So tell me a little about your process and philosophy.

Well, I truly believe that an athlete is not a complete athlete unless they are addressing the mental piece. We can train as much as we want on the physical side, but if we’re not addressing that mental aspect, then we’re not the best athlete possible. Some people get that but there are those who haven’t, and I believe those are the ones that are not living up to their full potential. When I work with athletes it’s best that they are open to trying the different sport psychology tools and techniques that I can teach them. Because just like anything else, being open to change is essential.

People always ask me – what exactly do you do? It’s different with everyone. Everyone comes to me with their own issues. My work is best described as part counseling and part education. So the counseling piece could be about working with them around their relationships with teammates, coaches, their families… working around where their fears about their sport may have come from, confidence issues, effective communication, the list is long. The educational piece is giving people certain tools and techniques to work through some of the obstacles that may be blocking their performance goals. Ultimately my job is to help athletes be the best versions of themselves.

Do you find fear in a sport is usually a hindrance to reaching an athlete’s full potential?

Sometimes yes. I think everyone has fear. If you don’t think you’re fearful, you’re either lying or in complete denial. Where that fear comes from is different for everyone. Sometimes it’s necessary to go back and unravel where the fear is coming from, sometimes it’s not. We are where we are. I like to focus on what can we do to change it, and use tools to pass through it. Everyone is different in how they work through things. Maybe someone is scared of swimming or surfing because they had a scary drowning experience as a child. Sure, you might have to go back and work through that memory, but you still have to figure out what you’re going to do right now to change it.

Because our fear systems developed for protection from harm, do you find that fear in sports is often over the top?

I was just at a triathlon camp and working with these women who were first time triathletes. We did some sessions in the pool with different techniques and I could see different levels of fear in each of them. It’s good that I’m an athlete and a swimmer because I can look at them and know: ok, none of them are going to drown. They’re all very capable of getting across the pool doing this exercise, but they don’t all know that, and some of them were genuinely afraid. So yes, some of them exaggerate and don’t have proper perspective on their level and ability. But yes there’s the reality, and there’s their perception. The question is how do we close that gap?

Everyone has fear. Even Lebron James, I imagine, has a little. What do you think the best way to deal with it is? Do you push it away? Do you accept it and leverage it? Try to breathe it away?

I think one of the most important things is getting to know yourself as an athlete and what works for you. Because fear isn’t always a bad thing. You have to ask, is this fear working for me or against me in my performance and what I want to achieve right now? I truly believe that everyone is nervous and fearful of certain situations. I always say to athletes, if you’re not nervous, then I’m worried about you. If you are not fearful, then you are not invested. So you have to ask yourself, is that fear debilitating or can you make it work for you? How much is good for you? How much is bad for you? So even Lebron, he might need a tiny bit of fear to light a fire under his ass and have a great game, whereas maybe another NBA player thrives from an extraordinary amount of fear. Maybe they need to get to that pre-performance state where they’re heart rate is up, they’re sweating. That’s what works for them. Everyone is different and you need to discover what is good for you. If the fear that you are experiencing is debilitating, then that is where you need to make some changes to what you are doing so your performance is not affected. So back to your question – I think learning how to leverage your fear and make it work for you is a great strategy.

Right, it’s finding whatever your zone is, that balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Is that something that is scientifically proven – that you need this much stress to perform well – or is that just something that every athlete needs to feel out?

I think it varies for every athlete and that’s why the most important thing is to know yourself as an athlete. One of the ways I do that with people is to review past successes. So, we’d say, ‘ok, the day you surfed Mavericks, tell me everything about that day. What time did you go to bed the night before? What did you have for dinner? What time did you go to bed? What time did you wake up? What did you have for breakfast? Did you meditate? Did you do yoga? Did you do any breathing exercises? What was the temperature? Was it raining? Was it 80 degrees outside? Everything, and literally just get it all on paper. And maybe some other day you had the most amazing day surfing where everything came together. What did that day look like? Then you can go back up and say, for me to have an optimal performance state, for me to feel as fearless as possible in these situations, some sunshine is nice, yoga, whatever your thing is. And then we might think up some of your worst days. Maybe you didn’t eat breakfast. Maybe you didn’t get a good night’s sleep. You didn’t listen to your favorite song before you went out there. It’s like a puzzle: what are all those pieces? The more data you can gather, the more you can find out what works for you, and then you can apply that data and create a performance strategy to help you achieve your goals.

Right? So, do you have any examples of people breaking through their confidence issues?

Without getting into specifics, the first thing that comes to mind is creating small successes along the way to reaching a goal. So, say you want to surf Mavericks. You want to do it, it scares the shit of you, but well, that’s what you’re going to do. I don’t know your surfing level, but let’s just take average Joe. He shouldn’t go out there the first day. So, say you want to do that six months from now. It’s about making goals and creating little successes and each one of those successes will build your confidence along the way. A small success would be surfing a wave that scares you just a little but one you know you can tackle before risking Mavericks. Then working up from there. So again, it depends on the athlete. Whatever the confidence issue is, that you aren’t good enough, that you aren’t meant to do that sport, that you’re always going to fail. We can go back and work on some of that stuff. But again, I’m a big advocate of this is where you are today, this is what your goal is, and you’re lacking confidence, so what tools can we give you right now today to make that happen.

And you’ve found that that works better, starting now and building new successes rather than dredging up the past constantly?

I think some of it is exploring where it comes from. But some people already know that. My specialty is not family counseling so if you had that parent that beat you down forever and ever, I can certainly listen, but most likely I would refer you out to someone who specializes in repairing that relationship with that parent if that’s just so debilitating for what they’re trying to accomplish. So it kind of just depends. I’m more of a performance coach. I find success in focusing on working around what you’re in control of and not in control of. You’re not in control of what happened in the past. You’re in control of what happens right now. So I try to keep people present and active and focused on what they’re in control of.

It seems like with fear, if you’re dealing with it just in your head, it can be paralyzing, but as soon as your active, it becomes easier to deal with.

Yes, so what you just brought up for me is, I’m a big believer in breathing, how important your breath is, and how important it is to focus on that. You just talked about focusing on fear and sitting in it, and thinking about it. I try to teach athletes to shift to their breathing, really focus on your breath. I know a lot of people who say, I know how to breathe, but if you take this little breathing technique and focus on it, you know what, you’re not focused on your fear, you’re not talking about it in your head, and guess what, you’re body’s relaxing, you’re sending oxygen into those muscles that are preparing for whatever you’re about to do. And it’s about shifting focus. And you know, that’s just one little tool that people work with. That’s what I use with fear. For me, fear makes me scrunch my shoulders and shorten my breath, sometimes it means negative conversations in my head, and as soon as I commit to focusing on my breath, it gets me through just about anything.

It’s so interesting what you said about fear having a good aspect sometimes. I find the worst part about fear sometimes is my resistance to it. Do you find a big part of your work is shifting people’s perspective around fear?

Yes, absolutely, shifting people’s perspectives around everything: fear, confidence, goal-setting. Their perspective is over here, their goal is over there, and what perspective shift do they need? It’s fine-tuning and tweaking. Sometimes that takes a while. I can’t always sit down for an hour, if I don’t know someone, and find out how they work. Sometimes it takes a while. But after a while, you go, ok, this is what makes this person tick, it’s a process. And about being resistant to fear – you have to remember, its ok to be uncomfortable every once in a while. Growth often happens when we are uncomfortable and working through something.

How big is visualization?

Very big. Olympic athletes have been using visualization for decades and now it’s just trickling down into the mainstream for everyday athletes. It can be used in a variety of situations, not just for fear. For recovering from injuries, it’s huge. When an injured athlete is sitting on the sidelines, I’ll prescribe that. For fear, it’s huge. I call it imagery because visualization makes it sound like it’s all visual and the best way to do it is to involve as many senses as possible: what you hear, what you feel, what you see, what you taste. Research indicates that the more senses you involve, the more potent that imagery will be.
So if I was working with you for example – now you have some data about Mavericks: how big it is, what it looks like, how cold that water is, so what I would work with you on is, let’s script out your best session at Mavericks with as much detail as possible. When do you wake up, what do you eat for breakfast, what does that taste like, do you do some stretching or yoga, what does your body feel like, what does the beach feel like, the sand between your toes, how cold is it, what kind of conversation are you having in your head, and then write it all down, memorize it and play that script in your head over and over. Some people record it on a voice recorder and listen to it. But anyway, the scripted imagery of the perfect day out there is a great way to practice something in order to overcome fear or get back into the game after an injury. Or simply a great way to continue to build confidence and improve your performance.

Why does imagery work?

It’s all about shifting your perspective and focusing on something that will potentially add to your performance goals, not take away from them. It helps you get your head in to the place where it needs to be to execute a solid performance. You have to see it, and believe it, to make it happen. The more you create a proper, positive image in your head, the more you’re going to buy into it. If you were constantly thinking about negative experiences, ‘oh I’m going to fail, crashing or not getting up on that wave,’ that’s what is going to happen.

On a performance level, how big is the mental piece?

I lecture a lot on this. I was just giving a lecture at a triathlon camp and I asked the group, “how mental do you think triathlon is?” And while everyone said something different, they all acknowledged its importance. ‘It’s 50 percent mental and 50 percent physical.’ Some people said, ‘I don’t know, it’s 75 percent mental and 25 percent physical.’ And then the question back to them is, ‘how much time do you spend working on that mental piece?’ And most often what I hear back is that nobody spends anytime working on the mental piece. They actually do more than they think because just goal setting is working on that mental piece, but most people think, all I need to do is this physical training. And you’re not being the best athlete you can be if you’re not incorporating some of this mental training.

Do you find that just taking the step to do the mental work is one of the biggest parts because they’re acknowledging that there is that mental piece to work on?

Yes, and by the time they come to me usually they’ve already taken that step. They’re thinking maybe I need to address something other than my physical abilities. I’ve tried everything and I’m not getting any faster on my bike or I’m not overcoming a specific fear. So maybe it’s something mental. And finding me is a step along that road.

