Chasing Excellence: A Story About Building the World’s Fittest Athletes

by Ben Bergeron

we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence. —Vince Lombardi Jr.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. —Thomas Edison

The qualifying process starts in the winter with the Open, a five-week, five-workout competition held in CrossFit affiliates and garage gyms around the world. In 2016, 302,000 people from 120 different countries participated. The top forty men and top forty women from eight regions then advance to the next stage, Regionals, which take place over a three-day period in May. Only the top five men and top five women from each region advance to the Games, which is held in late July of each year.

Beyond their extraordinary physical abilities, they share a set of attitudes and attributes that are paramount to their success—discipline, commitment, passion, confidence, persistence, resiliency, competitiveness, coachability, growth-mindedness, humility, hunger, dedication, tenacity, and grit.

Today I will do what others won’t so tomorrow I can do what others can’t. —Jerry Rice

What is grit, really? It’s a word that’s been used to describe everything under the sun, but it means something specific: when things get hard, you push harder; when you fail, you get back up stronger; when you don’t see results, you don’t get discouraged, but you just continue to pound away day, after day, after day, with relentlessness, consistency, heart, and passion—that’s grit.

He’s the kind of competitor who sees a gap between where he is and where he needs to be, and takes immediate and unrelenting steps to close it. It’s not a question of how much work it will take, how much suffering will be involved, or how fast the results will come. It’s about committing to the grind every day.

talent without grit is just potential. Talent plus grit is unstoppable.

Staying positive is difficult for humans because our DNA is hardwired to hold on to negative experiences over positive ones, for sheer survival. Way back when our species was in survival mode, it was far more important to know and remember that the big furry animal with claws and teeth would kill you than it was to know and remember that the butterfly was pretty. It was more important to remember which berries would kill you than which ones were tastiest. We developed a survival instinct that is ingrained in a negative mindset.

Never whine. Never complain. Never make excuses.

It’s so hot out. I’m tired. This traffic sucks. My boss is such an idiot—brings greater focus to things that are ultimately outside of your control and are potentially detrimental to your performance. In no competitive or life scenario will focusing on negative uncontrollable factors improve your performance or stress levels.

Your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, and your actions dictate your destiny.

Elite athletes know something that most people don’t—adversity is the best thing that can happen to you. The competitors here at the Games know that humans only improve through adversity by embracing short-term pain. Ensuring there is no struggle, no challenge, and staying in your wheelhouse is a recipe for spinning your wheels without improving. It’s the days when you have to do things that scare you, when you have to take risks, when you have to push against challenge and difficulty—those are the days that make you stronger, faster, and better overall.

In strength and conditioning circles, this is known as the Overload Principle. It basically states that you can force adaptation in your body by consistently pushing past yesterday’s limit; you can make yourself stronger by showing your body what stronger feels like. But in doing this, you’re going to experience adversity; you’re going to have days that are incredibly challenging, even scary. There are going to be days that cause you to question your motives and ability. It’s important to realize that the toughest days are your best days, because they have the potential to force the most adaptation—mentally, as well as physically.

The problem with limiting yourself to training, practicing, and living within your comfort zone is that it prevents you from growing and reaching your full potential. We need to struggle because the struggle is what makes us better—the struggle is itself the journey. Humans naturally fear adversity, which is ironic because adversity is the only thing that makes us better. We have an instinctive fear of the one thing that is certain to lead to the results we crave. When we know this, the challenges, hardships, and struggles that might seemingly look like setbacks and things to avoid become anything but—they become defining moments that create the most dramatic changes and should be cherished and sought after, not feared and endured.

We fear adversity and do everything we can to avoid it, even though it is a guaranteed part of life for every species on planet Earth. It’s not a matter of if we will encounter it, but only a matter of when. And when we do face it, the form the adversity takes is far less important than how we respond to it.

As Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Confidence doesn’t come from knowing that you control the outcome of a given event or moment. It comes from knowing that you control your response to a given event. Confidence is about your competitive drive, your focus, positivity, perseverance, and grit, and whether you can maintain those characteristics when it matters most. Can you maintain the characteristics of a champion, regardless of what life throws at you? If you can—that’s confidence.

