Running Through Fear: Why It Makes You Stronger

How A Hybrid Athlete Will Run Sub 3-Hour Marathon + Running AI Studies

What You’ll Learn:

You don’t have less fear; you just bring more soldiers to the fight | Fear, suffering, resistance, and bravery

In August 2024, I completed the seventh of a "half-marathon-a-year for ten years” self-challenge. For some reason, I keep forgetting about how much the last 5-10 minutes of a half-marathon hurts. Like pure suffering, pain cave hurt.

This year, I wanted to be as present as possible, feeling every single discomfort, like wearing sand paper-lined underwear while I hike through a 99% mosquito-infested jungle. But like most people, my brain takes me to other places to help numb things. I foolishly think my meditation and mindfulness will prevent this, but really, all it does is make me aware that I’m not being aware. Baby steps to becoming an enlightened Buddha, right?

During the default mode networking, aka brain-numbing, I remembered an excellent quote from the controversial Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan that stuck with me. It was about how we think of suffering, fear, and bravery as actually incorrect.

We assume as you get more brave, you get more experience. Then, as you slay more dragons in life and running, the fear magically goes away, and you become a t-shirt and merch slogan from pre Y2K era.

The Cringe 90s Brand That Got It All Wrong

Maybe that ’90s brand had something to do with it, but that’s actually wrong from a psychological standpoint.

A study published in Behavioural Neuroscience defines courage as a "behavioral approach despite the experience of fear," highlighting that it's not about eliminating fear but confronting it.

In simple words, Brave people have the same amount of fear as they did before they were brave or as much fear as most other mortal humans. Instead, what happens as a runner is that every time you step right into the chaos and suffering, you get another running soldier partner twin, ready to do battle. So it’s not just you suffering the last four miles of your marathon; it’s another you. Two is surely better than one, right? Do it again, and you get three, and every time your army grows so does your confidence, but the fear is always there inside of all of those soldiers.

Jordan Peterson likened this to your forefathers and ancestors doing hard things many generations ago. This hard work was embedded into your DNA. Those ancestors are with you today, helping you in your daily life fights. I won’t go down that rabbit hole as it got a bit religious, and I’m sure I’m hacking this up, but the core idea has stuck with me now for years. That core idea: You are always scared; it’s just how you decide to step up and face that fear.

This is all great, but you might be wondering how do you actually train your mind and even your brain to face your fear head-on? Here’s the lab coat-level breakdown that tells us what’s happening under the hood when we push through discomfort

My New Obsession with David Goggins

A quick backstory to set this up for you if you didn’t read my newsletter on David Goggins “Secret Sauce”.

Right now, I’m on this David Goggins kick. It’s wild that it took me seven years after the release of his first book to get into him proper. I think a lot of people are attracted to him for many reasons. Most people want whatever natural high he’s on. Serial entrepreneur, rap jingle writer, and philosophical ultra runner Jesse Itzler got close to the smoke by having him stay at his house for a month and live with him. I’m trying to figure out what his secret sauce is by reading and listening to everything he’s done and all the podcasts he’s been on. But neuroscientist and podcast GOAT Andrew Huberman might have figured out what the real reason for what David Goggins drive is — The Anterior MidCingulate Cortex (aMCC) when he interviewed the Navy Seal on his podcast.

Obviously, with Huberman being a neuroscientist, he would try to really break this down, but there is a lot to be learned for someone who might not care about the details of what’s happening.

What is the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC), and why it's great for runners?

It’s the brain’s “grit center.” It grows when doing hard, unpleasant tasks that you don’t want to do. That’s the key. It does not grow when you do hard things that you like doing. If you love cold plunge, you don’t grow the aMCC. If you love running easy runs, you don’t grow the aMCC.

It builds willpower, and improves mental toughness and your adaptability for running and life challenges. It’s like when you have a hill workout schedule to help improve your anaerobic capacity early in the season. You hate hills, so you want to skip it in favor of a tempo run, thinking since a tempo run is hard, what’s the difference, right? First, you won’t get the physiological adaptations from the programmed workout of hill sprints. Second, you won’t build your aMCC because you don’t want to do it. We all know what it feels like to have resistance and not want to do something. That’s when you have to push through. You must.

How can you train it intentionally?