This conversation is reminding me about the importance of self-talk, and how that relates to fear. People don’t realize they are working on their mental game, but we have a conversation going on in our head all the time and it’s so important to understand what that our internal dialog is really important and determining whether it’s working for us or not is crucial. Most of us, I don’t care how strong and confident you are, there is still some self doubt, there is still some negative internal chatter. So we work a lot with athletes around unraveling what’s there. I’m big on journaling and writing. So, for example, I’ve been working with this cyclist around some fear stuff with descending. I have him journal, before and after, what he’s saying in his head, the specific language. What are these thoughts? Because if you’re saying, ‘I’m going fall, I’m going to fall, I’m going to fall,’ ok, we need to change that. Sometimes they already know they’re saying it, but then they realize when they are saying it and I can teach them to use tools to change that. So it’s a matter of downloading that data and realizing this is when that voice comes in, at exactly this point in my ride. So a lot of what I do is develop awareness so that they can change their self-talk.

For the athletes that are naturally confident, are there personality traits that sports psychologists have found relate to performance?

A lot has to do with how they’re brought up. I don’t want to generalize too much, but usually you see confident athletes come from parents who were very supportive. But then there are the exceptions to that. There are athletes who grew up being told they couldn’t do anything and they persevered and they said, ‘you know what, I can do anything.’ I do think you’re born with some of that. Regardless of upbringing, ultimately an athlete who has confidence is going to perform better than an athlete who is lacking in confidence.
But across the board, is the connecting principle in performance confidence and positivity? Do you ever meet cynical, doubtful people who perform really well? Or do you think you need a positive mental conversation?
I think so. I have never met a good athlete who was really negative. Could they exist, sure? But I’m a big believer that there is a strong correlation. But there is also the flip side of being too confident, too much ego. If you put someone out at Maverick’s who is too confident, that’s a problem too. You don’t want them to hurt themselves. Sometimes the perspective needs to shift the other way.

Yea, or in triathlon, you might start the race too fast and be spent after the swim.

Yes, but sometimes there is some value in that experience too. For example, an athlete who is scared to push him or herself too hard in a race, well, they’re not necessarily learning their limits and boundaries and they’re not living up to their potential. The athlete that says, ‘I’m going to go all out, I’m going to see what it feels like to burn up my legs, throw up, and maybe not finish the race,’ that person is collecting a lot of valuable information. They’re going to know their limits and say, ‘ok, I’m not going to go there and do that again, but I know how far I can go.’ The fearful athlete isn’t going to go there to know how far they can push themselves.

That really makes me think of just knowing your sport too. Talking to the big wave surfers, I realized you have to know every situation you could get into and rehearse for that: the two-mile swim you might have to make, the two or three-wave hold down. So when you get into that situation, you don’t panic.

Yes, you keep triggering things for me. When someone expresses fear when getting prepared for a race, I’ll say, let’s write them all down: I’m afraid it’s going to rain, I’m afraid I’m going to get a flat tire, I’m afraid I’m going to get stomach cramps, I’m afraid someone is going to run over me in the swim. They’ll make their laundry list of all the fears and make a line down the middle of the page. And then to the right of that, we’ll determine, ok, is that situation in your control or out of your control? If it’s out of control – and there is some debate about which are in your control and out of your control, but some are obvious – then I have a conversation and say, if these things are out of your control, can we cross them off the list? I mean, if they’re truly out of your control, let’s not focus on them. So maybe then they’re left with half of things. And we’ll go through each of those and create an action plan, on the right side of the line. Maybe for you that means rehearsing the two-mile swim if you lose your board if we’re talking about Mavericks. Same thing in triathlon. If you get a flat tire, which is not always in your control, but if it happens, do you know how to change it? Do you have a spare? Well, of course you’re scared that you’re going to get a flat tire because you don’t know how to change it. So then we’ll set goals around that and create an action plan: once this week, go to the bike shop and practice changing a tire. I’m afraid someone is going to run me over, well, that may happen. Have you done some group swims where you’re swimming in confined situations? No, I haven’t. Well, no wonder you’re scared. The idea is: go practice this, address it directly. In the case of the nutrition piece, I’m scared that my stomach is going to hurt, I’m not going to get enough fluids in. Ok, well what’s your strategy there? Go and study. And when it comes to race day, and you know you’ve done all you can, you’re not scared anymore. You know exactly how many calories and fluids to take in and which gels and bars work well with your stomach. It’s about managing those fears and having a strategy for them.

More about Paige:

Paige works for Move Press where she currently heads a new triathlon magazine called 3/GO and serves as Editorial Director. 3/GO was recently awarded the prestigious award for “Best in Triathlon Writing” at the Triathlon American Conference.
Prior to working with Move Press, she worked as a freelance writer specializing in sport psychology, cycling, triathlon, sports, fitness, and wellness. She worked as Regional Editor with Competitor Magazine and was a contributing writer to Road Magazine She is currently working on her first book with Dr. Stacy Sims of Stanford University called “The Pregnant Athlete”.
In addition to her writing, Paige counsels and educates athletes on the mental component of athletic experience through her private practice. In her practice, Paige teaches various sport psychology techniques to enhance performance: goal setting, motivation, imagery, confidence, relaxation, focus & concentration, effective team communication, and more.
When she is not writing, speaking or or working with athletes, Paige is probably on her bike. Recently she completed a 600+ mile bike ride with Specialized to raise money and awareness for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. She also just completed a 100 day/100 run challenge and is looking forward to her next adventure yet to be determined which will have to wait a while as Paige and her husband are expecting their second son this Fall.

Your body is made of about 60 percent water. The blood in your veins is close to the consistency of seawater. Even the human brain is more than two-thirds water. Keeping this in mind, try to feel that original part of yourself. Imagine those elbows and knees, bits of tooth and jaw and skull, dissolving into an aqueous state.

You hit earth and spread in all directions, fingertips reaching out onto that warm beach, settling briefly before being sucked back back back. Back into the formless. Back to containing all these individual waves and spirals, gyres and rivulets, all these births and deaths. Until, of course, the next brush of wind. Until the next time you take shape.

For months, this is the little meditation I would guide at bookstores before doing a reading from my first book, Saltwater Buddha
. It’s something you might say to an audience to relax them, but for me, it was totally selfish. It was to relax myself. I’d written the book at 26, fresh out of journalism school, insecure. Now being on book tour was the most terrifying thing I’d ever done. I had a fear of public speaking, for one. But I was mostly just afraid of ruining my life. I’d worked my ass off to go to the best graduate school in journalism, all to become a “serious” writer, and I’d been sort of doing it: living in New York, smoking cigarettes, writing about politics, sex, and death. I had a good act going. But somehow, just as things were getting official, I’d also decided — through the urging of a little-known publisher who’d read one of my more bohemian articles — to reveal all the oddest and most vulnerable moments of my life. How I’d run away from home at 16 to focus my life on surfing, how I’d spent a year in a Buddhist monastery and nearly ordained as a monk at 19, and how Zen and surfing had basically kept me from becoming some missing teen on a milk carton. Great, now anything I wrote would be considered the words of some hippie runaway Buddhist surfer. Oh, the gravitas.

The book had seemed like a great idea when I was writing it on a sailboat in Sausalito, Calif. But not long before the release, I’d become so scared of suddenly having my real life revealed — scared, really, of just being myself — I balked. I told the publisher I would give them back the money and shelved the book. It was far too risky to go public with who I really was.

But after some months away — needing money — I reread the manuscript, trying to read it as if I was the ocean recording the journey of just one wave, like it was an anonymous novel I’d picked up at a secondhand bookstore. When I read it like this, I kind of liked it. No, I really liked it.

Long story short, the book came out, got good reviews, and I toured all over the world — Canada, the U.S., Australia, Indonesia. And every single night before I spoke, I wanted to run. Tense chest, sweaty palms. But then, every single time, without fail, once I was speaking, the fear would flip 180 degrees. By the time the presentation was over, I was relaxed, joking, having fun. I felt like the real me again. I was out of the spiral of the wave, free to swim around the boundless ocean — at least until the next time I freaked out.

As it turned out, my fears of the book ruining my life were unfounded. Nobody shunned me or threw me out of the journalism club. I could still do serious writing (although I realized taking yourself seriously is sort of a bummer). Some incredible filmmakers even started making the book into a documentary. What the hell had I been so scared of?

I still use the wave meditation for myself. It reminds me that we’re all individuals with complex stories — waves who think we have lots of problems, who think we’re separate from the ocean. But we all also have the capability, at any time, to remember we’re necessarily connected to all of nature, all beings, all times and places — oceanic. Every one of us contains water that has lived on the earth since the very first days of our planet. We are literally just water and sunlight being born and dying over and over and over again, recycled into various forms, various waves.

Some people call this oceanic self God or Buddha nature or the super-ego. I have no clue what it is. But my experience of life is that we fluctuate constantly between ocean and wave. When we put down our usual story and feel connected to the big picture, the ocean, fear doesn’t bother us. But it doesn’t take long to get caught in the spiraling churn of self-obsession again, where every little fear feels paralyzing.

The book tour made me realize this more clearly than ever, and I spent the next few years trying to figure fear out. I read reams of books and interviewed many of the world’s experts on fear: neuroscientists, psychologists, extreme athletes, sports psychologists, phobics, artists, meditation masters. I also started treating myself as a lab rat, pushing myself to confront the fears that I felt were keeping me from living the life I want to. Three years later, I’m far from being fearless — and actually don’t want to be. Fear has benefits, it turns out. But the research has been so life-changing, I put the story into a book called The Fear Project. The book comes out this winter from Rodale. But fear — like love — is such a vast topic, I could never fit everything I’ve been finding into one book. I also still have so much to learn. That’s the reason for this blog.

In a way, fear is the most basic, simple, primal emotion. It evolved in the same way in all of us. It functions in our brains and hearts in much the same way. It arises in the mind and can cease in the mind — a fabrication. That said, there are a million nuances to fear that scientists are beginning to uncover, nuances that can be extremely helpful in learning how to manage fear’s crafty ways. It’s these nuances that I’ll be focusing on here.

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll post discussions about fear, stress, and courage with the likes of a Stanford neuroscientist who studies meditation, a pathologist who became a shaman, Buddhist monk, a Mavericks champion who battled drug addiction, and so many others — as well as post my own experiences. (A few of these interviews, in their raw form, are already up here.)

