HOW TO CONQUER FEAR

There was one car parked in the roadside lot as I drove up. I thought I saw a figure sleeping inside, so I figured nobody else was on the trail. Rain sluiced through the dense forest overhead and the clouds guaranteed no moonshine that night. It was my first night run alone and as I launched down a wet and rutted trail, my world was nothing but a rushing sphere of light.

To my left, I heard a rustling. I jumped and peered into the forest. Nothing. No eyeshine. “There aren’t any cougars here,” I told myself. No luck. My primal fear had already kicked in and I had done nothing beforehand to train my brain out of it.

I remember something I’d heard from Ultra runner and race director Candice Burt. She’d run the 98-mile Wonderland trail in record time and had encountered cougars her first time. The second time, she brought an external speaker and played podcasts on blast to keep the cougars at bay. It seemed to work.

I had my cell phone and I was near enough to town for cell coverage. I turned up the speaker volume and loaded up Pod Save America and listened to the pundits argue about Cavanaugh. While there were probably no wild animals out in the rain stalking me, the podcasts did make me feel better. I was then able to focus on the trail and the goal.

What did that podcast do? It didn’t actually make me any more safe in the White Mountains and in the rain where there was probably no danger. Let’s examine what we can do to change our fear responses and make ourselves braver people and fearless runners.

Chris Hadfield and Spider Webs

The other day I watched what I’d call my favorite TED Talk of all time. Astronaut Chris Hadfield talks about handling fear as an astronaut. I think I teared up three times listening to this wonderful man talk about his experiences in space.

Hadfield has a way with words most speakers lack. He hooked me and then told me a story I couldn’t pull out of. And as I sat there in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle with him, I could feel his fear and excitement. He then told us the odds (thanks, C3P0). The odds of a catastrophic event for a space shuttle launch was 1 in 9. “You realize that by the end of the day you’re going to be floating effortlessly and gloriously in space or you’ll be dead.”

How did he handle that knowledge and that fear? He compared NASA’s training to how psychologists tell us to handle the primal fear response of walking through a spider web.

He reminded the audience that in the world there are 50,000 types of spiders and only two dozen are venomous. In British Columbia, Canada (the conference location), there are 729 different kinds of spiders and only one of them is venomous. And its venom isn’t even fatal. And yet, people everywhere will freak out when they walk into a spider web. This is a primal fear response and it’s irrational given the information available to us.

How did Chris Hadfield recommend handling this primal fear response? Knowing what venomous spider webs look like and where they build them (a Black Widow builds her web in dark corners near the ground). Then he recommends just walking through any other spider web you find until your primal fear response goes away.

(If you experience panic attacks while doing this, please see a professional psychologist. This isn’t intended as a replacement for clinical therapy.)

NASA takes its astronauts and shoves them through “spider webs.” They simulate and train the scariest situations an astronaut could possibly experience. They use water, virtual reality, centrifuges, and a variety of methods to train astronauts how to deal with scary situations without panicking.

Applicable to All Situations

And you can apply this principle to most any fear you could encounter in life. This is especially true with Ultra running. If your race requires you to run through the night, then schedule night runs in your training.

If fear of hypothermia stopped you from finishing a 100-mile (what really stopped me at IMTUF), learn what it’s like to be cold enough to go hypothermic. But do it in a controlled situation.

An overnight race during a colder month would suffice. Prepare your crew and pacer ahead of time and let them know they’ll have to warm you up and that they need to monitor your condition. Teach yourself and your crew the signs of hypothermia and the various stages. And then run the experiment.

How to Overcome Fear

This is how you keep yourself safe while knowing what fear is rational and what isn’t. Of course, you can’t prepare for all scary situations. But one thing you can train is your response. Put yourself in scary yet controlled situations and learn how you respond.

As Hadfield says at the end of his TED Talk, “Fear not.”