Fighter's Mind, A Read online

  He could have learned from Dan Gable, especially Gable’s “back-off-to-win” experience, how Gable had been winning his last match in college but kept going for the pin and lost. Gable learned that lesson, internalized it, and won with it.

  In the ’96 finals for a berth on the Olympic team Randy was wrestling against his “nemesis” Mike Foy. He was winning by 9 points with forty-five seconds left and could have “run all over the mat and he never would have beat me.” But Randy “wanted to tech fall his ass. I wanted to beat him, so I stayed on him, aggressive, went for that last fall and I ended up on my back and pinned.” Like Dan, that loss is ever fresh. Watching the match today, it’s hard to believe that was a pin. Randy was pushing Foy all over the place. In the final seconds his shoulders brush the mat as they roll over for the briefest moment.

  But just as Gable probably never would have had the fire to have the Olympic career he did without losing that final NCAA match, Randy might never have had the fire to succeed in the way he did as a fighter if he’d won a medal in the Olympics. And it’s something Randy is tangentially aware of.

  Even to this day, Randy’s wrestling matches are more important to him than his fighting career. When I ask him about losing in general, he talks solely about wrestling. Maybe he thought I meant wrestling—but the mind-set is revealing. “I lost the NCAA finals twice, and the Olympic trials four times when I could have made the team. But I learned to put it in perspective.”

  Randy went into one of his favorite topics.

  “I started thinking about the differences between being nervous and being excited—they’re very similar. The physical attributes you assign to each are real similar, and one has negative connotations. Nervousness means something bad is happening and you’re not enjoying it, and being excited makes you smile, you love what you’re doing and good things are happening.”

  I had gone through a similar experience years ago, when I first thought about being a writer. I was anxious about the future, about not knowing where I was going to be living in three or four months, never having a salary. I realized that I couldn’t do that—not if I wanted to be a writer. I couldn’t live in a state of anxiety, it had to be excitement. I tell that to friends or people I meet who want to be writers or artists, anybody who wants to do something different, a job without security. Don’t let it be anxiety; let that uncertainty generate excitement. If you can’t make that switch you shouldn’t be a writer, or an artist, or a fighter. You won’t enjoy it.

  There have been plenty of scientific studies that show how laughter and being relaxed reduces stress hormones and performance inhibitors. Smiling changes our brain. It’s common sense, sports psych 101. Randy’s own relationship with fear is distinct, studied. He turns his opponents into athletic puzzles. It’s not about them, personally, and he has no emotion about them.

  “In the Tim Sylvia fight, I knew it was going to be a little problem for Tim—because he fights on emotion. He has to generate a little dislike, a little anger. And Tim and I are friends, he stayed at my house. I knew that would make things a little harder for him, because he respects me.”

  Randy has no problem fighting his friends because of where he comes from, the wrestling; it’s not personal.

  “It’s problem solving. With Chuck Liddell, I knew there was a distinct risk that if I did what I had to do to beat him I could get knocked out. So at some point you have to make friends with the worst-case possibility. But hey, if the worst thing that happens is you lose a fucking fight, you’re doing good. So risk it.”

  Randy is a competitor, it’s something that gets said a lot. He loves the process, the training and learning, but the “pinnacle of competition” for him is when you see your opponent break. “Once you do it . . . you realize that’s what it’s all about. I never even really saw it until I went to Oklahoma State. But you open a guy’s eyes to that mind-set and it changes him.

  “The first time that I felt it was with Vitor.” Randy smiles avidly. Here’s something he enjoys remembering, trying to quantify. “It’s almost a noise. I liken it to a stick snapping. You can hear it, feel the stick break.”

  He mimes snapping a stick in half.

  “Tito was close, he struggled with it. From the third round on I would take him right to the edge, I would feel the will start to go, and he screamed. He’d find a way. He knew he was close to giving up but he’d come storming back, he’d try and fight and find a way to fight on. He never really did break, he was right there teetering and I couldn’t push him over.