Fear won’t go away. Fear is there for a reason, a survival tool. But we can change how we react and view our most primal emotion. It can be a huge deal that becomes literally what we are. Or it can just be an occasional flicker on the ocean of mind.

For more by Jaimal Yogis, click here.

For more on Becoming Fearless, click here.

“When I’m trying to figure out these things that I’m going to do, I try to find the one thing that I’m most afraid of – whether it’s a longer distance, or whatever, that’s what I thrive on.”

Jamie Patrick is one of the best ultra athletes on the planet. He recently completed an unprecedented 111-mile swim down the Sacramento River. Jamie was a huge inspiration for The Fear Project and I’m proud to call him a dear friend. Here is just one of our recent interviews on fear, ultra swimming, and life.

JY: How did you get into swimming?

JP: I got into swimming when I was seven. My mom decided that swimming would be good for me and I started swimming on a rec team and my first coach was actually Matt Biondi, the seven-time gold medalist. He was my first coach in rec, which was kind of neat. I just loved it. I was a kid who – they didn’t call it attention deficit disorder back then – but I was high energy and swimming kind of grounded me. I just fell in love with it. It was something I was good at. I continued to play other sports, but swimming became the focus. I really started to get serious about it around 12 or 13. Just been swimming ever since.

JY: Did you want to have a career or go to the Olympics?

I was really a pretty good swimmer through high school, but I never really had any dreams of the Olympics. I wanted to continue my career in swimming though, so I actually turned down a scholarship in water polo to attend Long Beach state to swim on no scholarship because it would mean swimming under one of the greatest coaches ever, Tim Shaw, who actually broke the thousand yard record going out in the mile. But you know, I never had any aspirations of being a professional swimmer. I was never that good. There are a lot of swimmers, especially in the area that I grew up in, we’ve had so many Olympians that that’s what they strive for, but I never had that kind of desire.

JY: When did open water swimming come into play?

JP: It didn’t until I transferred to the University of Hawaii, where we did some of our swim workouts in open water and then when I started doing triathlons. In Tri, most of our swims were done in open water, so it kind of got my interest up.

JY: Tell me about the most difficult triathlon you completed – what the physical and mental ramifications were, and how you got through it?

JP: The hardest triathlon I ever did was the triple Iron Man in Virginia. It was three times the distance of an Iron Man, non-stop, 7.8 mile swim, 336 mile bike and 78 mile run, and that race was definitely my hardest. It was 41 hours. The swim wasn’t a problem. The bike, we were on the tail end of a hurricane. It rained for the 20 hours I was on the bike. Mentally, going through almost two days of no sleep, was really difficult. As I was doing more triathlons I learned that I kind of thrived on going beyond what I’d done before and it kind of took away the speed aspect of racing for me, which was nice. It was about getting across the finish line. Mentally, it was a very difficult time, but it’s one of those things where if you can get through the mental side and push through, when you succeed, it’s that much better.

JY: How about the pain?

JP: I had a lot of pain. I believe pain is a real big mental thing. If you can teach your body to deal with the pain, you’re more likely to succeed. People have a fear of going beyond what they think they’re capable of doing. I’ve found doing these ultra events that using that fear that I’ve got helps me get to the finish line.

JY: The fear helps you? Fear that you won’t finish?

JP: Fear of the unknown, really. Is this something I’m capable of doing? And it’s almost, when I’m trying to figure out these things that I’m going to do, I try to find the one thing that I’m most afraid of – whether it’s a longer distance, or whatever, that’s what I thrive on. I don’t feel you should be unsafe, but if you can harness that fear and put it in a special place in your mind – because fear is not something your born with , it’s created out of experiences, or things you hear – if you can harness that, and use that as a building block to your success, it will be that much more fulfilling when you succeed.

JY: So you basically say to yourself: ok, I’ve swam three miles, I bet I could do six, so let me see if I can do 10? You want to take it just to the point of uncertainty? And that’s what drives you?

JP: Yea, it does and it’s almost frustrating. For example, I went 44 miles after the Tahoe Double, and when I was training for the 111-miler in the Sacramento River, there was almost a frustration from 1-44 miles. I wanted to get to 44 miles and one-tenth because from there every stroke I took would be different and new and that’s when I succeed. That doesn’t have to be going farther. It could be going faster. It could be doing something new like rock climbing. It’s experiencing something new. A lot of times people don’t go out and experience new things because of that fear. There’s a fine line between taking things you’re afraid of and being stupid. I want to make sure that that’s clear.

JY: Why do you think fear inhibits people?

JP: When people fail they carry that fear to the front instead of keeping it in a good place. So I think it’s important that people tackle small fears, whether it’s they don’t want to go to the gym because they don’t look good in their gym clothes, they don’t want to approach a big client because that’s out of their scope. You know, if people just take one little step forward they realize, oh this is not so bad. So they can continue to progress in life. It’s not just athletics. It’s every aspect of life, if you can tackle your fear head on, you’re going to be more fulfilled in life.

JY: Take me through the 44 miles of the Tahoe Double, how you felt, how you kept going?

JP: For my double crossing of Lake Tahoe, once I’d gotten to the event, I knew I’d done everything possible to prepare, whether it was the planning or training. I was expecting the unexpected. I almost wanted that to happen, and it did throughout the swim, whether it was experiencing more chop through the whole first half to not bringing the correct goggles. I had dark goggles during the night, and it was almost as if I was supposed to not be able to see anything, I was supposed to be in that place. The first lap, the first 22 miles, went relatively easy. The longest swim I’d done up until that point was Clear Lake, 17 miles, when I touched the beach on the south shore and I turned around to start back, this overwhelming sense of accomplishment came over me because I was now swimming farther in Lake Tahoe than anyone had, because there were only 21 people who had swam one length and nobody had done more. As you remember, when I started to come back to the other side, I started to have some nutritional problems where I didn’t have enough protein intake and I was starting to shut down my kidneys. I couldn’t keep down any food. And you know, this unknown fear came over me. I never thought that nutrition would be the cause of me not being able to finish. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve experienced, overcoming the nutritional, because there’s almost nothing you can do to recover. You can’t just stop and eat something and recover.

JY: Did you know it was nutritional at that point or did you just feel like crap?

JP: I felt like crap. I didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t hold anything down. I started throwing up a little blood, but you know, the drive I had to become the first person was not only for myself it was for the people who were supporting me. I had an amazing amount of people that were there to be there for me. When I was in that bad state, I kept thinking, I really want people to see that you can overcome these things. And maybe it wasn’t smart. I didn’t know how severe it was at the time. My next swims I’m planning on having doctors there to assess my health.

JY: What did you learn?

JP: What I got from this swim was not personal accomplishment – yes, it makes me feel very good – but the real reward was hearing what other people got out of seeing the finish: people saying, I’m going to do my first triathlon because of you and such. One gal who I don’t know sent me an email saying that she’s overweight and started walking again. I got an email from her two weeks ago that said she’s up to running five miles a week. You go for something having one goal, but you can get something totally different out of it.

JY: Have you found that the apprehension of one of these ultra events is worse than the actual thing?

JP: When you think about something that you’re apprehensive about, it’s definitely harder to think about it than actually going to do it, and that’s why people don’t actually do things in life. When you’re doing it, you’re in the moment. You’ve accomplished one huge goal in attempting it. Whether you succeed or fail, you’re actually doing something that you thought you couldn’t do. You’re giving it a go. That’s one of the most important things for people to realize is: just do it. Just get out there and try, and just getting out there and trying, well, that’s succeeding to me. Like you with surfing Mavericks. The reality is the fear is going to come from the anticipating, watching films and thinking about it, but when you paddle out there, man you’re giving it a go, and if you just sit in the line-up, man, you’ve accomplished something already. So when I was swimming in Lake Tahoe, I was doing something that I’d been anticipating, I’d thought about, I’d dreamt about, I’d visualized. I was there, I was living the moment. I believe that anticipation is worse than actually doing it because when you get in there you realize, — this is not so bad.

JY: Ultra swimming is a lot of time alone in your head. What do you do?

JP: Ultra swimming is a lot different than ultra running or ultra cycling or Iron Mans because the fact is you have your face in the water and you’re staring at blue or black and not much else for hours. So you’re forced to go inside, and you have a lot of time to give up, because your mind constantly wants to say, I can stop. You have the good angel on one shoulder and the bad angel on the other. So open water swimming is very difficult mentally. There are lots of things I planned on doing to get through the mental side: number games, word games, alphabet. The reality is, the thing I thought about the most was, one, finishing. I mean I thought about finishing consistently and that feeling of actually being done, the endorphin rush, that incredible sense of accomplishment. And the other thing I thought about a lot is I wanted my daughter to see her dad do something amazing. I hoped maybe she would take away something good from that.

JY: What did you learn about fear?

JP: You know, there’s a deep dark place. That’s part of the fear – this voice that tells you can quit, that you don’t have to go any farther. And that’s actually a pretty special thing. I learned from my first coach, Chris Haut, that when you have those lows, whatever you’re doing, you always have to know that on the other side of it is a high, and when you get to that high place where you feel good, you have to try to maintain that for as long as possible, and that’s knowing your body, making sure you don’t go too fast, and eating properly. So planning is really important because in a 25 hour swim you have to know you’re going to go through a lot of lows, and it’s a pretty amazing thing when you pop out of it, and sometimes you don’t think you’re going to come out, but the littlest thing can make you feel better.

JY: What do you say to people who say you’re an addict?

There are a lot of people who don’t understand. Most people don’t understand. I’m not saying everyone has to go out and climb Everest or swim 44 miles or swim 111 miles down the Sacramento River, but, you know, I’d much rather be an addict of this than something else not healthy. Some people call this unhealthy, but my spirit is up-lifted by these things that I do. You know, I never want to hurt myself, I’m just trying to make my life balanced, and doing these things makes my life balanced. When I’m not training, I’m not balanced.

JY: Do you think striving for something new gives you the focus you lacked when you were a kid?

