👋 Hey.
Welcome to issue #33 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter. Thanks for being here.
Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (4.5 min read):
🧪 Stoic Sports Science
Ross Edgely is an extreme adventurer, ultra-marathon sea swimmer and author.
In 2018 he swam around Great Britain.
157 days.
2,884 km.
Storms.
Shipping lanes.
Sharks.
Salt erosion of his tongue.
Stung by over 100 jellyfish.
Just him, the ocean, a small team and a 16m support boat...
It’s tough to get your head around how insane this actually is.
He’d swim with the tides for 6 hours at a time. Twice a day. Averaging 18km a day.
Pushing the limits of mind and body.
So how’d he do it?
In his book The Art of Resilience, he breaks down the tools he used to get through it.
He calls it Stoic Sports Science.
Which he says requires a:
- 💪 Strong body
- 🧠 Stoic mind
- 🗺 Strategic plan
It’s a boiling pot of sports science, Greek philosophy and smarts.
“Stoic Sports Science is related to your physical capacity and mental clarity to apply proven principles of sports science and psychology, under conditions of extreme exhaustion, stress and adversity. It’s essentially sports science and philosophy that’s been forged in battle.”
Let's break 'em down...
1. 💪 Strong body
Our bodies determine our physical potential.
Like our lung capacity, strength, and coordination.
Which determines things like how fast we can run, how far we can swim and how much we can lift.
Built with the help of sports science. Things like physical preparation and training, periodisation, specificity, pacing, fueling and sleep.
"Too many coaches place too much emphasis on minimalism, specificity and recovery. We seem to forget that eventually you just have to do more work. It’s that simple."
2. 🧠 Stoic mind
But a strong body won’t realise its potential without the brain.
The brain has to be trained too.
Edgley combines sports science with stoicism to build an unbreakable mind.
But what is stoicism?
It’s a philosophy that reminds us how unpredictable the world is.
It says:
- 🌧 We can't control outside events, only how we respond to them
- 👀 Our attitudes and perceptions determine how we see the world
- 😡 Poor performance and unhappiness often come from reacting emotionally rather than logically
With that in mind, Edgley developed a mental toolbox that included:
- 📍 Identifying what he could and couldn’t control. Accepting the things he couldn’t (storms, currents, animals). And focusing on the things he could (effort, habits, thoughts).
- 📆 The habituation of stress (getting used to repeatedly doing hard things)
- 😂 Adaptive coping strategies (healthy ways to deal with stressful situations like humour, positive chat and problem-solving)
- 🙊 Feral fear theory (overriding our animalistic responses to stress, thinking logically)
"I needed to study mental fortitude and physical fortitude in equal amounts, if I was to do battle with the obstacles in front of me."
3. 🗺 Strategic plan
His strategic plan involved researching and understanding limitations like pain, fatigue, and discomfort.
Staying on top of the tides, the currents, the conditions.
Allocating roles within the team (support crew) and executing them.
It was a matter of putting all the lessons in sports science and stoicism into a plan of attack.
Using all these tools at the right times.
"Ultimately, as I made my way around the coastline of Great Britain, this is how I ensured my body wouldn’t break and my mind wouldn’t quit, as Stoic Sports Science served as a mental map that segmented limitations and systematically looked to offer possible solutions."
And nearly 6 months later, he swam back into Margate Beach.
Physically, mentally and emotionally cooked.
But successfully.
So if you’re training for a big effort like an ultra marathon or ironman, or planning (what Edgley calls) a big adventure... Stoic Sports Science and the lessons in his book are going to be helpful.
🔍 Resource: examine.com
Examine.com is a database of nutrition and supplement research.
It analyses 1000s of studies to find what works and what doesn’t.
For example, I heard about a couple supplements – Rhodiola Rosea and Citrulline – on a podcast.
Examine.com has looked over all the research published on them. Sharing them in an easy-to-read way.
In a few minutes, I got all the info I needed. Scienced-based. No BS.
You can also search by health categories like sleep, brain health and exercise.
Bookmark it for when you need to cut through the fat about the latest supplement being flogged online.
📈 Checking your sleep data
Tracking my sleep is one of the best things I’ve done to improve it.
Because what gets measured gets managed.
(I’ve written about this before)
But something I’ve recently learned is the importance of when you check your data.
See to our brains, checking our sleep score is like checking social media.
We get a hit of dopamine.
And that hit (soon after waking) can start to cook the backend of our sleep.
Because over time, our brains start to expect it at a specific time.
And it can wake us up early.
📝 So wait at least an hour before checking your sleep data.
(This'll also help you gauge how you're feeling before relying on data to tell you).
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
Matt
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