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Learning in Public: Mindfulness, Sports & Performance
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Courtney Dauwalter

World’s best female ultra-runner.
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Key Concepts

Unstructured training, listen to your body but push hard.
Pain cave: visual place she goes when running gets hard.
Big mindset shift from pushing off pain cave for as long as possible, to celebrating getting there.
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@Courtney Dauwalter on Rich Roll Podcast
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Key Quotes


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@Courtney Dauwalter
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I mean, it’s just a mindset right? It’s all in our heads. In the past couple years it’s been the place I want to get to. So like changing it to a place where I get to celebrate that I made it there, and then that’s where the work actually happens. So making the pain cave bigger is how I view it, instead of pushing the pain cave away. I mean our minds are so powerful, so even just changing the story line makes it a whole different game.
Rich (interviewer):
So what’s that story, what’s the script that you flip when you’re in that headspace and it’s getting really hard?
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@Courtney Dauwalter
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Yeah, it’s like perfect, this is what we wanted. Now we get to actuallly do the hard work of making the cave bigger and so it’s like picturing a chisel and just making tunnels in my pain cave in my brain.
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It’s just telling myself a different story about that place where it hurts so bad. Where before it was like surviving it. And now it’s like, this is so cool, we made it here and now we work.

Notes

Unique intuitive training method — no plan until the day of, keep it fun
‘The pain cave’ — visual place she goes in her mind when running gets difficult
She used to ‘push off’ the pain cave as long as she could in a race.
She made a shift in recent years to celebrate that she got to the pain cave and acknowledge that’s where the work begins.
She pictures herself making the pain cave bigger by chiseling away tunnels inside it.
Flipping the frame from wanting to get to pain cave rather than avoiding it, that’s where the work happens.

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