JP: There’s no doubt about that. I’m not the kind of person who can go out for a five mile run just to go out for a run. I have to have something that I foresee in the future that I’m attaining. I do think that the attention deficit disorder, or whatever you want to call it, I think that the physical activity, the getting the heart rate up, having the ability to channel some of that energy makes the rest of my life more focused and calm. And the other thing is, I did, back in the day, have my wild child days. I did do some drugs way back. I experienced the opposite of what a lot of people do with drugs. With marijuana, I would freak out and have high heart rate, and with cocaine I would calm down. So like Ritalin, which is a stimulant, these athletics and these kinds of things provide that stimulation for me. There are criticisms, but it makes me who I am and what I think is most important for each person is to find those things that make them better. I just went and watched one of my friends do his first Iron Man a year ago, and when he first started out there was no way he was going to do an Iron Man. To watch him cross the finish line was unbelievable.

JY: Who do you look to for inspiration?

My father, he’s not an athlete per-se but he’s an adventurer, a sailor, a philanthropist, and a lot more. He does things that nobody else would even consider: the places he’s been, the things he’s seen, he’s constantly – I think I got this from him – looking to do something new and pulling people together. So yea, my dad definitely. I’m not sure how much influence this had on me, but I spent two summers with Lance Armstrong, and that time he was just starting triathlon and we were both 16, 17 years old, and over the years I’ve followed him and I’ve loved where he’s come from and what he’s done. And over the years, you know, I follow sports and I see things other people are doing and I want to do something beyond what they’re doing. I have a little bit of that drive to push the envelope.

JY: What do you feel like getting over a physical fear in ultra swimming has done in your everyday life? Social fears, fear at work?

JP: When you build confidence in anything you do, I think it trickles over into other parts of your life. I have a fear of public speaking, and I forced myself to go out and start talking to people. So I’ve been to a number of rotary clubs, and I had this fear the night before, not able to sleep, all that, and I got up there and I said, you know, I’m talking about something I love, I’m talking about something I know. Thirty seconds into it, I was in a very comfortable place. I finished that and said, you know, this is something I really enjoy doing, talking about something I love. So I learned that if you put the time and energy into something, and overcome a fear in that part of life, it can trickle over into the other parts.

JY: Anything else you want to add?

JP: If you can take something, anything, that intrigues you but also makes you a little scared. If you can take that, and it doesn’t have to be a fast progression, but if you can take it in pieces and figure out why you’re apprehensive about doing it, and break those things down, and then tackle the little things, you’re going to be more fulfilled in life. And it doesn’t have to be public. What I do is very public. This can be something inside, something for you only (those are the most fulfilling, really). If you can just take something and figure out why you’re apprehensive and take little baby steps to get over that, man, life is great when you overcome those things. If there’s one thing I can say, if you have a little desire that you feel is way out there, you should just give it a go, because if you don’t give it a go, you’re always going to be thinking coulda shoulda woulda, and we only live once, so….

Interested in open water swimming? Check out the gear you need.

“You have the fear of drowning, and you add claustrophobia and all sorts of other kinds of phobias, buried alive, and cave diving has a very high stress level…But there is no question that the biggest enemy in the cave is your own mind.”

JY: How did you get into cave diving?

MM: When I first started teaching diving in Mexico, the ocean would sometimes be too rough to take students out. You’re always dealing with a finite amount of time. And if they signed up for a course, they have to be able to take the training. These cenotes, or caves, were these great pools of fresh water back in the jungle, that the Maya had known about as far back as they’d lived there. Because all of the water in that area – none of it runs on the surface, it all runs through these caves. So we would take our students to these sink holes in the open water and train them, and there would be this great giant opening in the cave as big as a hangar for a 747 with stalactites and stalagmites. It wasn’t a very hard choice to say, “wow, this is a really beautiful place, I’d like to see what’s there.” There’s also a book called Shibumi that greatly influenced me.

JY: It’s about cave diving?

It has cave diving in it. Anyway, so the caves in the Yucatan were unexplored and giant and accessible. I guess my point is I was in the right place at the right time to begin this journey of exploration. In the end, I was lucky enough to discover a cave in 1989 called Nohoch.

JY: How did it get the name?

We named it Nohoch. It didn’t have a name before. The Nohoch cave from 1990 to 2004 was the world’s largest underwater cave system. And I had arranged for exclusive rights to explore it so we could do it in a systematic way. Every year we would mount an expedition of 20-25 cave divers and we would separate to cover more ground. I would coordinate them diving, and I was one of the lead divers as well, and we would take all the information, whether it was water quality, survey data, biological studies, population studies of animals in the caves, and we’d put all that data together and we’d keep generating maps. Every year we’d have this project where we’d do this exploration. The fun part of that was that every year for 10 years when I’d go cave diving and lay new exploration line, I was breaking a world record.

JY: Nothing even remotely that large had been found?

Well, interestingly enough, there were four cave systems in the area that were big. Let me just give you an idea of relationship of size. When I first started cave diving, the world record cave was 30,000 feet – Blue Cavern Caves in the Bahamas. That was the grand daddy of caves. In the Nohoch system, when I quit exploring it in 2000, we had 275,000 feet of underwater passage. Since that time, it has now been connected to another nearby cave system and it’s now exceeding probably 600,000 feet, which means that one cave system has over 100 miles of surveyed passages. So you know, we went from 30,000, which seemed insurmountable to, during our projects, we used to lay 30-40,000 feet of line in one month with a good group of divers. So, it changed dramatically.

JY: Didn’t you hold the world record for a long time?

At the end, we had the Guinness Book of World Records record for the world’s largest underwater cave system; and in fact for eight years I was listed as the explorer. It said discovered by Mike Madden. In 1991, I was inducted into the explorers club in New York as a fellow. In 1996, I was a finalist for the Rolex Sports grand prize for the work. We did 18 different documentaries: for Spanish television, French television, Japanese television, Discovery, PBS. We kind of ran the gamut. It was a really good run. There was a lot of very exciting and challenging work.

JY: What is so dangerous about cave diving?

MM: Well, you take two of man’s most primordial fears: lost in the dark and you add to it to the fact that you can’t breath water so you’re underwater. So you have the fear of drowning, and you add claustrophobia and all sorts of other kinds of phobias, buried alive, and cave diving has a very high stress level. Caves are very maze like, water is very clear when you go in but it can be absolutely zero visibility when you come out. So the cave can be absolutely beautiful when you go in and you turn around and it’s like you’re in a bottle of milk.

JY: From people mucking it up?

MM: It can be from careless diving. So the technique is really important. There’s silt, and it can be on the walls on the floor or on the ceiling. So breathing scuba and the bubbles hit the ceiling and it begins to snow to the point where if you’re in a very actively dissolving cave, the ceiling can actually collapse, and that actually happened to us a few times. Rocks are being dissolved on the roof of the cave and they just start falling down. That’s not the natural process of course, but the bubbles dislodge them.

JY: But is it true that you’re kind of your own worst enemy out there? Do most people who die cave diving have some sort of panic?

Well, there is no question that the biggest enemy in the cave is your own mind. You need the ability to sort out what tasks need to be done at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order, which helps you keep your stress level down. Training and repetition of emergency procedures also help. Because you have a limited amount of air, you can have a equipment malfunction. A lot of times, the priority is to get you switched over to another system so you don’t lose air. Because if you lose too much air, however far you go in you have to be able to come out. So if you shut things down and you’re trying to make it out, if you think you don’t have enough gas to make it out, that’s going to drive your stress level up, which is going to make you breathe harder. So it’s all about really keeping totally focused and stick with the routine that you know and not over-step things. And that’s really one of the keys, and where people get in trouble is that they push their own limitations. And then when two things go wrong, their stress level goes up, and it’s like a golf ball unwinding. You take off the cover and blap!

JY: Would you say you were able to keep your stress level low because you rehearsed rehearsed rehearsed? What would you say your techniques were?

MM: Certainly the routine of dealing with certain emergencies – because I used to train other cave divers – was helpful. One of the ways I would train people is I’d tell them: “it’s the problem that you never thought of before you went into the cave is the one that will kill you.” There are all kinds of ways to deal with different problems. And what drives your stress level up is when you feel like you’ve passed that point of control. If you turn around in the cave and you’re following the line and you don’t recognize where you are, and you’re like, “gee I have no idea where I am, then you start freaking out, and certainly the most stressful times I’ve had in a cave were — and I came face to face with my fear – when I wasn’t absolutely certain of my exit, and I had some sort of equipment problem or visibility issue, and I couldn’t read my gas gauges so I couldn’t tell how much gas I had. And your brain loves to cycle into that, what I call that RPM stress cycle. It’s just when you get to a certain point, you go, “ok, I can’t go past this because if I do, I quit thinking clearly, I quit making decisions that are good. I’m going to make things worse by allowing myself to speed up.” So it’s better to just stop and bring yourself back to a place where your mind isn’t racing.

JY: So it’s really knowledge of the way your system works.

MM: You have to be very comfortable with your equipment.

JY: I mean your own mental system too.

And that’s really true. Being able to know where you are on the stress gage is very important because there is a point where – really good cave divers will say, and I’ve had really good cave divers look at me and say, “you know, I would never panic in a cave.” And my reaction to that is: that’s just a bald faced lie. Because at some point everyone gets back to that reptilian brain that says, I gotta survive. It might come later for some people than others, but it’s just a matter of, more than anything, knowing what that point is. Because it’s really difficult to back out of a full-on panic.

JY: Once you’re panicking, how much more oxygen are you using?

It’s hard to calculate, but one of the physiological signs of stress is increased respiration. If you find yourself breathing a little harder – and it could be that you’re not afraid but you’re frustrated or something; you jam your reel and you can’t go any farther and you’ve got all this pressure on you to lay line, and you feel that pressure on you and your reel is jammed – and the minute that frustration hits you, you start into the cycle of stress, and I call it stress, but most people call it panic.

MM: Take me through a situation where you felt like you were up against a wall. How did you manage it?

MM: We were diving in a cave in central Florida called Silver Springs. Silver Springs is a very small cave that has an extremely high flow out.

JY: How small are we talking?

MM: We’re talking small where you can’t really wear tanks on your back or on your sides, so what you do is put a control device on the tank and push it front of you and you use a Y valve so you have two regulators. It’s called a no-mount rig. It was developed by a friend of mine who was charged with exploring and mapping the system for the park because right around Silver Spring is an amusement park – glass bottom boats.

JY: So it’s so small you can’t turn around?

