might have changed a word or two to update it, but the feel is the same.

This year we’re taking on a different, but no less challenging endeavour, a 50 mile desert trail race with 13 athletes. While the distance is less, the difficulty of managing the physical, mental, and emotional stresses of a bakers dozen presents a greater challenge for the team.

Particularly, my role is to be a coach on the trails, to run the race myself but also guide, support, and encourage the rest of our team, many first time ultra marathoners and trail runners.

When thinking about the role of nerves, each individual feels them differently and reacts differently in real time as they play out on the course. Just like Jon Starks, the butterflies can help us rise, but if we ignore them, we’re not properly preparing for the challenge.

In order to properly harness nerves, we must understand that not all stress is created equal. Some stress helps us conquer doubts and grow, while other stress paralyzes our ability to find courage and move through fear and adversity.

Eustress vs. Distress

In psychology there’s a binary distinction when thinking about how stress, or nerves, plays on on minds. One is positive, while the other is negative.

Distress: This is the negative stress, the type that harms you. It causes panic, overwhelming fear, despondency, hopelessness, and ultimately leads us to shrink from the great challenges of life.

Eustress: This is positive stress, the type that helps you rise. The type of struggle that allows you to grow beyond your current limits. It leads to willpower, bravery, creativity, righteous struggle, and transcendence.

Here’s a good example from the exercise world. Let’s use weightlifting.

Distress is putting WAY TO MUCH WEIGHT on the bar for you to handle. It causes fear because you know you’re setting yourself up for a world of hurt and likely failure as well. You think about the weight and it creates a boogie man in your mind. You being to feel physical sensations like sweaty palms, upset stomach, rising heart rate, shorter breath. There’s a negative spiral. You either step up to the bar totally unprepared in body and mind and then fail the lift spectacularly and possible injure yourself as well. Or you just quit altogether.

Eustress is putting JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE on the bar that forces your muscles to adapt and grow. It’s progressive overload. It’s recognizing that if you want to get stronger you need to subject them to the right amount of stress, to break them down properly so they can repair themselves and grow stronger in the process. Without stress, the muscles atrophy, shrink, and become useless. When you inch up the weight on the bar slowly, you internalize the positive value of stress on your mind, body, and spirit.

When thinking about nerves it’s the same. We want to channel the anxiety and stress we feel about any challenge into a positive, we want eustress. That’s why we should celebrate the butterflies.

How to harness your own nerves

The tricky part about nerves is they affect each individual differently. And we all have our own individual ways of dealing with the pressures of any big challenge.

Last year at our Zion 100 mile race, a lot of those nerves were translated into a hyper focus on logistical planning. The team spent a lot of time on fuel protocols, drop bag strategies, gear selection, and every other technical element of the race. It was more an exercise in how to handle the nerves than proper race planning. But it was effective in helping the team channel the nervous energy into positive action. It took potential distress and turned it into eustress.

When it comes to your own nerves, here are some general tips you can apply specifically to your situation.

1.Recognize physical sensations of stress

The body often knows before the mind can comprehend. Become aware of the signs your body gives you to signal the onset of nerves. Once you start to tune into how your body tips you off you can start to take the reigns of the harness of your emotions. Some ways to know:

• Deep feeling in the gut

• Reoccurring thoughts

• Goosebumps on the skin

• Hair standing on the back on your neck

Each person is different, but once you start to better understand the early signs of nerves you stop being overtaken by them in a moment of surprise. Knowledge of when they come about gives you the ability to start to take control of them right from the beginning.

2.Understand your natural ease with adversity

Every individual has a different way of naturally handling the stresses of a challenging situation. Some need to plan down to the detail, others need to let go of planning and focus on relaxation. Others find harmony in between preparation and improvisation. Lean into the ways in which you seemingly handle the nerves without much thought. Become conscious of how you do this so that when nerves come about you are able to channel them directly into your natural flow. Couple this strategy with the first, of knowing the signs, and you are well on your way to positively harnessing the nerves away from distress into eustress.

3.Learn to sit in strong emotions without immediate reaction

Listen, there’s nothing easy about managing stress. Despite your best intentions, nerves can still wreak chaos on your mindset and ability to move through adversity. Even if you’re conscious of them, know how to channel them into your natural ease, you’re still confronting strong emotions that are not entirely under your control. They’re called feelings for a reason.

But as my mentor, biz coach, and homie Zach Homol said on a podcast we recorded together “feelings are indicators, not dictators.” When we feel a strong emotion, negative or positive, which nerves can signal, it’s normal to try and ignore, neglect, or force them away. But that only allows the nerves to grow and the emotions to take the reigns. Instead, learn how to sit in the emotion and understand what the signal is behind it. Whether negative or positive, understanding how you can remain calm through the emotional storm will allow you to clearly see how that emotion can be channeled into positive action instead of paralysis or a fear based response. Turn distress into eustress.

4.Resolve to take action in positive directions

With a thorough understanding of how nerves act on you, the ways in which you naturally handle stress, and gain the capacity to feel strong emotions without need for immediate reaction, you have ALL the ingredients to turn nerves in your favour.

Remember, eustress is the good type of stress, the type that builds us up through overcoming righteous struggle. Distress is the type that paralyzes us with fear.

I’ve been meditating on the character of the biblical character Joseph over the past few weeks, as he’s been the main feature in the final chapters of Genesis that I’ve been reading. The striking feature of Joseph’s character that elevates him is his ability to take negative situations that would cause others to complain, quit, settle, and curse the world for their misfortune into a positive understanding of adversity allowing him to grow towards his true potential.

That’s the power each of us has to turn ANY situation of adversity, stress, or nerves into positive action instead of negative rumination. Your perspective determines your perception. Think of stress as neutral and your mind as the agent that turns it towards positive or negative. No matter the situation, you have the ability to find the silver lining and grow towards a better version of yourself.

One of my fellow teammates and coaching clients displayed this exact perspective in a chat we had driving to pick up our race packets yesterday. He has a big ‘interview’ with the new owners of his company and we were talking about his mindset around it. Last year he would have seen the nerves as a negative, worrying about how it was going to go, and allowing the stress to negatively impact his ability to positively move through it. But after working through an understanding of himself through training and mining the lessons of self he discovered he’s using the nerves positively. He’s channeling them into his training, his family, and the things he knows helps him calm those nerves to keep moving forward. He’s in control.

The physical has tremendous power to teach you about yourself. Seeing these types of transformations in mind fires me up the most as a coach. I’d be honored to help guide you in your quest to become a better version of yourself, to not allow the nerves to dictate your negative reactions to stress and adversity, and to align you body, mind and spirit, towards your best potential. Send me a message using the button below and let’s get to work.

Happy training friends.

Let’s go SMASH 50 miles team.