On Motivation

It's a new week, here's how I get myself going when I'd rather just... not

Along the Chattahoochee River here in Atlanta, where Twix (that’s her above) and I went for a long walk this weekend.

His name has fallen off most people’s radars today, his accomplishments largely confined to the history books. But what he did on a gray, windswept day in England exactly 70 years ago today still echoes into the moment we’re living in, in the way we talk about motivation and finding out what we’re actually capable of.

I’m talking, of course, about Roger Bannister, the now-legendary British runner who broke the barrier once thought unbreakable: the four-minute mile. He did so on May 6, 1954, on Oxford, England’s now-legendary Iffley Road track.

At the time a medical student at Oxford University, he trained consistently and meticulously — but also in a very strictly limited way, squeezing his runs into his 45-minute lunch breaks between his daily hospital rounds.

Now, I should add he was 25 years old at the time, near the peak of his physical powers, and an extraordinarily gifted and motivated athlete. Those qualities, all in one package, are pretty rare to say the least.

But there’s something about what he did that day, and what came after, that’s particularly interesting to me: the four-minute mile wasn’t just a physical limit that coaches, doctors and everyone involved with the sport thought would never be broken.

It was a psychological limit, too. Because it was spoken about so often, in such glaringly daunting ways — Bannister himself told Sebastian Coe, another British track-and-field Olympian, many people back then thought him mad for even trying:

“People don’t appreciate the mental barrier that he also had to break through,” he pointed out. “He was a doctor. And he would say to me: ‘I used to read articles in medical journals saying that if anybody tried it, they would probably die in the process’.”

I try to see that the way Bannister might have all those decades ago: those journals, and the specialists he knew, might all have told him he was attempting something extremely dangerous. So there must have been at least a little bit of terror in the back of his mind about what might happen.

And yet, he trusted himself. He decided to find out where his limits really were, what he had inside himself — and that’s just as interesting as the accomplishment itself.

Lately, I’ve been following your comments on posts here, listening to your stories. And, to be sure, they’ll never grab headlines like he did. But, to me, they’re no less impressive than what Roger Bannister did 70 years ago.

I’ve been following our friend and fellow subscriber Clark Rose, who ran nearly a third of a 24-hour, 120-mile race over the weekend — and lived to tell the tale! I’ve also been following the training of my friend

Polina Pompliano

, whose race a couple weekends ago was derailed by food poisoning the night before — so she ran a half marathon on her own in New York’s Central Park. (You can read her full story here.)

I don’t think your goal, or my goal, or anyone’s goal needs to be as boundary-breaking as Bannister’s to be worthy. It just has to be meaningful to us. To give us that feeling of liftoff, even just for a moment, that we’re capable of more than we realize.

I can imagine that’s exactly how Clark and Polina felt after achieving their goals (not to mention, feeling tired!) and that’s something that’s available to us all.

I just wanted to share that with you today, especially if you’re feeling the way I often do, if you just can’t quite muster up the motivation you’ve been needing. It’s there, trust me it is. (This is something I have to remind myself often, by the way!)

Seeing examples like these three — and the ones you share with me every week — are what keeps me going.

In the meantime, I hope you have a great, great run out there today — let me know how it goes!

Your friend,

— Terrell