E + R = O Event + Response = Outcome This equation teaches something very important about the way life works. We don’t control the events in life, and we don’t have direct control over the outcomes. The only thing we do have total control over is how we choose to respond. Successful people focus on the R part of the equation, while unsuccessful people tend to focus too much on the E part.

The other option is to realize the event itself is outside of her control and to ignore the other women completely, knowing that their performances have no bearing on her ability to deliver her own best effort.

Ultimate confidence is the understanding that you simply need to find a way to give your best at every moment and every opportunity in order to measure up to your own standard of success.

one of the most important components of building my athletes’ mindsets is coming up with a definition of success that is not tied to the result they’re after. Most people would look at Katrín and define success for her as winning the Games twice. What happens, then, if she doesn’t win? Is she a failure? Tying success or failure to one single point in time, one event over which you really don’t have much control of the circumstances, sets you up for unavoidable failure because there’s no way anyone can win every single time.

Here’s Katrín’s definition of success: Success to me is giving full effort knowing that was the best I was capable of. That said, full effort means nothing if day-to-day preparation was not all I had. Success to me is giving everything I have into each and every day, each and every moment; training, recovery, family, friends, giving back, inspiring, loving what I do. Then, come game time, give full effort, knowing I am the best I am capable of becoming. Notice that there’s nothing in there about winning, nothing about scores, nothing about personal records. Actually, since we began working together, we’ve never talked about winning the CrossFit Games. Never once has the subject been uttered.

We choose to focus on what’s inside our control, and what we can control is exactly what she defined as success. It’s what we can focus on this day, this hour, this minute. We can work into each and every moment with every ounce of effort and personal grit we can muster. In doing that, we’re truly successful in each moment. Results, when you live and work that way, are a foregone conclusion. The flip side, the opposite mindset, would put us in a place where success would be determined by Katrín’s performance during one single week in July. The preceding fifty-one weeks are just hoping we can make success happen, and we have no idea where we stand. Her entire year, and her whole measure of value, riding on five days in July is not a great way to experience your best. The pressure of those five days would be mentally insurmountable. For Katrín, the pressure she feels when faced with an event at the Games that’s not in her wheelhouse, like the Squat Clean Pyramid, is exactly the same as the pressure of any other day. She simply gives all she has, in each and every moment.

Hard work is incredibly important—you can’t get to or stay at the elite level without it. But once you’re there, hard work is not enough. To continue to rise, you have to work smarter, more efficiently, and more strategically. Malcolm Gladwell alludes to this concept in his book Outliers. Gladwell makes a compelling case for what he calls “The 10,000 Hour Rule”—that is, that you need ten thousand hours of practice to become world-class at anything.

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything,” writes neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

Deliberate practice can be characterized by the following four elements: It’s designed specifically to improve performance. It is repeated a lot. Feedback on results is continuously available. It’s highly demanding mentally, and not necessarily or particularly enjoyable, because it means you are focusing on improving areas in your performance that are not satisfactory.

I coach my athletes to maximize every minute of every day. Katrín, Mat, and Cole don’t just go through the motions, because at the elite level, it’s not enough just to show up. If the goal is to get better every single day, you have to make every moment you’re practicing the best you’re possibly capable of.

Becoming world-class at something takes an extraordinary amount of work. As Gladwell illustrates, it takes a minimum of ten years of practice before you can expect to start achieving at an elite level. Along the way, you have to practice like you’re possessed. The kind of deliberate practice that leads to success takes a level of commitment, dedication, patience, focus, grit, and resilience that is impossible without an essential ingredient. Passion.

Passion will outperform drive every time, because passion breeds a bulletproof level of resilience.

Passion allows you to persevere when any other sane person would quit.