MM: No, in-fact there are places in Silver Springs where you’re going in and you have pretty good visibility and you look back and you have no visibility, and there are places where you look above you and there are just these jumble of rocks just sort of falling, making an igloo top, being held up, and they’re so loose that you don’t want to exhale bubbles into them so you get to the point on the line, there’s a close-pin, you exhale and you begin inhaling and swim across this route, not exhaling until you get across. So that’s the kind of cave it is. And the story I’ll tell you is, I was in filming with a really good friend of mine, Bill Carlson, and he was in front of me. We were in a very narrow passage, maybe three feet high and maybe 2.5 wide, swimming through, and I had a camera on the front of my no-mount and I wanted a camera on the end of my tank. Well, the ceiling collapsed, and when the ceiling collapsed, the rock fell down and first fell on top of bill and then it slid off and covered up the line. And the visibility went to nothing. So first thing, I had to follow the line and it went underneath the silt, underneath this rock, and I went “oh boy, this is bad.” I managed to get a hold of one of bills legs and I pulled him out. We got a hold of the line and exited out of the cave. Well, it took us a while…

JY: Did you have to go in reverse?

MM: We knew if we just followed the wall through the channel that we could find the line so we were lucky, and the flow helped us because when we were going in, we were going against the current and as we were coming out, it cleared, where if we’d been going the other way, the silt coming in on us, we’d have been in a really bad situation. We managed to get out. But it took upwards of 25 minutes.

JY: How deep were you?

We were at about 70 feet.

How long can you go?

MM: It’s all dependent on depth because if you take a breath here at the surface, if you breathe compressed air at 33 feet, your lungs are taking in twice as much air. It’s the same volume. So if you go down 99 feet, you’re breathing four times as much air, so the deeper you go, the more air you breathe, the more gas you use for every breath. Because your lungs don’t change size. Because of the pressure, the volume remains the same, but the density of the air is much greater. And that’s why weabsorb nitrogen and nitrogen can cause the benz and that’s why if you breathe air beyond a certain depth, oxygen becomes toxic because the air is so dense. If you breathe air at 10 atmospheres of pressure, that means there is 10 times as much oxygen and 10 times as much nitrogen and your body is going to absorb all that.

So, for you guys, what was your panic level?

MM: Well sometimes, even when things go bad, you know you have options to run through. For me it’s when I – well, in 1800 cave dives, 7000 underwater dives, I can remember three occasions where I had lost the line in the cave and I was really lost on one occasion. And I was angry, I was so angry with myself, and then it goes back to that fight or flight kind of thing. What I did is I chose to fight it, and when I realized I was angry, I realized that wasn’t letting me think through the problem carefully. So I was able to pull myself back from that anger. Another time, I had a boat in the open water in the surf zone and the captain and flipped it over. It was upside-down and it was laying right on top of the reef getting drug back and forth across the reef and all the ropes and everything were in there. So I was underneath the thing trying to get it freed and I got trapped, tangled up in a rope underneath this boat smashing on the reef and stuff. And my stress level went really high because I was thinking, here I am a world famous cave diver and I’m going to drown in 2-feet of water underneath a fucking boat, you know.
And there have been several times where my partners have had their stress levels go up and I’ve been able to maintain calm.

JY: Can you talk?

MM: No, it’s all done through hand signals. You get used to diving with someone and you just look at them and know exactly what they’re thinking. I mean, it becomes nearly telepathic. Beyond the fact that your life is someone’s hands when you go into a cave with them, theoretically, a third of their air is yours for exit. Because you use a third to go in, a third to go out, and a third for emergencies. Say, you and I went cave diving and we used a third of our air, and we were just getting ready to turn around, and we had 2/3 of our air left, and my complete system failed, boom, and I had no air left, I should have, theoretically, enough air to go to you. You should have enough air in your tanks, with your third and the emergency third, for us both to make it out of the cave. So your buddy becomes a very important part of your equipment. I have a friend whose motto is: don’t ever dive with strokes. The thing is that when we were doing our projects and I had 25 divers – there may be now, but there wasn’t at that time 25 divers who knew what they were doing – so I would pair someone inexperienced with someone who really knew what they were doing, and consequently, I built people, I got people really involved in the project and very experienced.

JY: After you had a scary experience, you must have had some anxiety imagining bad scenarios. What would you say was the driving force that kept you from wanting to stop? Was it curiosity, exploring, wanting to break the record, the love of doing it?

MM: Well, I think it was all of those. All of those are really true. The exploration of it, and the truth of it is that all the situations I just told you, I learned from. And that’s the key. The thing I’m most proud of is that nobody ever died on my watch. A lot of people say, I want to die doing what I love. Not me, I want to die of old age and a clear conscience.

For more of Mike’s beautiful cave diving photos, click here.

Interested in scuba and cave diving? Get started.

The book that got Mike Madden started.

“If fear is something that you hold in your mind in anticipation of something bad happening, I don’t hold that in my mind. I don’t see that kind of peril in surf, no matter how big it gets.”

Mark “Doc” Renneker is both a world renowned physician and big-wave explorer. He is one of the most seasoned Mavericks surfers on earth and is the only one to have ridden numerous big waves around the globe like The Potato Patch (miles off the coast of San Francisco). A dedicated scientist, explorer, and reader of all genres, there may be nobody in the world who understands fear and extreme conditions better than Doc. I’m honored to occasionally get to tag along on his adventures. Below is just one of numerous interviews I’ve done with him recently.

JY: How did you get into the big wave world?

Doc: I always liked big surf, even growing up in west LA and just body surfing Santa Monica and places like that. Even in Jr. high we would get anybody, hitchhike even, to body surf the wedge. I was always really comfortable body surfing big waves. Eventually ended up finishing up undergrad at UCSC, and by then I’d gotten into bellyboarding, knee boarding, and then there was kind of limit: you couldn’t take a knee board into a wave past about 10 or 12 foot or something. I started stand-up surfing, but mainly with an interest in catching bigger waves. I moved up here for medical school, and then you really needed a big board. Having a bigger board was sort of the access to big waves. It was ocean beach that really let me learn how to coexist with big waves.

JY: This was your training ground so to speak?

Doc: Yea, playground I would say.

JY: When was that?

Doc: 1975-79 – and then residency and things through 85.

JY: Did you always feel that comfort in big waves or was fear an issue that you were pushing?

Doc: Fear was never an issue. I somehow am missing that fear gene. Well, that isn’t 100 percent accurate. Being a doctor and doing surf medicine stuff, I see people who have broken their necks surfing, and it’s always in shallow, shore break. I actually am afraid of shallow, hard breaking waves. If I get pulled over the falls on some little shallow, shore break wave, I get scared. And I’m scared of other surfers’ big wave boards. Because that’s a great way to get a significant head injury. But with big waves, it’s always pretty deep. The waves themselves have never really, in truth, given me reason – with few exceptions – to fear them. If fear is something that you hold in your mind in anticipation of something bad happening, I don’t hold that in my mind. I don’t see that kind of peril in surf, nobody how big it gets. But that’s a function of learning over many years how to safely be in big surf. By the way, I’ll let you see a copy of it, as far as this book, Surf Survival, the most fun chapter I wrote, and the first chapter I wrote was on surviving big surf. It was fun, after all these years of experience, to try to distill it down in my own way, not as to big wave surfing made easy, but just to make sense of it.

Maverick Moments “Danger” from The Go Big Project on Vimeo.

JY: That would be good. It sounds like you were progressing by going out in what you felt comfortable in, little by little.

I don’t know about that. The first week of medical school I rode some of the biggest waves I’ve ever ridden. It was the great New Zealand swell of 1975, October, and I rode some really big waves, and also got to see the potato patch break from the 14th floor anatomy lab, and I just thought, aw, man, I’d love to go surf out there. And so, that became sort of the bar that I was interested in, locally. I would just sort of fantasize about being out there. And to acquire that sort of experience or knowledge, to understand the place, took a lot of time. Really surfing the biggest days here, when the outer bars area breaking, edging out, edging out, edging out, learning what these offshore currents do, and the tides, the swell direction, wind. And then rehearsing, as it were, even over the summer time, just having the fun of speed paddling out a mile and just swimming back with your board behind you. Rehearsing all the escape routes. So that kind of kept being incremental.

JY: You were also charting the Patch from an oceanographic perspective, right? And this was pre-internet, did you just hop over to the coast guard? The library?

Doc: I always was buying nautical charts. From a nautical perspective, there was no less information then as there is now because San Francisco Bay entrance is a big deal to mariners. So all that information, if you really want to look at flood and ebb tide patterns, and how the water flows through the different portions of these offshore sandbars, it’s all there, it’s all mapped. And I had a friend who was a crab fishermen named Eddie Tavasief. Eddie T, he fished out there, and he took me out there the first time.

JY: And you got the idea to surf out there before you’d ever heard of Maverick’s?

Doc: Oh, long before. 1975.

JY: And that was before Maverick’s had even been discovered by Jeff Clark?

Doc: Yea, well what’s really interesting is if you really press Jeff on it and ask, all those years you were surfing Maverick’s alone, how many times did you really surf it. He finally confessed to me that it was only 8 or 10 times.

JY: Well, understandable.

Doc: And on the other hand, when I first went out there in 1990, to Jeff’s credit, he was fully formed in his knowledge of Maverick’s. I mean, he really knew the place. For however many times he surfed it, he’d learned the place.

JY: So you tried to paddle out at the Patch before you’d ever surfed Maverick’s?

Doc: Yea, oh yea.

JY: And that was 1981, right? Talk about that experience. That had to scare you a little bit.

Doc: Again, the only thing that scared me was jeopardizing the people with me and Eddie. I felt completely comfortable out there. When I paddled out and got mowed down by big waves, I thought it isn’t that far to shore. I could swim that far easy, especially with waves pushing me. Even if you lost your board or whatever, I knew it wasn’t going to be some life threatening deal.

JY: So it was your confidence in knowing the currents?

Doc: And knowing myself. The people I was always with. I’ve been in too many emergency situations in medicine and seen when people aren’t experienced or knowledgeable what happens when they panic. And suddenly you end up having to risk your life to rescue someone else, or put yourself in jeopardy. So that’s the problem. So that’s why, when I first went out and surfed it, it was by myself. That just made the most sense.

