How Endurance Challenges Build Mental Toughness – Lessons from Pierce Showe

Host: David Charlton, Sports Psychologist and Mental Toughness Practitioner

Guest: Pierce Showe, Podcast Host, Endurance Athlete, World Record Holder, Running Coach

Introduction: From Lacrosse to Ultra Marathons

David Charlton: Hi Pierce, it’s great to meet you. Nice to put a face to a name. Would you be able to share a little bit about your background and your interest in endurance sports with our listeners and viewers?

Pierce Showe: Yeah, for sure. Thanks so much for having me on, David. I’m super excited to be here. I love the topic of mentality, mental toughness, and grit. What does it take to actually have that? How can we demystify it so it’s not something that’s so far out that only the Kobe Bryants, the LeBron Jameses, or the incredible sports figures have, but how can we have it ourselves?

I do a lot of endurance running and ultra marathon races. You may look at me right now and think, “My gosh, how has this guy been able to do all these races from such a young age?” I’ll demystify it for you right now—I started seven years ago with a half marathon. Actually, before that I was playing lacrosse, which is very popular in the United States, especially in the Midwest and East Coast. There’s a lot of running involved in lacrosse, so I had this background that you may not realize just from seeing my social media page.

It’s gone from 5Ks to half marathons to full marathons to 50-mile races, 60-mile races, and even some 200-mile races over the course of several years. The cool thing with that is not only has my endurance grown, but also my mindset. That’s something I’ve really learned about mental toughness through all of this—it’s built through practice, and it’s also built through hardship and challenges. Who I am today is because of the challenges I’ve had to endure and persevere through. I’m super excited to dive in wherever you want to take it.

Early Challenges: The Foundation of Mental Toughness

David Charlton: Yeah, well, let’s start there. You’ve hit on something straight away that I like—how mental toughness is developed through different experiences that you go through. So go ahead and share some of those experiences, the challenges that you’ve no doubt faced whilst doing these crazy 200-mile runs.

Pierce Showe: There’s a verse that I really love. It says, Romans 8:28: “We know that in all things, God works together for the good of those who love him and who’ve been called according to his purpose.” I think that verse really speaks to the power of how God will use things together for our good that might not be seen as good initially.

I’m going to tell you something that’s really impacted my life—it’s not in a specific race, but it ties into my races. When I was six years old, I went through my parents getting divorced, and it was very challenging to go from parents being together to now split, living in a big house to living in an apartment, feeling like I’m the man to feeling like I’m kind of an outsider. That was really challenging. But what that did was put this drive in me and this hunger to be the best that I could be because I wanted to do something with my life. I didn’t like the way my family was. I love my family, but no one wants to be in a divorced family. So I decided very young that I wanted to be different, and I worked really hard.

That mindset I brought into running. Once I found running, it was this really cool thing because I could challenge myself with the runs, and with each race it was challenging, but once you complete it, there’s something like an unlock here. This is kind of the start of mental toughness.

The First Half Marathon: Unlocking Belief

Confronting Self-Doubt

I’ll share this story. I’m playing lacrosse during high school, and we have to run these 5Ks before tryouts every day. When you’re 14 or 16 years old, you’re like, “Man, why do we have to run a 5K? This sucks.” But anyway, we did, and I realized I wasn’t that bad at it. After a couple years of doing those before tryouts, I thought I should do something with running and see if I could run a little bit further.

My mom has actually run a marathon every year for the last 30 years, which is crazy. She’s just been so faithful with it. She never told me to run. She never taught me how to run. But she set a good example, and that was really powerful. A good example is worth a thousand words. I saw her doing that and was like, “Oh my gosh, if she can do a full marathon, I could at least do a half marathon.”

I signed up for this half marathon in September of 2018. Once I started telling people I was going to do this, I was met with doubt. Yes, some people supported me for sure, but others were like, “Are you sure you know how to fuel? Are you sure you’ve run far enough? Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to do that?” I’ll be honest with you, I started to doubt myself. I was like, “My gosh, I don’t know this. I don’t know that. I haven’t trained that much.” It caused me to doubt myself.

The good thing about that was that I had already paid for the race, and I’m like, “I’m not forfeiting my 150 bucks. I’ve got to do it anyway.” So I’m like, “All right, I’m going to give this my best go.” I went out, drove with my grandpa like an hour and a half to this race. I was really nervous before it, but I got to the start line and went off. Boom—countdown, three, two, one, go!

The Breakthrough Moment

I ran it, and it was challenging. It really pushed me to the max. But it was crazy because I finished, I crossed the finish line, and I gathered myself and was like, “My gosh, if I didn’t think that I could do this, but I was able to do it, what else is possible? What else can I do?” There was this moment, this trigger of belief.

I realized that I had avoided a marathon or half marathon before because of how difficult I thought it would be in my mind, without even giving it a try. I just had written it off. Then I did it, and once I did it, this new level of possibility opened up for me. This pertains to mental toughness because where I’m at now in my running and the difficulties that I’m able to handle—running a 200-mile race when your feet feel like they’re broken and you’re just getting by on one hour of sleep per night, you’re 80 hours into the race, all those different emotions that you’re managing—I could not have handled those back when I started. The Pierce who ran that half marathon was not mentally tough enough to get through the highs and lows of a 200-mile race. But because I did that half marathon, it triggered this belief that I could do more.

