How endurance run boosted my resilience

“It’s your ability to withstand adversity and bounce back and grow despite life’s downturns,” says Amit Sood.

The main sport that I've played in my whole life, at least until now, has been football. During training sessions I hated running, I swear. But life changes, people change and with a 100km run (without any injures) I showed myself that if you want you can.

Yeah, to be honest, I don't really believe in these common words because there are many other factors to be succesful but one thing is true, if you don't try you can't reach your dreams and failures are part of the success.

But let me take a step back...

In 2015 (I was 21 years old) something changed me and I really started believing in myself. From that year I started one step at a time to grow. It was like an endurance run where you have to know your limits, always take a small step forward and always look forward.

The keypoint that every time makes me thinking "Yes, I can do it" is always the same. Our life will end one day and on that day you can't rollback and do different things, take different paths, etc.
You are not a version of an application that if customers don't like it can be rolled back to a previous! 😂😂😂

An other force that comes to me when I don't believe in myself as I should (and as you should!) is the social proof. Marketing teaches us that one reason that persuades us during a purchase is the social proof. The more people have already purchased that product the more confident you feel to proceed. Isn't true?
Yes but I'm not saying anything new because it's written in all the marketing books 🤪

But try to think something similar of yourself

• If you reached X, why you can't reach X+1?
• Successful people have become successful somehow, haven’t they?

Personally, in pratice, I sometimes think to my little goals:

• I graduated in computer science BUT I never believed in it when I started.
• I changed at least 3 companies (I founded one of these) with always an higher view BUT when I started working I never thinked to grow myself as I did.
• I started a company BUT I never thinked that I could.
• I started living to an other city BUT I thinked that I would always live in the same little town.
• I run 100km in a single race BUT I hated running before.

Of course my last challange was a 100km italian race called 100km del Passatore.
100km of Passatore starts from Florence in Tuscany and ends in Faenza in Emilia Romagna country and it usually takes place at the end on May.

Now I can say that it was harder than I expected but thanks to a strong resilience I succesfully did this challange.

I started to feel tired already at 15 km maybe for the too hot weather or maybe to a not well recovery in the days before. Thinking that I still had 80km ahead demoralized me so much that I began to think of stopping myself. From now I decided to find a way to come out of this deep crisis. I knew that I had a full year of hard training (if you are interested I posted there my race journey https://www.yuribacciarini.com/sports/my-journey-from-0-to-100km/) and starting from this assumption I called my trainer and followed exactly what he said to me.

Up to 50km I alternated running with walking in order to prevent the legs from locking and trying to think about the best.

Now I can say that at 50km the race seriously started as many people say. More and more runners began to retreat at refreshment points. My strategy was trying to not thinking that I already did 50km but to think that the race had just begun.

My legs knew the true but at that moment I really discovered the role of our brain.
Our brain can lead us where our legs could not.

After 60km my legs were over. The night comes and mentally it was not very easy to go on. I started thinking about positive things, positive people and the things I did but never thought I could. And also having a friend with an huge ultramarathon experience beside me helped a lot.
It's difficult to explain but this was my winning strategy.

Resilience is a common skill between endurance run and work.
I strongly believe that they train each other.

And when you realize you made it, you are already thinking about the next step.
That's how we are made to work. 🚀🚀🚀