JY: What do you think allows you to have that calm in the face of waves that big? You’d think we’d have an almost genetic fear of waves that big, having had to survive tsunamis and such?

Doc: I’m not sure that’s true. If that were the case everyone would have just stayed in central Africa. I don’t think so. I think there is a much larger gene, if you will, as to exploration. It somehow lessens it to call it adventure. But exploration. And I think combined with exploration, what exploration always requires, is intellect and curiosity. And without either one of those, you don’t make a very good explorer.

JY: So do you think it’s basically your ability to reason your way through it.

Doc: And learn from my experiences. Everything that I would do, it would add to the catalogue of the playbook. I always had all these strategies for, I don’t know, getting caught in a rip, all the things that can happen in surfing – two wave hold-downs and whatever else, and I would seek out those experiences. I used to rehearse two wave hold-downs. I used to stay down for two waves on purpose, just to ablate the fear, because what I know of fear is that it will increase your heart rate, and it will increase your oxygen usage, and you won’t last as long. So there is a decided advantage to the corn snakes’ or hog-nosed snakes’ ability to roll-over and act dead even, to just turn off your metabolism if you can. And so when I drive, every time –this may sound obsessive or OCD or something – but virtually every time I drive to maverick’s, from the beginning, from 1991 on, I would do this thing along the air strip, at the start of the air strip heading south. I’ll drive only 35 miles per-hour, not past the speed limit, and I’ll hold my breath for the length of that road. The fun of it is that it’s hard to do all the way to where you hang a right to Maverick’s, even to just get to the end of the air-strip is about a minute and a half. To get to the end of the road is 2 minutes. But the interesting is, if you don’t take a perfect breath, or try to do something along the way like eat something or distract yourself, then it gets really interesting. Then I find myself – unknowingly – pressing down on the gas pedal to go a little faster, 39 or 40 mph, to get to the end of the road sooner. So then I thought, this is a great training for Maverick’s. So now what I’ll do is, when I really want to breathe, I’ll let off on the accelerator, down to 30, 20, and it seems to take forever, and that’s what simulates a long hold-down. Much as you want to get to the surface, you just have to wait. You can definitely, as it were, uncouple or desensitize a superficial fear response.

Purchase Doc’s latest book, Surf Survival here.

KT-22 is a double-black-diamond with the occasional 20-foot cliff. The snow is coming down in sheets. When we begin our descent, I’m hot on JT’s trail for about, oh, five seconds. Then I realize JT isn’t going to really make any turns. His friend, an Australian snowboarder, informs me that JT is “taking it easy today,” so, ok, change of plans. We meet at the Squaw Valley wine bar.

JT strolls in wearing a black hoodie and Irish tweed cap, brushing snowflakes off his shoulders. “You scare me,” one man shouts at JT through a thick beard. “You scare me,” JT laughs, clearly used to this treatment. JT has been skiing from the age of two and has developed an international reputation not just for being able to get down some of the most technical and sheer mountains in the world with speed, style, and huge air, but for – in his off-time – flying.

In 2009, 60 Minutes featured Holmes and friends BASE-jumping in “wing suits,” flying squirrel-like getups that allow them leap off, say, a 1000 foot cliff, and cover up to 2.5 feet horizontally to every one-foot of vertical free-fall. It’s the closest thing to a human flying without a motor. When we sit down, JT just finished a stunt for Transformers 3 in which he and three others did their flying squirrel act off the 1730-foot high Willis tower in Chicago. They used the suits steering capability to make a sharp, mandatory right turn around a neighboring sky scraper called 311 Wacker, then maneuvered their way through downtown Chicago, opening their chutes just 400-feet from the ground and landing safely on the street that had been blocked to traffic.

“We needed a beer after that,” JT laughs.

He may sound blaze, but when he and fellow BASE-jumper Mike Swanson got the job for Transformers, they were far from relaxed. “We were scared and we trained like hell,” JT says. “Mike and I probably did 180 jumps together to prepare: sky dives, BASE jumps. By the end, we could communicate without speaking. We could anticipate each other’s moves. We just took our fear and transferred it to focus.”

The above is a short excerpt from my book, The Fear Project. Below, some excerpts from our interview at the Squaw Valley Wine Bar. I’ll be posting more from JT soon.

I read some of your interviews about how you got into skiing, but tell me a little bit about how you got into skiing and if you were always pushing the limits, was that your personality type?

Well I grew up as just a weekend skier in the bay area. I was in the Mighty Mites program under ski instruction here at squaw. I realized around high school that I really wasn’t anything special in baseball or basketball or soccer, but I was pretty good at skiing and I liked that. I liked that I was better than some of my friends at skiing so there was a little bit of ego there, I think, and I liked the rush you got out of it, catching air, and getting a little scared, just getting that kick. I dug that. Some people’s brains just function better when, if you want to get technical about it, frontal lobe stimulation. Some people, when they have that, they perform better. Their brains and their bodies work better. I’m one of those people where fear helps and maybe that’s why I could ski well – because there was a little bit of an element of that fear. I just thought it was really fun.

Did you ever figure out what that is, why you function better in a stressful situation?

In this day and age you have all kind of kids who are getting Ritalin prescriptions. You’re ADD. You can’t focus in class. And basically they’re getting a small dosage of methamphetamine that gives you a small bit of frontal lobe stimulation throughout the day, and I was an ADHD kid and I took Ritalin and it kind of worked. But in the end, I stopped talking Ritalin because I got headaches from it. But looking back on it now, I realize that as a human being, I do function best when I have a little bit of that fear. It helps me focus on one thing. If I’m on top of the mountain with my parachute and I’m scared, that fear really drives me to analyze every step of the base jump I’m about to do, or the skiing line I’m about to do. I think it through and I think: how am I going to do this safely, how am I going to make it from the take off to the landing, are the conditions right, whether it’s snow conditions with an avalanche in skiing or wind conditions with a base jump, with that fear, and that brain stimulation, I’m completely focused, I can dissect and be meticulous with my thought process. Alright this is an acceptable risk and I can do this. And I’m just transferring that focus to the task at hand. I’m not focused on whether I’m going to do it or not, I’m focused on doing it. And then you kind of, you drop in and you start skiing or you jump off a cliff with a wing suit or whatever it is, and you shift from functioning in that objective thought process to functioning in your emotion, and you’re just kind flowing, and letting it happen, riding the instinct wave, that works well too.

It sounds like there are maybe two stages for you: in the beginning, before you go, fear focuses you, and helps you focus on what’s possible, then after you’re going, it sounds like fear can be a hindrance because it freezes you. How do you let go?

I think there are people, who when they have that fear, it’s a real intense emotion, and it can overflow that thought process and it can result in like a panic, but I’ve actually never found myself to do that. In base jumping, I’ve actually seen people give up and go into a fetal position in the air, like ready to die, and then they get lucky and their parachute opens or something like that. But most of the people who I jump with and myself, I’m a person who stays cognizant through the whole panic situation and that’s the way to be if you’re going to be taking risks. You’re in an avalanche, well, you’re tumbling down the mountain. You need to be cognitive and make deliberate movements, whether it’s creating an air pocket so you’ll have something to work with when you’re buried, or pulling your ABS chord, or getting your AVA Lung in your mouth, or any of these things, you need to really stay calm and deliberative with your thought process.

What is one of the scariest moments you’ve had out there?

One of the more scary moments that comes to mind is in 2010, just last year, I had my career worst skiing crash in Verbier, Switzerland, on the Bec des Rosses, a really big, steep, scary mountain. I decided to ski a line that was pretty aggressive. It was in the Verbier extreme, which is the pinnacle of extreme competition. And this was a line that I thought could win. No other skier had done it and I was the last skier to go. It was something that was untouched and a beautiful place to go skiing, but also there was some risk there. I knew if I went, where I could fall, and I knew where I couldn’t fall and I made it to where a fall was somewhat acceptable. I was still tumbling more than a thousand feet vertical on a slope peppered with rock at a very high rate of speed. And during this – on video, it’s 18 seconds of falling, just tomahawking down the mountain – and, uh, you know, I’m thinking to myself, alright, there’s nothing you can do here, this is not going to stop anytime soon, so I just said, well, I might as well relax and just go with it. Then I thought to myself, if I can reach my – we have these avalanche chords where a device inflates around your head and neck for protection as well as for an air pocket – I thought to myself, if I can reach that handle and pull it, I can get some protection if I end up hitting some rocks. I reached for it, but the centripetal force of the tumble was so strong that I couldn’t get my arms down from above my head. I could actually feel the blood going into my head and through my eyes because it was such a high speed tumble. I gave up on that thought, and said, it’ll stop, it’ll stop. And when it finally slowed down, I was able to dig in the heals of my boots, I stopped myself. I immediately evaluated my body and realized I’m ok and I immediately gave a wave to the audience and the helicopter just to say I’m ok.

No serious injuries?

I had aggravated some old injuries. I’d sprained my thumb about six months before. I felt that. I felt a shoulder injury. I felt a knee injury and I felt an old ankle injury. But I walked away from it.

What are all the injuries you’ve sustained over the years?

You know, typical to most skiers, I have some knee surgeries over the 15 years or so that I’ve been skiing really hard. Three knee surgeries and, uh, they feel pretty good.

How old are you know?

31, and the knees feel pretty good. So three knee surgeries, broken finger, broken back, broken tailbone, you know, stuff like that.

What I understand from the fear research I’ve been doing is that when something happens like that where you could have been badly injured, you’re going to be more tense the next time. Do you find that you’re more hesitant now?

Oh, I’m more hesitant to avoid that happening again. I don’t want to ever tumble down a mountain like I did the Bec des Rosses in 2010. I don’t ever want to do that. There’s just too much of an element of luck. I could’ve hit a rock. I could have dislocated my hip. But I don’t think I’ve become more tense and become worse at falling. I don’t really think you become better at it either. I think it’s something that is innate in your being. If you can fall well once, you can fall well forever.

Do you have to go through a mental process after an injury where you’re visualizing yourself doing well again?

