“The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears.” David Goggins
When our mind says we are done, we have tapped into less than half of our potential.
Our brain sends us signals for self-preservation, to avoid pain. But it sends these signals long before we reach the critical and dangerous levels. Learning to ignore the first few rounds of flashing warning lights develops our tolerances and expands our capabilities beyond what is normal or even believable. Working in the pain zone is where we trigger growth of body and spirit that brings us to new realms of possibility.
Our ego doesn’t want to fail, so it doesn’t let us truly see where our limit is. But if you lift a weight to the edge of your current strength level, that “failure” becomes a benchmark we can then try to exceed. Our mind restricts us well before then though because it knows breaking through that barrier will hurt temporarily, even if the long-range benefit is obvious. We need to subjugate our doubts, silence the mind to remove the governors we installed in our head.
So we have to fight and beat ourselves to beat our external competition, whether it is a human opponent or that ultramarathon (literal or figurative). We have to defeat ourselves to become the best version of ourselves.