We Can Do Hard Things

For five years, I was a competitive triathlete, and if there was one part of triathlon I never really got comfortable with, it was swimming in open water.

Give me a bike, give me a pair of running shoes, I'm good. Put me in the middle of a lake or ocean with nothing underneath me, and suddenly my brain starts telling me all the ways this is a terrible idea. In the early days, I would sometimes have full-blown panic attacks at the start of a race, which makes what happened at Alcatraz even more ridiculous.

The Escape From Alcatraz

The Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon is one of the most famous triathlons in the world. The swim starts in the San Francisco Bay, with the athletes jumping off a boat near Alcatraz Island and swimming to shore, and getting into the race isn't easy. It's a lottery, and most people who enter don't get a spot, so when I entered, I honestly wasn't expecting to get in. I basically entered because I could say I had entered.

Then I got the email: You're in. I remember thinking, well, now what? If I had known I was actually going to get accepted, I probably wouldn't have entered in the first place. The thought of swimming across San Francisco Bay scared me to death, but there I was, standing on that boat, looking at the water, and there was no backing out now.

Aiming At A Completely Different Destination

One of the things that makes the Alcatraz swim so unique is the current. You don't swim directly toward the beach. If the swim exit is straight ahead of you, you actually have to aim roughly 40 degrees to the left because the current is so strong that it will carry you sideways, and you're essentially aiming at a completely different destination so that you can end up where you actually want to go.

And this isn't just some technical detail. Get it wrong and the current can carry you way off course. Some swimmers have ended up being pushed toward the Golden Gate Bridge and have needed to be picked up by the Coast Guard.

And I Did

So I'm standing on this boat, terrified of open water, knowing that I have to jump into San Francisco Bay and swim across it. And I did. I jumped, I swam, and I made it to the other side.

And something happened that was bigger than finishing the race. I became a little more confident, not because someone told me I could do it, because I had proof. I had just done something that terrified me.

Resilience Is Like A Muscle

And that's what I learned throughout those five years of doing triathlons: every time I did something hard, I became a little more capable of doing the next hard thing. The fear didn't necessarily disappear, but my relationship with the fear changed, and I started realizing that I could be scared and still move forward.

And I think that's an incredibly valuable lesson, because we're living in a world where we're constantly looking for ways to make life easier: more convenience, more comfort, less friction. And I'm not against any of that, but I think there's something incredibly valuable about deliberately doing hard things.

Go climb the mountain, run the race, start the business, have the difficult conversation, learn the thing you're terrible at, put yourself in a situation where you might fail, do something that scares you. Because every time you do, you build a little more resilience, and resilience is like a muscle. You don't build it by thinking about being resilient. You build it by getting uncomfortable, facing something difficult, and discovering that you can handle it.

Evidence, Not Just Medals

That's what those five years of doing competitive triathlon gave me: not just medals, not just finish lines, not just some great stories. They gave me evidence: evidence that when something feels impossible, it might not be, evidence that fear doesn't mean stop, and evidence that I'm capable of more than I sometimes think I am.

I still don't love open-water swimming. But every time I think about that boat, Alcatraz behind me, the San Francisco Bay in front of me, and knowing I had to jump into water that genuinely scared me, I remember something pretty simple: we can do hard things. And I think we should, because the hard things we choose to do today might just make us strong enough for the things life throws at us tomorrow.