IRONMAN star Sam Long is taking inspiration from the way Navy Seals are taught to deal with and feed off failure as he continues to look for new ways to improve his swim times.
The American athlete is only too aware that the opening triathlon discipline is his weakest, often leaving him with huge ground and time to make up on the bike and run to challenge for a podium place.
What makes the situation so frustrating is that there can be little doubt he belongs up there among the very best in the sport once he clips into his pedals or pulls on his running shoes – the very reason why he has enjoyed so much success at both full distance and 70.3.
Improvements are already noticeable
After finishing 14th in September’s IRONMAN World Championship in Nice, he declared it one of the best all-around IRONMAN performances of his career, a feat made all the more impressive when you consider there were only six of the 53-strong field behind him when he came out of the water with a time of 51:26.
However, he clawed his way back up the rankings with a bike ride that was the 15th best on the day (4:42:13) and a run which was the eighth best (2:39:54).
Indeed, even when he won at the 70.3 Eagleman in June, he finished the swim in 21st place among a field of 36 in a time of 27:49, with the leaders having a full four-minute-plus head start on him as he took to the saddle.
A somewhat heroic fightback saw him then put in the second-best bike circuit of the day (1:55:14) and the very best run at an impressive 1:10:49.
Spotlight has always been on his swimming
With Long also a regular competitor on the T100 World Triathlon Tour, which puts the spotlight on the swimming section with its 2km course providing a bigger percentage of the overall race compared to 70.3 and IRONMAN, the need for improvement is understood and accepted.
Earlier this month, while happy with his improved swim, he nevertheless accepted that he had left himself with too much to do at IRONMAN Arizona, as he used up too much energy on the early stages of the run in a failed bid to catch eventual winner Menno Koolhaas.
Working hard to try and rectify the issues, he has now turned to some interesting mind-over-matter techniques deployed by the US Navy Seals in an attempt to train the brain into both dealing with and improving on failure.
Writing on his Instagram account this week, he explained that by embracing his failures and accepting his difficulties, he was able to build up resilience against the frustration and continue to be effective when and where he needed it the most.
Purposely choosing the ‘hard path’
He said: “Some numbers: 4m 0s, 6m 15s, 4m 40s, 4m 17s. These are the deficits of my last four swims. Which I suppose shows a couple of things.
“1. Never give up! 2. The point I intended to make is that the first two are in IM distance swims, so over twice the distance of the bottom two, which are from @t100triathlon. As you can see, the gap to the front is drastically better, especially when you account for it being twice the distance. This year I purposefully chose a hard path.
“There is little more motivating than embarrassing/difficult/failure experiences. They are not for everyone, as you have to be able to handle it… It’s interesting to see the Navy SEALs take a similar approach. I held onto my belief throughout and recently have been lining up with good confidence in my swims.”
What the Navy SEAL training reveals
He then added some of the rules which have been published from declassified Navy SEAL training documents, which reveal:
- Instructors deliberately engineer failure scenarios where even the most prepared candidates cannot succeed, forcing them to experience defeat under controlled conditions.
- This is seen as a strategic inoculation against psychological collapse, which happens when people who have never failed before encounter their first real problems.
- Candidates learn that failure isn’t a terminal event but a recoverable state, building psychological resilience.
- When people experience controlled failure and recovery repeatedly, their nervous systems learn that setbacks are temporary obstacles rather than identity-destroying catastrophes.
- SEALs who complete the failure-inclusive training maintain operational effectiveness under extreme stress, as they are more likely to be able to treat failure as ordinary and have built up a resilience against total collapse.
Having recently become a father for the second time, Long is no doubt currently mixing his training with some feeding and nappy duties, but he would also do well to read the many responses to his post as supporters praise his approach and back him to continue his journey of improvement.
