Endurance by dictionary definition: the fact or power of enduring an unpleasant or difficult process or situation without giving way.
Endurance in simple words (by Google search): Meaning of endurance in English. the ability to keep doing something difficult, unpleasant, or painful for a long time.
Endurance racing was how I did my kick off on my soul searching journey, and endurance for me means one thing: Punkaste! It is a long story, more precisely a book approximately of 2 hours and 30 min read.
Along the way I learned a lot. I learned from racing, learned from different coaches, learned from different athletes, learned a lot from coaching different athletes and learned a lot in specially coaching myself. Endurance racing, (and when I say racing I include the preparation time for the event, the racing time and the recovery time meaning the looking at the whole picture), it’s pretty much like life, because in the end to the day your spirt it what it have the biggest weight on your endurance race journey, in this case, in this case metaphorically speaking, the journey of life.
Anyways, while coaching myself I learned that the only approach for performance in an endurance event is an individual approach. Now, performance does not mean winning, and I speak for myself, because in the best performance of my life I was second place. And vice versa because I won not having my best performance, I was burned out but came in first but completely burned out but first place. Performance in an endurance race like my brother (and 1st sponsor) put it beautifully, is: “crossing the finish line with dignity” (which can be applied to life). When it comes to that I must say I did perform in all races, including the ones I didn’t finish.
After my last ironman I ended up doing a 24 hour paddle boarding which closed my soul searching cycle. Of course endurance racing was not the only thing, after all for good endurance is a matter of mind, body and soul. Since, I was severely traumatized took me 18 ironmans, 18 years of therapy and 36 years of unconventional and unorthodoxy therapies, including a book and a punk rock album. Which it might be your case or not, only you know but it all started with the idea of doing an ironman, which was the seed to change my life. The good news is: If that is what you are looking for, this is definitely THE place to start.
To be honest to do an ironman you need is know how learn how (if you don’t already know) to swim bike and run, the rest we build. Same goes for running a marathon, ultra marathon, long distance paddle boarding, long distance swim and long distance cycling/ mtb biking. Well, that is what I have experience with, to be honest 20 plus years of experience in coaching people ground zero. I am an example, when I started I was 260 pounds smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day couldn’t even crossing a 25 yard pool without stopping.
Along these 20 years of experience I created this unique approach of mind body and soul with my athletes, with amazing results in all aspects of life. This unique approach became a life long philosophy called Punkaste.
Punkaste,
Richard Wygand
Punkaste 