Mental toughness and Ice baths
I have told many of you that I am a big believer in ice baths. If you are an athlete of any type, hopefully at some point someone has told you the advantages of putting four or five bags of ice in your bathtub, filling it with water and siting in it for fifteen minutes. I can tell you from personal experience if you work out for more than two hours or do a especially hard crossfit workout such as Fran or Murph, an ice bath will allow you to recover in a fraction of the time. There of course is a catch. It takes enormous mental toughness to get into and stay seated in water that is fourty degress. I think a icebath is a great example of how the best things in life are not easy. What is suprising about icebaths and I suspect all things that require mental toughness is that many people simply avoid them even though their coach recomends them. In the endurance world there is a lot of transperancy. It is difficult to hide the fact that bonked on the marathon. You can look into someones eyes and see they bonked. In the business world it is much more deficult to see what really happened that led to someones failure in a particular area or event. Most of us don’t want to verbalize the real reason we failed. I propose that the reason that many people fail is that they did not poses the mental toughness needed to do what it takes to succeed. Hopefully you will never look at the bathtub the same way again.