Well, if it’s a really bad situation where you almost died and you didn’t die because of luck, or you put yourself in a situation where you may have seriously jeopardized your life or your spine, I experience an anger toward myself and a post traumatic stress depression. Maybe that has happened to me once every two years since I became an extreme sports enthusiast, so now I can recognize it, and I can analyze the depression. It’s the same thing as another sort of depression: say a girl dumps you. The first time you think it’s the end of the world. You think you’re never going to recover. But after you’ve been dumped a few times in your life, you can say, ok, I’m really down and out about this girl right now but in a few weeks I’ll feel better. And if I go and exercise and live a healthy life I’ll feel better. And if I sleep well I’ll feel better. Same thing with the post traumatic stress depression, I can deal with it a little better each time. I can sleep it away, live healthy-it-away, and get back out there and ski at a reasonable level and get back on the horse slowly.

So you rebuild slowly?

Yea, it’s not a jump right back into it. Maybe three weeks after the Bec des Rosses fall, I was physically capable of skiing at top level for a ski movie, but mentally, no. I didn’t have the mental capability to call up Matchstick production and say, ok, I’m ready to do some filming.

How do you get to that point when you are ready? Do you have any methods that you use to get back on your game? Do you do any mental preparation?

Absolutely, you start small. Get back out there. Get the feel for it. Jump off some cliffs. And you got to learn from what went wrong. Whether it was you or one of your friends who had the close call, you got to analyze it and not make the same mistake twice. And you got to think to yourself, sometimes you have to do an overall evaluation and say, look, I took two major falls this year. And uh, one of them I got lucky, one of them I got hurt. Maybe I need to tone it back 10-percent. When I’m looking at a line, maybe I’m 80-percent sure I can do it, and I need to be 90-percent sure.

How do you balance that with the feeling of wanting to stay on top? Like you said, your field can be financially unstable where you might be killing it at one point, and then having trouble the next. Do you experience that fear of staying on top so you can continue skiing?

There is a balance to be found there. There is a huge pressure to perform above everyone, jump bigger or do more tricks or whatever, to be the baddest dude lighting your hair on fire that there is, but the task at hand is, one: to have fun, two: to keep your sponsors and company affiliations happy so you can continue to have a career. You’re not going to do that if you’re injured. If you go and try to hit the homerun and be the glory guy, well, now you’re down for six months and the guy who was out there skiing smart is, you know, doing a much better job for their sponsors and companies. That’s where you find your balance.

Check out some of JT’s recent videos.

Check out the AVA Lung and other ski equipment here.

The Science of Choking, by Jaimal Yogis
IT WAS A CHIP SHOT. With just 15 seconds left in the AFC championship game against the Patriots in January, the Ravens’ Billy Cundiff faced a 32-yarder to send the game into overtime. Like all NFL kickers, Cundiff uses the scoreboard to keep track of downs and where he should be in his prekick routine. As the Ravens stalled at the Pats’ 14-yard line, the Gillette Stadium scoreboard showed third down. Problem was, it was wrong, the Ravens say. Unprepared and probably a bit confused, Cundiff was rushed onto the field by screaming coaches. He hadn’t missed a fourth-quarter kick all season. But he got a mediocre snap; the laces weren’t quite out. His kick came low off of his foot and hooked left. With his teammates looking on in horror and disbelief, Cundiff had just choked — badly.

“This is perfectly healthy,” White says, but not so ideal for performance. The anxiety I was feeling with all those scientists staring at me was causing the wild heartbeats that can harm academic and athletic results. Feelings of gratitude and love, on the other hand, create gentle, repeating HRV waves that HeartMath terms “coherence.” That’s the state in which expert archers shoot more accurately, pro golfers hit the ball farther and kickers (though there hasn’t yet been an official study) get closer to Cundiff circa 2010 and 2011. Read on.

Check out the device pro athletes have been using to reduce choking and stay in the zone.

Below, some books by scientists and doctors I interviewed for The Fear Project

I had the good fortune of growing up best friends with one of the world’s best Mixed Martial Arts fighters ever, Urijah Faber. Recently I sat down with the former world champion to ask him what he’s scared of.

JY: When you go into the ring, the night of the fight, what are you feeling and does fear even enter your mind?

UF: Good question. A lot of people ask that, especially people outside the sport. They look at fighting, especially cage fighting, as something really scary, you know. I mean, I think there is a lot of emotion that goes into it, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it fear. Most of the fear that you have, or anxiety, isn’t necessarily the fear of a fight because a fight is going into battle with someone and this is what I’m trained to do. I spend four to six hours a day, simulating this action, sparring with my partners, and visualizing and working on different game plans. So, once I go into a fight, it’s not about fear of any kind of bodily harm. But there are things you are definitely thinking about. There’s an eagerness to win, eagerness to make sure people are happy. The biggest fear out there is, you know you have friends and family out there who are invested in watching and rooting for you, emotionally invested. There’s fear of your future. What your career is going to be like after. There’s an anticipation of the unknown. That’s what’s a little bit scary for some people, but I’ve gotten to a point where fear isn’t really a factor for me. I’ve accepted that I’m going to put everything out on the line. I’ve come to terms with the fact that life for me is going to be pretty stable whether I win or lose. That’s a thing that has allowed me to be less fearful and more excited about the event.

JY: So on a physical level, it’s the repetition that has allowed you to get to that point?

UF: Yea, I would say it’s the familiarity. For some people, speaking in front of large crowds is something that’s really scary. I bet for a lot of those people, after doing it over and over again, they get to the point where it’s no big deal. I think it’s the same thing. Granted, fighting, getting hit in the face, and vice versa. Being in, you know, simulation of fighting for your life, would be a lot different for someone who’s never done it before. But getting yourself acquainted makes everything easier.

JY: You’ve always, though, from the time we were little kids, haven’t had a normal level of fear around encountering conflict. Where do you think that comes from?

UF: Man, I think about this because I scout other talent and I have a management interest in some of these guys. I have a team that I’m building. I’m looking for talent, people who have a similar mindset. Where it comes from is probably a history of success and support, which came from my family mostly, being loved. I’ve got one of those moms who is always on your side. Even if there is a consequence, she is first going to blame whoever or whatever is giving you trouble. If you got in trouble at school, she was going to make sure it was dealt with by the teacher properly first. [laughs]

JY: I remember that happening. And I also remember other parents being nervous that you and your brother had too much freedom. You could stay out late when you were young or be home alone. Your parents really trusted you.

UF: Yea, and part of that was out of necessity. Both my parents were struggling to make ends meet. I almost felt like on my pop’s side though, he was more like one of our peers. You remember that. But he was also really trusting. He had that trust that, hey, we’re all just people here. He kind of acted like we were adults from a young age. But you know, we also had the fear of my mom too, the discipline. She was the iron fist. [laughs] Regardless, though, I knew I had support. When I went to Davis and I studied these things, you looked at the adolescent patterns. The most stable kids were, of course, attached to their parents, but when the parents left, they were still going to be alright. And I think I had a real, almost to an extreme, a sense that I was going to be ok.

JY: Yea, I have a distinct recollection of being in first or second grade and we were playing four-square and some sixth grader stole our ball and you went up and were just like, “what, you going to give us our ball back?” And the kid, who was about three times our size, you could tell he had a moment of fear. There was no fear in your stance. Logically, maybe there should have been. This kid might have been able to beat you up. But you didn’t think he could.

UF: I remember that too, and being a little bit unrealistic about stuff. I talk about that with my guys too. So much of it is the power of the mind and how do you really perceive things. An extreme optimist, even when you get beat up, you find something good that you did. I have a real ability to focus on the good thing, and to really believe that nobody is going to mess with me, nobody can beat me up, and that’s why I got into the sport. And from that stand point, I think there’s a carry over from my parents, my mom especially, that nobody does this to my kids. My kids can dance, my kids can act, my kids can do anything. It was almost unrealistic. It’s funny because I went to BJ Penn’s camp and I got time to spend with his dad. And his dad is delusional about how nobody should be able to beat up BJ. I talked to him and was, like, this guy’s not seeing reality. BJ has been beaten before. But then you see BJ and he’s got the same confidence that his dad does, the same it’s all in the mind attitude. Ignoring the fact that BJ has been beat before, his dad still talks like, “the reason nobody can beat BJ.” [laughs]

JY: The support is unconditional.

UF: Yea, I think for me it was being in a position when I was a little kid when I was kind of the man. Whether it was genetics or family support, I had a little bit of an advantage here, a little bit there. I was doing some acting even in first grade so I had some high confidence and stuff like that. But then, you know, it was also being willing to find out.

JY: And you did have natural ability, which created a string of successes. So what happens to you, like, let’s go to the Mike Brown situation when you got beat twice. There were a lot of positive things to find in the first fight and in the second but how were you feeling after that loss? Did you have any anxiety and how did you deal with that going into the second fight, and after that?

UF: It’s a good thing to talk about losses. Because you hear people talk about positive attitude, PMA, positive mental attitude and how important it is for successful people. I think that is such an important part of life, and it’s something that people can change. When I look at things, it never feels good to have the loss part happen. But you let it motivate you, or you let it bring you down. It’s almost going back to that denial thing. I don’t want to be one to make excuses, but I’d rather have an excuse than say, ‘I’m just not good enough.’ That’s permanent. There’s nothing I can do to change that. If I say, hey, if I was a little bit stronger here, or if I was a little bit faster there, or I was just careless, I made a mistake, you know, that’s what cost me the fight, and I can change that. So you go back to your positive mental attitude, maybe if I do this stuff, I can improve. The other thing is, knowing who I am. I don’t let a loss or a win define who I am. I know who I am. It has been proven over time. I’ve worked hard. I’ve lost before. I’ve lost games in elementary school. I’ve lost football games and wrestling matches, and you know, you don’t stop living.

JY: You lost a couple fights to me [laughs, completely untrue]

UF: Not that I remember [laughs]

JY: So, when you went into that second fight, you felt just as confident as ever that you were going to beat him?

Yea, and that’s something, they talk about guys losing. A guy who has really been knocked out bad, they say he’s never the same. I think it all depends on how you view things. They also talk about age. I had a reporter the other day ask me about age and she was saying, ‘a lot of people say that the shelf life for smaller fighters is shorter because they’re smaller,’ or something like that [laughs]. And I was just, like, oh really, that makes zero sense to me. I try to let my own beliefs control my destiny and know that I’m going to give my all. People also talk about hey, you lost the fight, you lost the second fight, how do you deal with that? And the thing is, when you have the ability to put that out there, to lay it all out, and exert yourself and put in your full effort, it kind of negates what really happens. Because it’s a release of tension. For someone who is living vicariously and watching at home, it might bother them for months on end, but when you are exerting yourself and giving your all, it’s kind of a release. If you didn’t get a chance to exert what you really felt you had like the first Brown fight, you know, I felt like I got caught early and I wanted to do more. But being able to exert your best effort takes away some of the negativity and fear of loss.