Katrín doesn’t do anything that normal girls her age do. She wakes up every morning and reads books about mindset. She spends seven hours in the gym, then spends the remaining hours seeing bodywork specialists, prepping her nutrition, and following recovery protocols. It’s a laser-focused life, and it seems like a huge sacrifice to those of us wanting to live in balance. From time to time, someone will point this out to her. Her response is always the same. “I’m not sacrificing anything,” she says. “I love what I’m doing. If you gave me the choice of anything in the world to do, I’d do exactly this.”

Only those who have the patience to do things perfectly will acquire the skills to do difficult things easily. —Friedrich Schiller

Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you need to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.

The process is about focusing on the steps to success rather than worrying about the result.

Katrín and I never talk about winning the CrossFit Games. Instead, we focus on creating the right thoughts, habits, and priorities, with the belief that those are the things that lead to success.

There’s so much literature about goal-setting. We’ve been told that high achievers are those who are out there enthusiastically setting goals. We hear the most about the importance of SMART goals—those that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Better goals lead to better results, they say. And yet, if that were true, the person with the best goals would win the CrossFit Games. In reality, it’s the opposite. People tend to focus disproportionately on results, while neglecting the day-to-day things that will get them there. What’s the effort you need to put in in order to achieve that goal? Goals are nothing but the results from which you put forth effort.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. —Leonardo da Vinci

As an elite athlete, there are only five things that you can truly control—your training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset. If it doesn’t fall into one of those categories, I tell my athletes, forget about it. Control the things you can control, and ignore everything else.

A huge piece of chasing excellence is attention to tiny details, but the key distinction is that you pay attention to the right details, the ones within your control and over which you have power.

I coach my athletes not to focus on anyone’s performance but their own. We don’t say, Look at how much he can lift or how fast she ran. I have to beat that. They’re only competing with themselves.

Once you learn to ignore the things you can’t control, the next step is to identify the things you can control and should be focusing on.

For my athletes, there are five things completely within our control—training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset. Within each area, we have identified five to ten specific daily tasks or habits that are essential to our ability to make progress. Inside the training category, for example, there are specific warm-up and cool-down techniques and a prescribed number of days they will swim each week. Nutrition is comprised of eating a specific quantity of carbohydrates, protein, and fat at certain times as well as pre- and post-training fueling protocols. We dial in their sleep by tracking total hours and the quality of their sleep, as well as creating a nightly routine that promotes more restful nights. We maximize recovery by having the athletes schedule regular sauna sessions, professional body work, muscle stim, and more. The athletes are accountable for the development of their mental toughness through a pre-training mindfulness practice on a daily basis, as well as other character-development exercises.

Achievement becomes the result of how committed you are to following the process.

If the event went great, we have a quick high-five celebration. If it’s a bad event, we have a short grieving session. Both are part of the process, but then you need to be able to turn the page. If you don’t allow for that—if you don’t let yourself grieve for five minutes—it’ll haunt you; you won’t be able to shake it off.

“We’re going to have moments like this at the Games,” I told her. “We’re going to have events that feel like this. We’re going to be frustrated. We’re never going to have fifteen events in a row of sunshine and rainbows—it’s just not going to happen. We’re going to be frustrated at least once, if not multiple times, during Games week. When that happens, are we going to give up and host a pity party? Are we going to let it linger? Are we going to live in that moment for longer than we need to?” “This is exactly what it’s going to feel like,” I told her. “Let’s use this moment, right now, to learn how to turn the page. We need to learn how to take advantage of the next available moments, which are not affected whatsoever by what just happened. It’s gone. Once it’s happened, it no longer exists. Particularly in a sport like ours, where every event is completely different and has absolutely no bearing on the next one, living in the past is a liability that will diminish future opportunities.”

Understanding that you only have control over the present moment is the key to being able to turn the page. Reliving the past is a recipe for unnecessary depression, and fearing the future is a surefire way to anxiety. Learning to live in the present moment is vital, because it’s the only thing you have any control over. The only thing you can do to rectify the past or influence the future is to take action now, in the present moment.

When physical abilities are equal, mindset becomes the separator.

“Sports do not build character, they reveal it.”