I stole the title from Mayhem. It’s too good not to use.
The overarching lesson of the book Do Hard Things is that toughness is not created by mercilessly driving someone past their limitations. That’s the old-school way of thinking about toughness. Think Bear Bryant’s Junction Boys or any Indiana Hoosier Basketball team under Bobby Knight. But science shows that people must be given some level of control over their situation to develop true toughness. The theory being that if everything you ever do is for a dictator, then when faced with a tough situation, you will likely give up in the absence of the dictator.
Tuesdays at Pontiff are not the typical F3 workout. Pai Gow takes the Q for almost all of them and he prescribes the sprint workout for the day. The pax has no control over designing the workout. That is always done by Pai Gow. However, he is far from a dictator. He gives instruction and goals for completing the workout, but leaves the rest up to the Pax as to how they want to complete the workout.
Today PVC, Two Yutes and I were faced with a Pai Gow – less workout. We started with a slow one mile jog. At the end of our warm-up we had a decision to make. Do we continue to take it easy and slow jog the rest of the workout or do we borrow one of the sprint workouts that Pai Gow has given us in the past and push ourselves? Suddenly the most recent chapter of Do Hard Things started to make sense. The temptation to slow jog the rest of the workout was there, and had we been beaten down souls every Tuesday, we might have taken the opportunity to take a Tuesday off. But we are not beaten down souls. Our pre-fontal cortexes are fully engaged and they encouraged us to do the hard thing:
The Thang:
One Mile warm-up. Sprint a 100, 200, 300 and 400 with a 100m recovery between each. Finish with a 400m recovery lap. Then repeat the entire set. We did 3 sets and covered about 4.5 miles.
Meanwhile Tenderloin did his own thing on the track, while Scantron dictated the KnOT workout to Rougarou. Does Rougarou have any control? Is he building toughness or just hatred for Scantron? Only Roug knows.
Things we learned:
• Mosquitos eat bitcoin
• More NHL players are born in January than any other month.
• Dentists open at 7:00 am
