Description:
Tom Ryan has coached Olympic gold medalist Kyle Snyder, 80 All-Americans, and a national championship team at Ohio State. None of that is what shaped him. In this conversation, the two-time NCAA Coach of the Year and author of Chosen Suffering goes to the places most coaches won't: the day he walked into Dan Gable's wrestling room and got beaten unmercifully, the loss of his five-year-old son Teague and the question it forced him to answer, and why there's no such thing as a quantum leap — only dogged persistence that ends up looking like one.

Jim and Tom get into the non-negotiable standards behind every elite athlete Tom has coached, how to actually know your athletes before the world labels them, why ultra-competitors don't break when fatigue and pressure hit, and what it means to be the landlord of your own mind.

Timestamps:
02:30 — Walking on at Iowa: the "Are you warm?" moment
07:30 — Getting cut from basketball and finding wrestling
15:30 — Losing Teague, and the question Tom couldn't answer
21:00 — "Gratitude crushes suffering"
25:45 — No quantum leaps: the unseen work
29:15 — Choosing the hard thing and living in reality
31:30 — The non-negotiable standard (Snyder's 5:28 mile)
37:15 — Landlord of your mind: I love tos, I believes, I ams
46:00 — Why ultra-competitors don't break under pressure
57:00 — What Tom wants his athletes to carry with them
57:50 — Rapid fire

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Tom Ryan: @buckeye158 on Instagram and X · Chosen Suffering wherever books are sold.