The Eternal Suffering of the Endurance Mind | Colin Robertson | TEDxUniversityofBolton

I'm taken back to when I was 13 years old and I came home from school with my end-of-year annual report and my tutor had commented in there that this boy lacks ambition which my mother and I found quite interesting because I'd already decided by that point that my I was going to attempt to do was find out the meaning of life so we took some Ryan moments from that and how I was gonna do that was yet to be explored and yet to be determined but I did know a couple of things and one of the things that I was aware of was that I loved sport and that what I wanted to do was sport and that was where I was going to focus my efforts and ambitions and the reason for that is because even at that age and certainly later on I came to recognize that whilst physicists were looking at space-time the orange of the origins of the universe whilst of a biologists who were looking at the evolution of man I actually determined there to understand the meaning of life was outside of that and what I wanted to do was look at humans under extreme conditions when they would perform and optimally at the upper limit something akin to a motor engineer looking at a Lamborghini go on top speed down a track I figured that that would be the place where we'd find out what it was all about and if we could take them to extreme environment then we could definitely find out all the more that the purpose today really though is to get across the idea that to exercise at all is to embrace suffering the exercise isn't easy if there's one thing I've learned throughout my entire career is that exercise is by its very nature demanding and it takes us outside of our comfort zone and there is no easy way around it pain is inevitable suffering is optional which is a great quote from Haruki Murakami and his book all about what he talks about when he talks about running and an earlier speaker today Nigel and clearly experienced pain but it chosen not to endure suffering certainly not forever and often that's the difference because pain is an inevitable part of the process of the things we do but how we suffer and how we interpret that suffer determines the diff so bear with me whilst we go back a little bit further this is the summer of 1980 what of least importance is that me down the front second to that is my brother who at this point and continued into this day six years older than me he's about 14 there and is the only person I know who runs just for the sake of running and this fascinated me I grew up in Liverpool I often saw people run but typically they were being chased but James would go out and run he was great to school he was captain of the football team captain of the cricket team and I understood all that and that myself I was passionate about rugby and I would see people run but James would just go out and run and he would leave the house for half an hour 40 minutes an hour and he would come back glowing covered in sweat out of breath but smiling and this made very little sense because I attempted this I thought there was some secret land to be found and I would get 400 yards down the road and be absolutely broken but that was really where I bought into the idea the perseverance and continuing to go back would teach me something about a secret now months later this happened this was the very first London Marathon and I sat at home in awe as 20,000 people round what I consider to be at that time an impossible distance 26.2 miles in all honesty I didn't really know what 26.2 miles was back then I didn't really know how long it should take and I saw people crossing the line in various states but each of them crossing the line and most of them smiling which again I found really really frustrating because to get to the end of my road left me broken with no smiles at all so I was I was obsessed and I was fascinated and really when I look back now this was the point where my addiction began and I do a confess that I am an addict to endure and sports myself and what's been the catalog of errors and experiences since this is portrayed upon that screen there but that's less important but it is important to recognize a guess that what I ask other people to do as part of my career I do want to go myself what's more interesting though is over the same 35 years since we've seen this explode apparently of fitness of people taken to the streets in their tens of thousands the London Marathon now attracts in upwards of 50,000 and over eighty-five to ninety thousand applicants the Great North Run up in the Northeast even more so and there are ever more and more events across the country and across the world where tens of thousands of people are taking part and the events themselves getting ever more extreme in extreme conditions environment and even the distances have gone through the roof you used to be able to impress people by saying that you'd done a marathon nowadays you don't even come close everyone's doing a marathon what's next I took to do an Ironman a couple of years ago which is a 2.4 mile swim 112 mile bike and then you do at marathon at the end and still now people go yeah but which Ironman where did you do it was it an easy one so it's hard to impress people but back to the point if we look at the profile and this is with information from the World Health Organization and also some of the marketing information from a world leading brand of exercise equipment builder manufacturer what we see is there is almost a perfect correlation between the increase of cardiac disease type 2 diabetes and obesity and the explosion of exercise facilities if you were to look