Expect the Journey to Be Hard

The conversation that saved my running career and the psychology behind why it worked

In early 2017, I was sitting in Coach Milt’s office feeling sorry for myself.

My first two years hadn’t gone the way I’d planned. They were defined by a string of injuries, subpar performances, and nothing like the success I’d been used to in high school. While my teammates were traveling, competing, and improving season over season, I’d spent most of that time sidelined. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I was close to folding my cards, and I think he knew it.

Coach Milt told me: “Listen, Alex. This is what hard feels like. This is where most people stop, and it’s why they don’t succeed. You came here because you wanted to be challenged. I recruited you on the premise that this would be an uphill climb, and you were excited about that. Now more than ever, you need to remember what brought you here.”

Those words struck a chord within me at a deep level. He was right.

When I was being recruited, I was a kid in Connecticut who was enamored with Stanford. It looked like the promised land: beautiful, idyllic, an incubator for success. Every time I got dreamy about my perfect future there, Coach Milt would steer the conversation back toward struggle. If I was going to make it in his program, I needed to embrace that and be excited for it.

And I did. I told them over and over that I was built to be persistent and that I could handle whatever came my way.

At the time, his fixation on the hard parts puzzled me. Why would a coach spend a recruiting call talking me out of my own optimism?

In reality, he was building the crucial piece of evidence he would rely on two years later. When I was sitting in that office, downtrodden, he didn’t have to talk me into anything. He just held up a mirror. To keep going, I’d have to double down on who I said I wanted to be. To quit, I’d have to break a promise I’d made to myself.

A great coach doesn’t just tell you what you want to hear but what you need to hear. And sometimes it’s reminding you of what you already said.

The rest of my Stanford career wasn’t perfect, but it turned dramatically. I trace a lot of that back to the conversation I had sophomore year.

This piece is about why that conversation works and how to have it with yourself in big moments and small ones. Enduring difficulty isn’t the obstacle to getting better. It’s the only way to get better.

Any meaningful journey is supposed to be hard

Every worthwhile goal has a cost, and the cost is the point. If what you were chasing is available on demand, it would be available to everyone, and it wouldn’t be worth chasing. The difficulty is what gives the goal meaning.

It’s easy to agree with in the abstract but almost impossible to remember at mile 18 of a tough marathon or in month three of a persistent injury.

Which brings me to the first of two things Milt did in his office that day. Before he reminded me what I had signed up for, he named what I was feeling and normalized it.

When you’re struggling, every instinct is to fight the sensation or find an escape. We’re not built to sit with discomfort. And because we spend so much energy running from it, we never get still enough to see the situation clearly. The pain becomes perceived as a personal failure or something that has gone wrong.

Naming the feeling gives you permission to feel bad without reading the situation as a personal failure. The energy that was originally spent on self-criticism can be freed up to do actual work.

There is a scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers, and he doesn’t flinch. Another man tries it and cries out in pain. “It hurts! What’s the trick then?” he asks. “The trick is not minding that it hurts,” Lawrence says.

Haruki Murakami once said, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Toughness requires acceptance. Gritting your teeth and pretending it doesn’t hurt costs you something. Admitting it hurts and continuing anyway doesn’t.

Remember you wanted this

The second thing Milt did was remind me who I said I wanted to be.

Years later, he described this technique on a podcast, and I recognized it immediately. He was talking about how he handles conversations with athletes who aren’t training or racing at the level they’d envisioned.

“You have to remind them that this is what they said they wanted. In the recruiting process, you told me what your goals were. I didn’t tell you your goals. This came from you. My number one job is to be the truth teller.”

He was invoking a powerful concept that psychologists call the consistency principle. People want to stay consistent with what they’ve already said or done, especially publicly. Get someone to take a small step voluntarily, and they become markedly more likely to take a larger step in the same direction when prompted.

We tend to honor the earlier version of ourselves, even when the later version has different information and reasons to walk away.

So in 2017, Milt didn’t have to talk me into staying the course. He was showing me I’d already decided. Quitting was not a neutral option. It would have meant abandoning someone I told him I was.

Both of these coaching techniques worked, but neither was improvised. Coach Milt could hold up a mirror in that office because he’d spent two years making sure a curated version of myself was visible.

Which means the intervention wasn’t really the conversation. It was everything that came before it. You can’t prevent the hard moments. But you can decide in advance who is going to meet them. Here are two ways to do that.

Dream the right dream

When athletes visualize a race, they gravitate towards the best-case scenario. They run the last 400 meters over and over again, rounding the corner with five teammates abreast, sun shining, decimating the competition.

Coach Milt would flip this narrative. “I want you thinking about who you’re going to be at 8K at NCAAs when you’re bleeding, fighting for 60th place on a bad day, and you have to find another 2K for your teammates. Can you get scrappy? Can you find a way to persist?”

Everyone talks about positive visualization. Almost nobody rehearses the bad day, which is the only one that requires a plan. The good day takes care of itself.

There’s a military expression that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Think about what could go wrong and rehearse your response. It’s not the hardest punch that will knock you out. It’s the one you didn’t see coming.

Ryan Sandes, who placed second at the Cocodona 250 last year, put it well: “I did a lot of visualization and ran through things that could go wrong so that if and when it did happen during the race I was a lot calmer. I always say it’s the person who can manage the low moments in an ultra that ends up generally being the most successful.”

Hardship inoculation

Most people carry an unspoken model of hard work. Discomfort is the cost you pay up front, and once it’s paid, you collect the returns in perpetuity.

It doesn’t work like that. It never gets easier.

I tell athletes this constantly. You will get fitter and faster, but the race will hurt exactly as much as it did before because you’ll be running faster. You don’t train so that racing feels easy. You train to be prepared to hurt.

Which means the question was never whether your life will be hard and training will be hard. Suffering is a fixed cost. What you control is when you pay it.

That’s the case for seeking out chosen hardship. It builds capacity for struggle you didn’t choose. The advantage that elite performers have isn’t talent exclusively. It’s cultivating an appreciation for the discomfort other people instinctively avoid.

So when you’re eight reps into a ten-rep hill workout and quietly questioning what you’re doing with your life, that’s the inoculation happening. Remember that you chose this. You wanted this. And you’ll be glad you have the capacity to endure on the day it counts.

You don’t decide who you are in hard moments

When I walked out of Coach Milt’s office in 2017, nothing about me had changed. He’d simply shown me something that had been true the whole time: a promise I’d made to myself back when it was easy to make.

You don’t decide who you are in the hard moment. You find out what you decided earlier.

It’s easy to be tough when you know you can handle a situation. The true test comes when you can’t, and by then it’s too late to start building your identity. So you must decide ahead of time that difficulty is the price of anything worth having.

Rehearse the bad day before it arrives, and when it does, don’t read the pain as evidence that something has gone wrong. Read it as confirmation that you’re exactly where you said you wanted to be.

The life you want lives on the other side of discomfort. Accept that. Learn to recognize the testing points when they arrive. And keep people close who will be truth tellers when you need them.