How to Be More Resilient, According to an Elite Performance Coach
How to Be More Resilient, According to an Elite Performance Coach
By Clay Skipper July 5, 2022
We're past the days of “no pain, no gain.” Steve Magness, elite running coach and performance guru, on what toughness looks like now.
As a kid, Steve Magness used to run until he puked. “That was my thing,” he says. This model of toughness—pushing through pain—worked well for him. So well, in fact, that he clocked a blazing 4:01 mile in high school. But several years later, when trying to break the four-minute barrier while running at the University of Houston, his strategy backfired.
Trying to work through an uncomfortable sensation in his neck, Magness collapsed. He’d given himself a condition that caused his vocal cords to malfunction by reflexively closing (and making it hard to breathe) at the first sign of stress. He could no longer just will his way through pain.
“I had to relax, to keep my breathing, neck, and mind steady and under control, all at the exact moment when discomfort and doubts were at their highest,” he writes in his new book, Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness. “In many ways, this book started the moment I collapsed. A search for what it means to be tough, for understanding how to control an inner world that often goes haywire.”
That was almost 15 years ago, and in the time since, Magness has become not just a successful running coach but an expert on human performance, working with everyone from NASA to Nike, and co-authoring the 2017 book Peak Performance with Brad Stulberg. What makes his new book unique—and especially useful—is that it threads the needle between the outdated outlook of “no pain, no gain” and the more contemporary model of self-care, which can easily tip into lazy self-indulgence.
He’s exploring a different, more productive way to navigate our pain that neither advocates ramming straight through it nor tries to escape it entirely. That might be the discomfort of trying to run your fastest mile, or will yourself through another hour of work, or simply use your phone less.
Whatever pain you’re trying to endure, here Magness lays out the lessons he’s learned on persevering in a more productive manner.
GQ: What was your childhood model of toughness?
Magness: My model came entirely from sports. I tried and played practically every sport possible: baseball, football, basketball, even street hockey somehow down in the middle of the South. When you go through that, especially in Texas in the ’80s and ’90s, you get a particular style of toughness placed on you. Put your head down and do everything you can to get on the other side of the pain.
I remember coaches telling me not to show emotion. You didn’t give the competitor any hints that anything could ever be wrong. No matter the chaos inside, you didn’t give away that you had doubts or insecurities. But eventually there are competitions where you dig deep, you reach down to find that extra oomph, and it’s just not there. It backfires.
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https://www.gq.com/story/steve-magness-do-hard-things-interview