Easy in theory, hard in practice — Just pick things that make you hesitate, but you know you have to do it. Hate doing calf raises because they take longer than you would like and feel uncomfortable, but you know you need to rehab your achilles tendon? Well, you gotta do them. Ryan Holiday had it right all along with his book and theory of the obstacle being the way.

When should you incorporate hard tasks?

Starting now and moving forward, I think you should do one thing that sucks every day. No days off from that. Now, the definition of something sucking could be physical or mental. It also is usually exactly what you need to do. I know I should be walking and rucking one day per week instead of constantly running. But I like running and while walking and trucking are easier on my body, because it’s great for recovery, I should do it.

How long does it take to see results?

It takes gradual growth through steady and consistent exposure to sucky things. Studies suggest that the neuroplasticity for the aMCC to grow takes weeks and months. You also have to sustain it by resetting your baseline for suck. Find things that are even more challenging if you start liking the suck of one thing. It’s habitual, dull, boring practice over a long period — like off-season base training, but for your brain.

Now that we know the aMCC is basically your brain’s grit center, how do we put that to work the next time we’re pushing through the final stretch of a race or staring down a blank page, dying to bail out early?

Applying This To Your Life

Ironically, this fear and suffering also happen in other areas of your life, and it’s usually not a Game of Thrones series finale three-episode-long battle against White Walkers. It’s more like me sitting down to write this newsletter or generally create content/art: I get resistance. The voice on my shoulder saying, “Oh hey, I should clean that smudge on my computer screen”, or “Let me just text this person back; it will only take 20 seconds”. Yup, that’s my brain avoiding the hard suffering of the thing I want to do and should be doing (creating) for something easy (random quick tasks). But just like the last ten minutes of my half marathon, I stepped into it and said, “Not today, brain,” while suffering through those few minutes of starting this newsletter. Go and do hard things regularly in life and build up that “club of you runners” to battle all the demons the world thoust bestow upon you. Every time, you’ll build up the army to make it 1% easier to fight another day.

And I’ll be taking that army with me to fight the battle of pacing a runner I coach to a sub-3-hour marathon (see next section).

AI Is Being Properly Studied In How It Helps Athletes and Runners

This is some exciting stuff, to be honest. The genie is out of the bottle, and I welcome our AI Underlord (get it?!) to help make the boring, time-consuming tasks less of my day so that I can do the real deep work that is meaningful and, in particular, helps the runners that I coach.

I’m all about using AI to augment and almost cyborg your efforts, especially in the realm of distance running. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) published a report on how athletes, teams, and coaches are exploring AI-assisted tools to enhance performance and reduce injuries in sports and, hopefully, things will get better.

What It Is:
Sports science is harnessing AI, wearable trackers, and quantum technology to personalize training, improve performance, and prevent injuries. Tools like digital twins and biometric trackers, once reserved for Olympians, are now accessible to weekend warriors.

How to Use It:
Amateur runners can leverage wearable devices and AI apps to monitor their training, adjust their technique, and prevent overtraining. Think of it as a coach, physio, and nutritionist in your pocket.

Why It’s Important:
These innovations aren’t just bells and whistles; they enable smarter, safer training tailored to your unique physiology—helping you run farther, faster, and injury-free.

Read the full article here.

How This Gym Bro Hybrid Athlete Will Run A Sub 3-Hour Marathon | Convo in Zone 2

The Five-Second Rule

Five seconds. That’s all it takes. Not to pick up food off the floor (though, sure, do that too), but to transform yourself from a solid marathoner into the kind of runner people whisper about at finish lines. Sub-three hours. It’s not just a goal; it’s a gravitational pull. And Brenton? He’s right there. But here’s the catch: those five seconds? They’re heavier than they look.

The Mental Marathon

Running is easy until it isn’t. The line between “I’ve got this” and “Oh no, I don’t” is thin, especially when you’re in the so-called “teens” of your pace. Brenton described it perfectly: 4:30 per kilometer feels breezy; 4:20 is manageable. But the 4:10 range? That’s when the doubts creep in, whispering their favorite mantra: “Why are we doing this again?”

This isn’t about the legs, though. It’s about the brain. The brain that overanalyzes every gel you took, every kilometer split, every bad decision you’ve made in your life—including trying the caffeinated gel for the first time in a race (rookie mistake, Brenton). The brain loves to make drama where none exists.

Read, watch and listen to the rest on your next run or workout