Consistently Good Not Occasionally Great - Nick Bare

Life is this massive endurance event where if you try to be occasionally great all the time, you're gonna burn out, but if you keep going consistently good and you just keep moving forward, you know there's gonna be obstacles. There's gonna be speed bumps. There's gonna be resistance. There's gonna be hills, but just keep driving through it consistently. It's not always gonna be fun. It's gonna suck, it's gonna hurt, but that builds endurance and when you look back over a period of time, you think, "I actually made some progress through this because I was consistently good rather than trying to be or look occasionally great."

Nick Bare, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me in the Bare Performance Podcast studio.

Thank you for having me here.

It go... Dude, it go- it goes both ways right now.

(laughs) How'd you get on with your recent marathon?

Oh, dude, it was great. I ran, uh, a 2:48:11, two hours 48 minutes, 11 seconds. The goal was to run sub-2:50. Um, that's coming off of... So to give some context, my first marathon was in 2018. This was a three-hour, 57-minute marathon, full sufferfest. My second marathon a year later was four hours, 15 minutes. I got worse, and I told people, "I'm just not a runner. It's never gonna happen." And then I finally committed to and stopped believing that, and after an Ironman I said, "I wanna run my first sub-three-hour marathon." And I went a- I went through the process and journeying and trained for it, and I, I failed. I ran three hours, 24 minutes. I realized it was a lot harder than I thought. I wasn't respecting that time. I went back into another prep and I ran a two-hour, 56-minute, 27-second marathon. This was last January. And, uh, then I realized, "What's holding me back? The only thing that's holding me back is me." So I said, "I'm gonna run a sub-2:50." And we did it. We prepped, we went through the process, went through the journey, stacked the bricks, did the workouts, showed up to Buffalo, New York with all the confidence in the world and crossed that finish line, two hours, 48 minutes, 11 seconds.

How'd it feel?

It felt... Uh, it's o- it's one of those things, like, you... I interviewed Matthew McConaughey a few months ago, and he said, "Nothing is unbelievable." He hates the word "unbelievable." Unbelievable? It happened. It happens. It's going to happen. So whenever I cross, like, a finish line, this could be a finish line that's actually physically there or, you know, a goal that I've set. When you cross it, looking back, when you set that goal or that objective and you go through the process, if you have the confidence knowing you're going to do it, you're gonna do it. You just need to put in the work now. So when I crossed the finish line, I wasn't like, "Holy crap! Sub-2:50." It was... You know, I knew after mile three I was gonna do it. Like, you know how you're feeling that early on in the race. So it was... It felt really good because there was a lot of weight on the shoulders because I share my goals with the entire world or my audience who- for whoever's watching. I gotta tell people months before it happens, "This is what I'm going to do. Now I'm going to document and show you how I'm going to get there." So then when it's finally time for me to be tested, yeah, there's a lot of weight on my shoulder that I carry. But I think that pressure also provides some power in how I'm going to perform race day.