“I DO IT BECAUSE IT SUCKS”

The quote for today’s title comes by way of a fantastic podcast Will Ruth linked me to (since I’m so dark on podcasts) of Laurence Shahlaei talking to Derek Poundstone about the latter’s training and competition experience.  I’ll post the link to the video here, since it’s fantastic, and worth watching.

If you somehow don’t know who Derek Poundstone is, he won the Arnold twice, came in second place in the 2008 World’s Strongest Man (losing the Mariusz by a single point), won the first ever Fortissimus competition by lifting an impossibly heavy 530lb natural stone (billed as 517lbs because no one actually weighed it) that no one else in the field could manage, to include strongman legend Big Z on the last event, and is the dude I’ve posted a ton of photos of here in the blog because he’s one of the dudes that has totally captured “big and strong”

I’d been following Derek as much as I could over the years, but he’s a pretty reserved dude and doesn’t put himself out there much.  In turn, I never knew how much of a shared philosophy we had until this video.  The part I want to focus on today is the quote “I do it because it sucks”.  This quote came about from Derek relaying a story about how, as a police officer, he works traffic detail sometimes, requiring him to stand out in the street on hot days.  During these days, he still wears full length pants and boots, despite the fact that shorts are authorized for wear.  His co-workers ask him why he wears the full length pants and boots, and his answer is “I do it because it sucks”.

Derek does that quote justice in his video, but I’m going to write on it as well, because it’s my blog and I get to do that.  “I do it because it sucks” is such a fantastic guiding mantra for anyone looking to achieve self-improvement in pretty much ANY aspect of their existence.  Bigger and stronger, sure, but you wanna get faster, smaller, become a better musician, family member, student, worker, etc etc: do things because they suck.  Why?  It’s not the doing things that suck that make us better, but the ENDURING and OVERCOMING of them that does.  And seeking out those opportunities to engage in things that suck give us multiple opportunities to practice those skills of enduring and overcoming, which, in turn, improve them and make us BETTER at enduring and overcoming, which makes us better at EVERYTHING else.

Probably even this

I’ve dropped 25lbs since March and am at the leanest I’ve ever been in my life right now.  I did it pretty much on a whim, since a competition I was training for was canceled and I no longer needed to be up a weight class.  It’s been the easiest fat loss phase in my life, and people get VERY upset whenever I say that fat loss is easier than muscular gain, and the sole difference is that SO many people DON’T “do it because it sucks” that they simply have no experience in dealing with even the most minor of discomforts like non-starvation levels of hunger such that all attempts at losing fat are met with disaster.  Think about HOW many diets are marketed about “never feel hungry!”, how many people are willing to use all sorts of drugs and voodoo to avoid that SLIGHT discomfort, because they’d rather irreversibly damage their endocrine system than “do it because it sucks”.  It’s practically a real life cheat code if you’ll accept something sucking and be ok with it vs trying to find all possible ways to circumvent ever feeling discomfort.

And hey, I get it: some people actually HAVE had to do things that sucked and had no choice in the matter.  However, those people most likely aren’t reading this blog right now, because odds are they either already “get it” or getting bigger and stronger isn’t a priority for them compared to surviving (because let’s face it folks: these things are a luxury).  But for those of us that have been living well and are #blessed, we are quite frankly pampered and soft BECAUSE we have so few opportunities to do things because they suck.  Which is WHY Derek wears long pants in the heat: because it’s a freely available opportunity to go do something that sucks, and, in turn, get BETTER at enduring and overcoming that feeling.  I get excited when the weatherman says it’s going to be record high temps on a certain day, because now I have a freely available opportunity to go outside and do some conditioning under awful conditions “because it sucks”.  When it’s winter and bitter, I can go train in those elements “because it sucks”.  I don’t drink water when I train, and I didn’t drink any during my half-marathon “because it sucks”.  The opportunities are abundant! 

In case you're struggling to find the opportunities

All these freely available opportunities to do things because they suck, and with enough practice, when you encounter things in life that DO suck, you’ll find that they don’t suck nearly as bad as they could.  Like your body’s immune system, your psychology has some sort of “this sucks” codex that it can reference in times of duress and discomfort and run its own playbook on.  When you experience hunger from fat loss, you lean back on previous “this sucks” experiences and remember how you overcame them/what you did, and you run that play.  That’s what resiliency is, and you can either work to actively build it so that, when you need it, you have it OR you can wait until life puts you in a situation where you need it and THEN you start building it.  The former sounds much better, doesn’t it?  In fact, the former sounds like it sucks LESS than the latter.