JY: And there were things in both fights that you could point to: you missed that elbow in the first fight and you broke both your hands in the second.

UF: Yea, and I’ll focus on that stuff.

JY: That’s logical. What about, do you ever use that fear of loss or fear for your career to help motivate you?

UF: It’s good you say that. There are so many people who are successful in this world and everybody has different approaches. There are guys who throw up before competitions. There are guys who can’t sleep the night before. And that may be what their body needs. When a bird is in a fight or flight situation, it takes a big crap so it’s lighter and takes off, you know what I mean.

Is that one of your strategies? [laughs]

No. [laughs]. I would say, the difference for me is that I would rather not focus on that. I don’t get a good energy from focusing on the fear and what could happen. I would rather focus on the fact that there are a lot of stable things in my life. You and I are going to be friends until we’re old men. My family is going to love me regardless. Do I like to lose? I hate to lose. But is it going to change who I am? Is it going to change my life in a way where I can’t live happily? No. It’s hard to focus on that. And some guys will be anti-motivated by that, you know. But I like to go into a situation where I’m enjoying it. I like to enjoy things and I can’t really enjoy something when I’m stressed all the time about what could happen if things don’t go the way they should. So I don’t really like to use that as motivation. I will use somebody talking bad about me, thinking that they’re going to one-up me, as a motivator, as something that gets my heart going, like, ‘come on buddy, you really think you can beat me up?’

JY: It’s having someone challenge your beliefs about yourself?

UF: Yea, and people often ask, how do you have to feel about your opponent? Do you have to hate him? I don’t have to hate him, but I have to think he’s a moron for stepping in the cage with me because I’m about to beat the crap out of him. [laughs] Shake hands before and shake hands after, but prove you’re the man in between.

JY: And you had an undefeated streak for a long time. Is there a feeling of, well, the thing that was a little bit scary, losing, happened, and it wasn’t so bad. What is there to fear?

UF: Right, and you know, people say it’s not about the destination, it’s the journey. I have different guys on my team who are so fearful of what might happen. One guy doesn’t really mind fighting. Once he’s committed to fighting he trains his butt off, but the commitment part of it, arranging the fight and saying I’ll take that date, has the worst kind of fear for him. He can’t commit to that. It’s almost like he has to be forced into it, and once he commits, he’s fine.

JY: What do you feel like motivates you to train hard?

UF: Well, I think what it starts out with is setting goals, you know. As a young kid, we were wrestling or fighting, rollerblading, we were physical kids and we learned what we like. I learned what I like at a young age. You knew what you liked at a young age. Throughout life, what I liked to do and what my goals were always coincided. So, once I knew that, I like to work out all day long. I feel good when I do that, I have a goal to have a job where I get to work out all day long. There’s your goal. It started out just following my heart and my passion and learning how to set goals and reach them.

JY: What was your thought process like? Because I remember we were going through this together. I was trying to write my first book and I was offered a few thousand bucks, and you started fighting and you were coaching wrestling for like $7000 for the season and you were doing your first cage fight? What was going through your head as far as, you know, there are societal norms that say this might not be a proper career path. There are people who would say, maybe you should sign up for veterinary school. How did you stick with your goal of fighting even though at the time there wasn’t even much of a career path for a lightweight fighter?

UF: I remember I was living in an apartment with three of my college buddies. You were living on a boat, writing a book about surfing and Buddhism. And I remember having that conversation, and we were both scratching by. The bottom line comes back to that confidence, and saying, hey, I know I’m going to be ok. And I’m going to just do stuff I like. That’s it, period. When I was doing the coaching at Davis, it was like, man what an opportunity. I think I was clearing like $600 per-month. My apartment was $200 per-month. I was working at a restaurant and busing tables to get some extra food and I was coaching little kids. But as far as I was concerned, I wasn’t even working. I was doing all the stuff I liked, and I’m surviving and I’ll be alright. If I need to go mow a lawn because I need some money, I’ll go mow a lawn. That kind of thing. My ability to do what I love had a lot to do with the fearlessness. I wasn’t worried about the security because I knew I’d be alright. I was really into doing things that kept me happy in the present. Because if I was happy in the present, I was happy in the recent past and I was happy in the immediate future, you know.

JY: What about the pain issue though? That’s bred into us from 200 million years ago as mammals. You’re supposed to fear pain because it’s harmful and you may not pass on your genes if you hurt yourself. Is that an issue at all? Because even though the fights are sanctioned, something could go wrong. You could break your neck or whatever? You don’t think about that at night?

UF: I’ve been asked by my mom a bunch of times now. She didn’t want me to play football or wrestle because she thought I was going to get hurt, and, I mean, my answer always goes back to the same thing: how many people died driving? And if I go in unprepared, that would be putting myself at risk. But if prepare, physically, mentally, game planning to go into a situation, then my expectation of pain doesn’t really scare me. I don’t consider a lot of things pain because it’s just familiar to me. It may hurt if I hit you in the arm, but if I hit you in the arm everyday in the same spot, you’re going to get a callous and shrug it off. It’s one of those things where, it would probably be hard for me to sit and write for the whole day. I would probably lose my sanity. If that was my thing. But I mean, I could ask you, wouldn’t that drive you crazy if you had to sit and write all day? You don’t do that, I know. You write and do other things with your day. But there are people who sit at a computer all day. Is that going to kill them? It probably will be more likely.

JY: It makes sense. You’re not a risk taker. You don’t like throwing yourself off cliffs or driving fast. You want to do what you’re prepared for.

UF: Yea, I don’t want to sky dive. And I think that takes away a lot of the fear: preparation, then the mental side of things. I just had a good example. The first time the four-minute mile was broken. Nobody in the history of man had ever broken the four-minute mile. You know, so it was never documented, never been done. The one time it did happen, within months, a bunch of other people had done it. And after that, 20,000 people had broken the four-minute mile. It’s like breaking the mind part of it, the perception of what is scary and what is not scary. I got to believe a lot of it has to do with people’s belief in the after life and stuff like that. For a lot of people the actual fear of dying might be a lot to handle. I don’t sit and think about it, but if I sat and thought about it, it might be really scary to me too. I don’t sit and think about dying all day.

JY: What do you tell your team about fear?

UF: My path to being a good fighter had to do with belief in myself, love and support, and a bunch of trial and error. Does that mean that Mike Tyson had the love and support to make him a great fighter? No, Mike Tyson had: people were picking on me, people were picking on me, I knocked this guy out. He stopped picking on me. He had a success there. He knocked the next guy out. He had another success. The next guy he went to knock out gave him money, you know what I mean. That was his way of learning things. Mine, I would say, if you want to teach your kids to be a great fighter, great at anything, give them love and support. Don’t be the opposite way. Now, is there a different path for everyone? 100-percent. Fighters from great families and fighters from horrible families. Writers, politicians and musicians. There are lots of different paths. This is just my path. But I think it comes down to action and being positive.

JY: There are a lot of successful unhappy people and you’re loving what you’re doing.

UF: Yea, I think that’s important. One of my guys, he has the worst problem with confidence and he just moved down here a couple months ago. He’s got a terrible problem with confidence. Then I have guys who don’t have confidence problems. Then I have guys who always come to practice. So this guy has trouble with confidence and he’s not coming to practice all the time. And he’s being inconsistent on his diet. So, I told him, your confidence issue comes from the fact that you’re being realistic. You’re not being disciplined and so you’re not going to perform well. That’s your confidence issue. He’s like, well, I just need to work on my confidence. And I said, you need to work on your lifestyle that allows you to be confident. You don’t just decide to be confident by saying, you know today is my day to be confident. It’s about earning confidence. You earn respect. You earn success. It’s never easy. So that’s my main message. Hey, you guys really want something. If you’re confident and you work hard, you’ve got the mindset of a champion. If you work hard, and you’re not confident, you have the possibility of being a champion. If you’re not confident and you don’t work hard, you’re delusional and you’re probably not going to be a champion. You know what I mean. If you have all the confidence but no discipline, you’re probably in trouble.

JY: And those are the people who probably get screwed up.

UF: Yea. Unless you can learn from that. If someone comes in and says, I’m the baddest dude on the planet, I can beat up anyone. I’m going to go to this gym, and nobody’s going to touch me. If he goes in and gets knocked out, then gets knocked out. He’s going to say, wait, I’m not the baddest dude on the planet. I need to get better at this, this, and this. If he keeps walking in everyday and still has that confidence, he’s going to be dead soon.

JY: Have you learned from your losses?

UF: Yea, I think you have to make adjustments and you have to be realistic. During my first Mike Brown fight to the second one, like I said, I lost both fights but there was a marked improvement in the second one. I felt like I needed to throw on some weight. I needed to not be so careless. And it’s funny, after the first Mike Brown fight, I wanted to feel sorry for myself. I was not happy. The promotion assumed I was going to win, I think, and they had be scheduled to do a PR tour in Mexico. And so I went to Mexico City the day after my fight. I had to do a whole week of PR, and because everything was delayed in Mexico a week, I had to act like nothing had happened, you know. So I’m going on these shows. I just rocked in the first round. TKO’d in the first round. And I’m going on all these shows, telling everyone they gotta watch the fight. It’s going to be a big one and all this stuff [laughs]. And so I’m doing this stuff. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter to me. I’m going through and I’ve got a place in Puerto Vallarta and I’m in Mexico City. So I’m like, hey, can you guys just fly me home to my place in PV? So I go over there and I’m like, now I can feel sorry for myself. But I get there and I’m looking out at the Pacific and there’s a beer in my hand. There’s a hot tub on the balcony and I’m chilling for two days, waiting to feel sorry for myself and it just never happened. I met this hot chick and I had a great time. And I was like, dude, life is good. And it may not be that way for everyone, but there are always ways to find the good.