at this as cause-and-effect you could say that actually the more opportunity you have to exercise the more likely you likely you are to get a condition related to not exercising because throughout this whole period as you have more opportunity to train more and more people have become obese have developed type 2 diabetes and some type of cardiac disease but the fact is is there is no cause and effect here because we're dealing with two distinct different types of population on average when we look at the analytics of a approximately and this figure hasn't changed for nigh on 25 years 12% of the UK population take part in exercise and trained and meaningful enough to elicit a change in their performance or in their health and well-being and that figure barely changes what happens is that 12% they migrate and they go with whatever they want to do next those people who found a half marathon challenge in some years ago need to do a marathon then need to do an ultrasound that needs to do an Ironman and then a whole host of other things upon which I've built a career so why is this why is this why do we have these two different types and these two distinct different populations well because you've been lied to because there is a whole host of manufacturers out there who are attempting to sell you a fad and exercise and health is the breeding ground of fat and everyone knows it's a fad we live in the information age and you're well aware of the fact that the six-minute abs probably won't give you washable abs in six minutes but still the book in the DVD gets old and every other kind of nutrition fad and exercise fad anything that looks simple will attract people because what they want are the aesthetics of exercise they want to look lean they want to look well they want the appearance and they want that with minimal effort because everyone's been told another lie and that other lie is and forgive me for a moment if I offend you is that you have no time everyone's told you have no time and almost to the extent that if you tell someone you do have time you must be the world's biggest loser at our place of work if you stop someone on the corridor and say how you getting on they're busy automatically no matter what they're doing they might be chomping into a doughnut but they're busy too busy to chat too busy to do everything and certainly too busy to exercise and think about their diet too busy to cook and sadly multinational corporations have latched on to this and they've sold convenience and they've sold the ideas of an easy way to achieve something that in fact we all know is difficult so real exercise looks a lot more like this and these are a few images from the kind of athletes and groups that were the opportunity to work with myself and the research group and so on the people that I collaborate where we've taken people to every kind of extreme you can imagine we've taken them to the top of Everest we've taken them to do marathons across the desert we've taken them to do the Tour de France we train them to represent their country a GB level at Olympics and various Olympic cycles we trained we even trained em martial artists you know people who've engaged in that and I defy anyone to tell me that martial arts is not an endurance both we've taken age group athletes and these are my favorite types of athletes because they have no money so they don't benefit from millions of pounds worth of investment to put them on a podium and put them on a world stage they have to do it themselves and they prove the rest of us wrong they prove the rest of us wrong that we have no time because they have the same commitment as us they have full-time jobs they have families they have friends they have Christmas they have birthdays they have Easter that they have everything else they need to do but they still manage to train full-time the interesting thing about this group of age group athletes and here's another one it's not only do they have full-time lives and jobs and other commitments but they compete at the world stage and more often than not they beat the athletes who have been funded and this has caused people to think very differently these age group athletes have actually brought about a monumental change in our attitude towards athlete development and performance profiling because their class does late bloomers so no one picked them up when they were a child they didn't have the pushy parent throwing them in and insisting everyone look at them and I have to tolerate those as well they quietly went about their business they went off fell in love got married had children found the career and then went back to what they wanted to do and became very very good at it even without the income and support the finances started to win so these themselves are a very very interesting group what I'd like to do really is draw your attention to one example and it's a group that I worked with a couple of years ago now and it's it paints my main point perfectly where things happen and see if you got a bad letter through that you know if you got a letter through the post telling you you owed someone five thousand pound it will be infinitely worse if you read that letter and you were on a boat and you're in the sea anything that's bad that's happened to you it'll be worse if you read see these guys though they approached me this was the third group I'd worked with who wanted to roll across the Atlantic so no small task whatsoever none of them were rowers none of them had any experience of Rouen and in fact when I took this project on my first question was can only it can any of them swim I knew so little about them the interesting thing