A sports medicine journal has a term, "beautiful suffering," for what elite athletes experience during 24-plus-hour endurance events. This week Sue takes the lead with a question she's been sitting with since watching runners collapse in freezing rain at the 2018 Boston Marathon: are elite athletes wired differently, or is toughness something the rest of us can actually learn? The conversation moves through Corey Richards' memoir of surviving an avalanche and an undiagnosed mental illness, Steve Magness's case against the old "grit and bear it" model of toughness, Ksenija's years coaching football players and elite athletes through NLP and pattern interrupts, and why the answer to "is this person a psychopath" might just be "no, they've found a very efficient way to feel alive.”

📚 BOOKS MENTIONED:

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• The Color of Everything by Corey Richards: https://amzn.to/4zlpZqA
• Do Hard Things by Steve Magness: https://amzn.to/3SExh8h
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed: https://amzn.to/461OdbM
• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://amzn.to/4xCnw9p
• Mindset by Carol Dweck: https://amzn.to/4g3SEYc
• The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu: https://amzn.to/460DXR9
• A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler: https://amzn.to/4x45nla

💌 Our Substack & Show Notes: https://transatlanticbookmarks.substack.com/

📚 EXPLORE OUR HOSTS' WORK & READING LISTS
• Read Ksenija's Novels: https://transatlanticbookmarks.substack.com/p/publications
• Ksenija on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6449766.Ksenija_Popovi_

🎙️ ABOUT TRANSATLANTIC BOOKMARKS
A brand new weekly literary podcast hosted by European novelist Ksenija Popović and American engineer Sue Graham Johnston. From opposite sides of the Atlantic, we bring you thoughtful, relaxed, and witty conversations about contemporary fiction, classic literature, award shortlists, and the human questions hiding inside the books we read.

New episodes are released every week.

👉🏻 CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction
00:57 The Mindset of Elite Athletes
12:13 Debunking the Toughness Myth
16:11 Can the Mindset of Elite Athletes Be Taught?
19:45 Association and Dissociation
26:57 Pattern Interrupt
32:43 Achieving Flow
39:59 The Advantage of Personalized Approach
45:51 The Astonishing Power of the Mind
51:21 The Psychology of Basic Human Needs
01:02:49 When The Mindset Isn't There
01:08:16 The Dedication Conundrum
01:09:31 Recommendations