The headline of Jessie Diggins’ blog post of January 13 was “You Can Do Hard Things.” It’s a fascinating and lengthy account of her days leading up to the Olympics, where she won her second and third Olympic medals in cross-country skiing.
Here’s how she describes her plan to intentionally subject herself to intense discomfort right before the Olympics:
I had to make the choice, over and over and over again, to keep moving forward, one stumbling, painful step at a time. I routinely race hard enough that I can’t feel parts (or all) of my legs. When I collapse in the snow after a race where I’ve given it my all, I feel like I’m floating while the world is spinning around me, and I have to hold onto the snow to keep from sliding sideways. Sometimes my vision tints yellow or pink, even when my glasses are clear. My greatest strength in ski racing has always been knowing how to pull more from my body than is reasonable. So when I say that the final climb in this tour was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done…I really mean it.
And that’s exactly why I wanted to do it. Half of my training plan leading into the Olympics included a lot of racing in order to get the physical fitness boost that I’m accustomed to after recovering from the Tour. The other half was the mental toughness boost that can only be earned the extremely hard way. The first time you feel that kind of pain cannot be the one time in your life that it really matters, or you won’t know what to do with it; how to move through it, how to feel it without being consumed by it.
We all know what happened next. Early in the Olympics, she won a bronze in the women’s sprint free. Near the end of the Olympics, she won a silver medal in the women’s 30-kilometer mass start. Across all of sports, very few athletes compete in both sprints as well as long-distance events; they require completely different training and body types.
“To have a medal in the sprint and the 30 km are the ultimate bookends for me. I have been trying to be a good all-around athlete my whole life, so this has been really cool,” Diggins said. As the Wall Street Journal put it, this accomplishment was like if Usain Bolt followed up his 100-meter dash with the Olympic marathon. Too hard, too crazy to believe, right?
You probably also know that Diggins had food poisoning just 30 hours before the 30-kilometer race.
Diggins goes out of her way to acknowledge that she has struggled with an eating disorder in the past and that “the amount of pressure placed on my shoulders has not been easy and has been building for four years.” She is neither superhuman nor invincible.
That said, she has one strength that anyone can embrace: she is willing to do hard things.
You may not win an Olympic medal or be the best in the world at anything. You cannot control how hard someone else competes or whether luck shifts in your favor.
But you can decide to do hard things. You can learn from Diggins and actually seek out such challenges.
The Link LonkFebruary 23, 2022 at 06:15AM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucekasanoff/2022/02/22/jessie-diggins-proves-you-too-can-do-hard-things/
Jessie Diggins Proves You, Too, Can Do Hard Things - Forbes
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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