  “You need to have the conditioning and mentality to stay one step ahead, make them work and keep scoring, and frustrate them, until they try and stop it some other way. With Vitor I felt the tension leave him, and shortly after, he fell over. There was no big shot, but all these little ones. Physically, he’d reached his limit.”

  Randy talked at length about breaking a fighter’s will, saying “the way you do it is through conditioning, being one step ahead of them . . . keep making them work, keep scoring, at some point they’ll break and give in to you, they’ll try and make it stop some other way. In wrestling, our national coach was big on ‘grind’ matches. You’d do your own warm-up for fifteen minutes and then wrestle with one partner for ninety minutes straight. You didn’t stop, drink water, or do anything but go for ninety minutes, and I saw more guys break in that time. I saw guys start crying.”

  Randy talked about watching Rulon Gardner, a heavyweight, and his brother Reynold, who “didn’t look like anything, athletically, but they’d flat push guys and break their hearts.”

  I asked Randy if he ever broke in those grind matches, and he smiles a little smile. His special secret.

  “You know, I never broke. I got beat up plenty but I never broke. I go with the heavyweights like Rulon and they physically beat me up, and I couldn’t score, but I never got to the point where I quit trying. I have no idea why. Everybody has their limit. I’m sure I have my limit, too. I’ve just never reached it in a ninety-minute grind match.”

  Or in a five-round MMA title fight. There may very well be something that could break Randy, some limit, but you get the feeling it’s not a fight.

  IT NEVER ALWAYS GETS WORSE

  David Horton. (Courtesy: David Horton)

  There is magic in far-running. There’s an aura, a mystique around the Paiute Indians, who could somehow make a hundred miles in a day across the Mojave, or the Japanese “marathon monks” of Mount Hiei, who cover a route of forty-nine miles every day for months on end. Today’s ultramarathoners run races of more than a hundred miles in the desert heat or southern forests. These are mysterious, mythic figures covering such immense distances that mere mortals tremble in uncertainty and disbelief. It can’t be, but it is—and so often dismissed, with a shrug or a shake of the head, into the realm of modern legend, half-believed, incomprehensible.

  I remember as a child reading about colonial New England and Canada, of the French coureur de bois (the fur trappers, the “runners of the woods”) making fifty miles a day in the winter, wearing snowshoes, and then wrapping themselves in bearskin and sleeping under a tree. It sounded outlandish, that they could be so different from us, so much tougher.

  I took a Wilderness EMT course in New Hampshire in 2002 to help my Wildland Firefighting career. One of the instructors had been an Ironman triathlete. I had asked him about the absurd thing that was an Ironman race—to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and then run a marathon. He had laughed at my attitude. The common attitude, I could never do that it.

  “You don’t know how fast you are,” he said. “I ran my first half-marathon, and then a little while later ran my first marathon—in the same time. It’s all mental, all in the push.”

  I fought fire with a guy who’d been a Division 1 cross-country runner, and he’d said with a shake of his shaggy head, “It’s all mental, dude.”

  Kyle Klingman, the young assistant at the Dan Gable Wrestling Museum, had told me he wasn’t a wrestler, but I could see
he was some kind of athlete. He had a cadaverous look, a tinge of the fanatic in his eyes, that had initially puzzled me. Then I found out he ran ultramarathons. When I asked him about that mentality, Kyle led me to David Horton, a strange, legendary character even among the rogues gallery of ultra-runners.

  Horton once held the Appalachian Trail record, that famous trail that runs 2,175 miles from Georgia to Maine. He’d run it in 52 days, 9 hours. I’d met fast “through-hikers” who did it in four months. Horton had run the thing, forty-plus miles a day for more than fifty days. He’d run the third best time in the Trans-America, a race from L.A. to New York. And he’d recently, at the age of fifty-five, crushed the record for the Pacific Crest Trail, 2,650 miles in sixty-six days, a feat well documented in The Runner, a film by another ultrarunner J. B. Benna of Journey Films. Ultrarunning is defined as anything longer than a marathon, which is twenty-six miles. Usually the races are either fifty or a hundred miles, or they take place over a series of days. What Horton does is on the far end of even that extreme category.

