You can be successful even while you're being pounded!

"You can be successful even while you're being pounded" – The Crossroad by Mark Donaldson VC

I was pondering this quote from Mark Donaldson’s book as I was riding along the banks of the Snowy River recently, and found great resonance not only for myself personally, but also professionally.?It’s all about considering what winning looks like to you.

Donaldson too was a keen athlete, and in his biography he uses the metaphor of surfing to talk about developing his success mindset – a mindset that helped him through his years of combat.

As a young man, Donaldson surfed at every opportunity.?He was clearly an “all or nothing” personality, so he would surf for hours on end when time and conditions allowed, and even when they didn’t, when it was recommended that he not go out into the water, he’d go and do it anyway.

He talks about how he just loved the adversity of it.?Alone with the waves, he could challenge himself and not worry about anyone else’s measure of success.?It didn’t matter if he caught the wave or not, being out there and trying was success in itself.

There’s a special magic in this concept that we can all use in times of adversity, when things don’t always go our way. If we can be clear on what success looks like, and be clear that there is a pathway to success that is not solely what we might traditionally call a “win”, we can take some sense of achievement and keep a cool head. This was especially important in his career as a military soldier in the heat of combat.

While other soldiers around him were fixated on victory, Donaldson knew that when situations arose and military actions did not go as planned, he would need to keep his resolve and find a new definition for success.

As I rode, I thought about how this applied to the world of cycling, which as you know is a passion of mine. Recently I watched a video about a man who was undertaking the Peaks Challenge, a day-long race in the Victorian High Country that I did for the first time in 2022.?For my first ride – my main focus was simply to finish.?This cyclist was looking to set a record time, and his mindset was totally centred around this.?However, in the first ten kilometres of the ride, his pedal came loose.?

Now this is a simple thing to fix – all he needed to do was stop and tighten it with an Allen key.?It’s the sort of basic bicycle maintenance you have to be prepared to do at any time.?But instead, focused on the goal of setting the fastest time, he gave up.

If he wasn’t going to win, there was no point in his mind in continuing.?

There’s not a lot of inspiration to be taken from this story.

Fortunately though, there are plenty of other cycling stories out there that provide me with more encouragement while I am out in the wilderness on these long rides – where you combat the temptation to give it all in, especially when you encounter something unexpected in the terrain.

I think about Martin Pisacka, one of the competitors in the Silk Road Mountain Race in Kyrgyzstan, which is a 1800km bikepacking race in the middle of nowhere.?Riders are completely unsupported, so it is the kind of challenge where you can only rely on yourself, and the strength of your commitment.?I’m interested in undertaking it myself one day.

Martin also faced a mechanical failure that threatened his race, but he dealt with it very differently. 250km from the end, the free hub broke on the his back wheel – and this is something that you cannot just fix.?You can replace it, but you cannot repair it during the race.

He was clearly not going to win this race with this bike at this time.

But instead of giving up, his resolve kicked in. He very simply decided that he could walk the rest of the distance, and still try to finish the race before the cut-off time.?

After days of hard cycling, he pushed a fully loaded bike for 250 km, largely without shoes as mountain biking shoes are incredibly difficult to walk in.

And he made it. What an achievement – and a far more inspirational story than giving up at the first sign of not meeting your goals.

When we are fixated on winning, I think one of two things happen. You focus, or you fold.

It's easy to just give up and stop when situations do not go according to plan. There's this analogy around people travelling in a car and getting a flat tyre.?Some people get out of the car and slash the other three tyres.?Others change the tyre and keep going.

If you're fixated on winning in a traditional sense, it’s easy to give up when that goal seems out of reach.?But sometimes life doesn’t give us this “out”, and certainly Donaldson had no such outs in combat.?You have to re-clarify a new version of success, and keep going.

Sometimes when I go on these long rides, which can be difficult and isolated, I might lose my way.?I have to choose between turning back, and forging on ahead, even if the way is different than I expected.?You just have to keep going.?You cannot afford to fall apart, or lose clarity on your goals.?If you can rely on your resolve when things go sideways, powerful and unexpected things can be achieved, and we can actually have an experience that is richer and more rewarding that we initially realised.