1-2-3 about Amelia Boone 🏃♀️
Post #28 (4 min read)
Hey everyone, as am I writing the last issue for the year 2020, I was thinking about who would be the right person to end this off with. This year has been a painful and tough year for everyone and yet we have to come out of it stronger than before.
That’s why I thought the perfect person to write about would be Amelia “Queen of Pain” Boone (@ameliaboone). She is a corporate attorney at Apple by day and an obstacle endurance racer by night. She signed up for her first Obstacle race at age 28 when she realized she couldn’t do a single pull-up. Since then she has become a 4-time world champion and one of the most decorated obstacle racers in history. She is also known as the Michael Jordan of Obstacle Racing.
1 STORY FROM HER
Amelia’s life leading to her first Obstacle race.
Dan and Irene Boone live in Lake Oswego, Ore., an hour from the mountains. They like the laid-back, outdoorsy lifestyle. This alone makes them wonder where Amelia came from.
They were active and so was she. Dan spent hours with her practicing pitching in the backyard, but even as they exposed their daughter to athletics and competition, they quickly learned that they also had to emphasize balance in her life. Even as a young girl, Amelia took losing too hard, so hard, in fact, that her easygoing parents had a tough time relating to her.
Other kids on the soccer field seemed happy with the orange slices they received after the game, win or lose. Amelia, though, would brood in her room for hours after a loss. She loved the competition, as it drove her to excel, but it marked her too.
When she looks back today, Boone admits she was probably a little obsessive, and now she pokes fun at her competitiveness with her dry sense of humor. But as a child, she hadn't yet developed that kind of self-awareness.
Starting in the fifth grade, she learned to use music to calm her competitive fire, singing pop songs in the shower every night before she'd go to bed. Irene sang too, in church, and encouraged Amelia, providing her with piano lessons and playing music around the house. When Amelia reached high school, she started participating in show choirs and musicals and took opera lessons.
As music took on a greater role in her life and Boone grew weary of athletic competition, she slowly let it go. She quit soccer at the beginning of her junior year in high school, and upon graduation turned her back on a decorated career as a softball pitcher. As an undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis, she joined the Cappella group. No one thought of her as an athlete.
Singing and getting good grades somehow satisfied her competitive urge without inspiring the ugly side effects of losing. But she remained competitive. In law school at the University of Washington in Seattle, she started her day at sunrise, carpooling with friends to the gym.
"She would jump on the elliptical," said Skylee Robinson, one of Amelia's closest friends from law school, "and she would murder the shit out of it."
"If there was the tiniest modicum of competition to it, like folding laundry, she would find a way to excel in it," Robinson said. "Like getting drunk. She would find a way to do that better than you."
Around 2009 when she graduated from law school, she also dabbled in running. She was more serious than a recreational runner, but not quite a competitive one, either. Despite struggling with stress fractures, in May 2011 she ran the Wisconsin Half Marathon, her only road race, in 1:32, a pace of 7-minute miles, good enough for 40th place out of more than 2,000. She was hoping to run the Chicago Marathon when her co-workers at the law firm goaded her into signing up for something called a Tough Mudder.
She liked her colleagues, and that's the biggest reason she was there on that summer day in 2011 for her first obstacle race at Devil's Head, a golf course and resort three hours from Chicago with hills steep enough to host mountain biking in the summer. On that day, as Boone looked over the course, the Tough Mudder turned it into a muddy playground where she was free to be somebody else.
It was love at first sight.
2 QUOTES FROM HER
“I make friends with pain. We spend so much time trying to avoid pain, yet it’s something that teaches us so many lessons.”
“Hitting rock bottom forces you to really look inward and discover who you are. It’s easy to ignore the hard things or push your problems aside. And then when you’re sitting there with just yourself, you have to confront that.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Create more than one identity:
Boone refuses to give up her day-job as an attorney to become a full-time athlete because of the realization that her identity can get wrapped up in a single activity. “I don’t like to identify myself as one thing,” she says. “I like having the different experiences because it makes me feel very well-rounded.”Practice “chunking:”
One of Boone’s strategies during long, endurance events is to break the race up into little chunks. “If you look at the whole picture,” she says, “it gets overwhelming.” If she’s doing a 24-hour race, Boone will tell herself to just get through the next 10 minutes, or through the next hour, or to the next aid station. If you shift your focus, you can check off the small wins throughout the race.Do one thing every day that sucks:
Boone enjoys running when it’s cold, dark, or raining. “It forces you to go through hard things in not-ideal conditions,” she says. Indirectly, that helps cultivate mental toughness in other areas of your life.
Sources & Extra stuff to read, listen or watch
Mud, sweat, and a whole lot of tears: https://www.sbnation.com/longform/2014/5/20/5220672/amelia-boone-spartan-world-champion-profile-obstacle-racing
The Knowledge Project: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/amelia-boone/
On high performance: https://tim.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/127-amelia-boone.pdf
Profile Dossier by Polina: https://readtheprofile.com/home/the-profile-dossier-amelia-boone-the-queen-of-pain
How to cultivate toughness:
That’s it from me, until next time! Feel free to reach out to me by replying to this email or on twitter 👋
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