  Horton was also a professor of kinesiology at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he also taught running. He was a big Dan Gable fan. Kyle gave me his number and I caught up with him for a phone call.

  We started talking about Dan Gable. Horton was effusive. “I think he’s the toughest athlete that I know of. I can’t think of anyone tougher . . . not only his wrestling but his coaching. Why was he like that? Sure his parents helped, and his situation, but I think he was just a tougher-than-nails little boy, too.”

  Horton’s voice is accented and charming, with some of that southern courtliness and rhythm. He’s eloquent, used to expounding and teaching, comfortable in that role, but pure and honest. Everything false has been burned away; like many great fighters there’s mostly honesty and pure emotion. Like an asteroid falling to the earth, these people have endured so much beyond the limits of what they thought was human endurance that any falseness and cuteness, anything extraneous, got seared off.

  “Do you feel that overtraining is a myth?” I asked him.

  “Yes, overtraining is a myth,” he said. “The harder you train, the more you train, the better you’ll do. World-class athletes train on the verge of injury. A guy I know who finished second in the Trans-America Race said he took a leave of absence from his job and for two months, in preparation, averaged fifty miles a day.”

  The Trans-America footrace, of which there have been eight, is held in sixty-four stages, on sixty-four straight days, and the time is cumulative. This race was nine weeks, averaging 317 miles per week. Day after day of 52 miles, 44 miles, 36 miles, back to 52 miles. How do you prepare for something like that?

  “I said to him, ‘I feel that was a little too much.’ And he agreed with me. For two months I averaged a hundred and sixty miles a week, about half what he did, and I ran the third fastest time ever. Was that too much? Nope, that was about right . . . but who knows, maybe if I’d done more I’d have done better . . . but the only way to find out is to do it again!”

  So maybe overtraining isn’t exactly a myth, I thought. You should just behave as if it is, until you can prove otherwise by injuring yourself. It’s not a myth but you need to pretend it is.

  Horton’s voice swoops and swirls over the phone, animated. I bet he’s a good teacher. He understands that to teach you have to entertain.

  “Ted Corbitt, the father of ultrarunning, a black man, just passed away in the last few years. He was in New York and he’d train a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy, two hundred miles a week—and this is at a time when forty or fifty miles a week was thought of as outrageous. He found two hundred worked for him.”

  When I explained my project and asked him about the mental game in ultrarunning, I could hear him inhale thoughtfully down the line.

  “It’s a tough subject,” he said. “If you asked me what percentage for the split between mental and physical, I often say it’s eighty-fifty, which of course doesn’t quite add up. Any sport like this, with a prolonged level of discomfort, it’s going to have a strong mental component.

  “Success in ultras depends on the ability to sustain discomfort for prolonged periods of time, whether it’s hours or days or many days . . . it’s just that. All it takes to relieve it is to stop—and that’s what we’re fighting against, all the time.”

  It was interesting to think about—winning the battle against the urge to stop, that’s what it takes. It reminded me of the difference between a combat photographer and a soldier in a war. The soldier has no choice, he has to be there, while the photographer is facing a test of courage, an endurance test, that he can leave at any time and go home. Easier to be brave for the photographer, when it’s a choice.

  “The body can always do more than the mind thinks it can. In the first year of the Trans-America, running from Los Angeles to New York, a young man got a stress fracture in Missouri and for a period of a couple weeks he still had to run the average of forty-five miles a day, and he was just barely making the cutoffs. But he made them. And toward the end his foot started recovering, and he started running fast again.

  “The first time I did the Appalachian Trail I was averaging forty miles a day from Georgia to Maine,” he says almost in a sing-song, he’s told this story so many times.