about them is they typify the big explosion in exercise they were all from upper-middle class economically mobile people they had comfort at home they had no need to go out and make themselves uncomfortable but they all had a background of endurance sport they were already addict and this was where that road had taken them so they don't I am ants they do marathons and ultra thongs and in fact we use some of those events to train them along the way for this because there is no kind of physiological marker of how you build an Atlantic rubber you have to look at the physical demands and then just go for it as best as you can and we looked at the kind of calorific cost of being active for that long and we had to figure these things out as we went and we trained them for 14 months and the ambition was what they would complete this journey in 40 days so I'd like you to keep the fourth on to your mind that these people could be at home they were successful in their career successful in business they could be a home driving nice cars surrounded by their loved ones and living in relative luxury but they chose to do this live in cramped quarters based on high density nutritional food that tastes awful but does the job they had to deal with a variance e condition both the climb of both the weather and the sea itself in fact they were capsized and that was during the night which makes it worse they were tipped into the ocean they had to rectify that get themselves back on board they had to a Tom's volunteer to go in the water because you got to clear the barnacles off the boat you got to maintain the vessel although it should be noted that less than three weeks into this whilst two of them should roll whilst two of them rest we lost one of the oars and the seats so they were down to one person Rowand one person talking to that rower and two people rest them tensions on board became rife they started to dislike each other they started to argue with each other and each of them disclosed to me upon their return that they all thought of sabotaging the boat just to end it end it nobly so people will go well you know what fair dues you gave it a try they all thought about it but none of them surrendered to it so as you be aware there's three points of contact when it comes to rowing a boat and that's sustained damage that's their hands they're in a sailing this is after a week and you haven't to manage open wounds that's their feet very similar pressing against same line condition open wounds you haven't to manage it this is the sufferer and they volunteered for remember pain is inevitable suffering is optional and this is what they'd want it for but in reality this was the unknown area so you're probably all guessing now or wondering about the third point of contact well we had to center it as best we could but if you can use your imagination and again this was just about seven days into the journey we aimed for 40 days it took them 59 they were out there for a long long time it was tough it was demanding it was rigorous there was no higher than place I remember the decided moment was Christmas day they were still out there on the ocean and every day I'd got into the routine of looking at the satellite tracker to see how they were getting on and I was just about to go and sit with my family and have my Christmas meal and I took one last look and this tiny little blip on a screen hadn't moved anywhere and a moment to care to me then that linked it all together it linked everything I'd done in sport myself every athlete had ever worked with and certainly this group and it linked to everything outside the sport that I'd read from philosophy to religion from the 12 trials and tribulations of Hercules to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism to Islam to Christianity to the works of niche across all chapters of philosophy there was an agreement amongst mankind that the reality is to embrace suffering and then it's only when we suffer and we test ourselves and we trial ourselves that we can actually expect to achieve any kind of reward I believe the addiction that people have which is growing on must now in the 21st century will endure and sport and the suffering that is there because actually doing the event is the easy way it's the hours and weeks and months spent in training is where the real suffering takes place it's because in a never secularized world people are looking for me and actually on instant terms we can engage with that and we can find out something about ourselves on a daily basis by putting ourselves through rigor are you through difficulty we can get in touch with something that tells us something about ourselves and the people who are around us the reason why fat diets don't work is multiple they don't work for host of reasons and everyone knows that but I believe one of the biggest reasons why fat diets don't work is because it appeals to a sense of humanity that takes you away from humanity I think by allowing people to continue with their ideas about fad diets about what they might produce guarantees them to reach failure takes them ever more a step away from their own humanity and leads them often in a direction that separates them from ever understanding the true meaning or purpose of their own life thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 58,255

Rating: 4.8499999 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United Kingdom, Life, Brain, Control, Emotions, Entertainment, Extreme Sports, Faith, Global issues, Goal-setting, Pain, Purpose, Self improvement, Soccer, Sports, Struggle, Youth

Id: DJrdV0ZQWxQ

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2016