  “On days eight, nine, and ten I had severe tendonitis in one shin, and one day all day long I was urinating blood. For a thousand miles I was dealing with shin splints, icing, and using antiinflammatories . . . but then finally they got well!

  “Your body sends signals to your mind, It’s time to stop, let up, this doesn’t feel good, it HURTS! The mind has to override the signal.

  “You know those little glass globe candles on the tables at restaurants? With a narrow opening at the top, just a few inches across? Now, you can put your hand over the mouth of that candle, and if you hold it there long enough the flame will go out. But it’ll hurt. If someone bet you ten dollars you might try it, but it starts to burn a little and you jerk your hand away. Now if someone told you ‘I’ll give you a million dollars’ . . . NOW there are all sorts of signals in your mind. That’s what mental training is about, learning to deal with signals and what you can override, and what you shouldn’t.”

  I asked him about the ability to override, where it comes from.

  “It’s not an easy thing, it’s very difficult, and it doesn’t come overnight. Any time I go out to do something extremely difficult, I always wonder, Do I have the edge, this time? Because I’ve done it before, does it mean I can do it again?”

  I thought about Tom Brands, Gable’s apostle, talking about the “mysteries of tough guys.” You get the sense David Horton takes to the trail in some way to see what will happen, out of curiosity, to see where his mind and body will take him once he’s gone farther than he thought he could.

  “It’s still ahout how bad do you want it. Once you’ve achieved some major thing, can you repeat? Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t.”

  I asked him about the athlete’s dilemma—how to tell what kind of pain it is. Is the pain just hurting or is it from being injured?

  “Trial and error, the only way. No book or magazine can tell you, and it doesn’t matter what other people say.

  “Say you sprain your ankle. Should you stop and ice it or keep going? Every time I’ve sprained an ankle I kept going. But does that mean everyone should? No.”

  He thought about it for a moment. “I’ve seen broken bones that didn’t swell up, and things swell up hugely that there was nothing really wrong with. The only way to know is experience.” And to have that drive to push through, that first time—to see, to go find out.

  I watched The Runner, the documentary about Horton’s record-breaking Pacific Crest Trail run from Mexico to Canada in sixty-six days with a 300,000-foot total elevation change. That’s averaging more than 4,500 feet of change a day, which is horrific. It’s an ungodly amount of up and down.

  There
were a few things that kept coming to mind when I watched the documentary. Here was a guy who wore his heart on his sleeve; his emotions and feelings are out there, in play. He obviously can harness them and put them to work.

  When I asked him about using his emotions, David responded eagerly, almost confessing a dirty secret: “One of the things I do, it sounds strange, I sometimes will make myself cry. I’ll think about my family, or home, or I’ll start singing a sad song, and I’ll start crying. Then after I cry, I feel better—not just mentally but physically. Physically, I FEEL BETTER.” He constructs a cathartic release for himself, something the ancient Greeks thought would restore and purify you.

  The other thing that struck me, watching the documentary, was the dual nature of David. Sometimes, at rest, he seemed frail, some fifty-five-year-old machine, too old to have a hope of success, already past his limit. But then, when he runs, there’s a sense of iron running through his body. A large chunk of steel, woven inside that fragile, aging, human frame. Endlessly durable, wound tight.

  “Commitment to a goal, that’s a big part of ultrarunning. Doing what you said you were going to do. It’s as simple as that. Part of it is that I tell people; I have a team that helps me.” David sets himself up, he talks about his goals, to give him another reason not to quit later. He’s told everyone he knows he’s doing it.

  “The Appalachian Trail, the Trans-America, the PCT—once I start one of those things, I’m totally committed. I don’t view it as dedication. It’s just something I do. It’s like the light switch in my office. When I open the door and turn on the switch, the light comes on. That’s what I do when I start running. I don’t think about it. I just get up in the morning and go. To me it’s not dedication, it’s commitment.