Defining Mental Toughness

As I did more, my discipline, my mental toughness, my ability to do difficult things—I’d be very interested, David, as a psychologist and with everything you know, how you would define mental toughness. But I was thinking about it before this show, and I think it’s really just the ability to do things that you don’t want to do and get yourself to do them. That might be an oversimplified definition, but my ability to keep going when I wanted to quit grew with each race I did and as I pushed myself a little bit further and further.

Those are some difficulties I’ve run into, and we can go into specific stories of things that have happened during 200-mile races and how I navigated them and the mindsets I had. But I just want to set up this mindset because, like you said, mindset isn’t just gifted—it’s built, and it’s built through difficulty.

David’s Perspective: Personal Transformation Through Challenge

David Charlton: That’s fantastic. What you’ve just shared has got me thinking. A little bit of background about me—I’ve run since my early 20s and did numerous half marathons in my 20s into early 30s. I think I did three marathons in my thirties, and then my body started breaking down, in all honesty. I was getting a lot of back pain, so it really reeled me in where doing a 5K was tough.

Earlier this year, I set myself a challenge to do my first triathlon because I thought the swimming is low impact, the cycling is low impact, and I could try and get myself back into it that way. The sense of achievement when I crossed the finish line in May was pretty much what you’re talking about when you were doing your first half marathon. You’re like, “Hmm, okay, right. Hey, I can do this. My body isn’t broken. What is possible?” So I see the similarities, but in very different ways in some respects.

The Science of Mental Toughness

Going on to what you mentioned about the definition of mental toughness, the way I see it and the way the science describes it is it’s the ability to deal with challenges, stress, pressures, and keep going. Some of the things you’ve mentioned there—confidence would be one aspect of mental toughness. Clearly, going through various different experiences does improve your confidence. Your self-talk dialogue changes, doesn’t it?

So where are we going with this? I guess, in some of those races where you’ve done 80 miles or when the fatigue kicked in, what are you saying to yourself in those moments?

Mental Toughness as a Perishable Skill

Pierce Showe: Yeah, so I’ll give you an example because I think regardless of how mentally tough you are, it’s not like Pierce has some insane mental toughness now and can do everything whether he tries to or not. It’s really what I call a perishable skill. If you don’t exercise it, it’s going to diminish. It’s like what you don’t use, you lose.

The Tahoe 200: A Lesson in Humility

Setting the Stage

Here’s the story. Back in 2023, I had signed up for three 200-mile races in three months—a race series called the Triple Crown of 200s in the United States. The distances were 220, 213, and 240 miles. At the time, I’d run four 100-mile races before, and I wanted to get into the 200 miles. I’d seen other people doing it. In a 200-mile race, it’s literally doing eight marathons back to back to back, sleeping one hour a night, going through the mountains up and down, all around, 30-plus thousand feet of elevation gain. To give you context, climbing Everest is 29,029 feet. It’s just a lot. It’s a huge, huge task.

I hired a coach, I trained, I did all the things I should have done. But I’ll be honest, at this point, every race I had done, I had finished, and I was overly confident going into the race. I went into this race—Tahoe 200 in July of 2023—overconfident and excited. I was looking at the prior race results and thinking, “Okay, usually I finish in the top 10% of the field. I’ll do that here. What time does that grant me? 72 hours? Okay, I’ll be done in three days.” But anyway, I went into this race a little bit overconfident, I’ll be honest, and I forgot to lube up.

When Everything Goes Wrong

In these ultra distances, it’s important—as silly as it sounds—to lube up your private areas, your armpits, your nipples, everything, so you don’t chafe. Chafing is when your clothing rubs up against your body or your legs rub together, and you can chafe so bad that you start to bleed. Sure enough, it was like a perfect storm. About 30 miles in, I started having GI issues, and I was going to the bathroom. I’m going to be honest—I was dealing with diarrhea on the trail. I was obviously running off to the side, taking care of business, but it was constant, like every 10 minutes or something I’d have to go. I was dealing with that, which is demoralizing because that’s the last thing you want to happen when you’re running and trying to finish an ultra marathon. Because of that, I started chafing really bad.

The Mental Spiral

Because of these circumstances and my mindset going into the race not being dialed in, I started to let that get to my head. It got to my head, and I started thinking, “My gosh, I’m 40 miles in and I have 160 to go. Oh my gosh, how am I going to do that? I’m only 42 miles in now, and I have 158 to go, and I’m moving so slow and I feel so terrible.” I basically talked myself into a hole in my mind. By the time I got to 50, 55 miles, I’m like, “Okay, I’m done. This race sucks. It’s just not my day. I need to throw in the towel and come back at it next year.” That was my mindset, my thoughts.

The Power of Rest and Reset

But I remember my coach always told me, “Before you make any decision to quit during an ultra marathon, make sure that you eat and you sleep, okay?” Eat and sleep, because if you eat a bunch and then sleep, usually you’re running lower on calories during these races just because your body can’t process enough. And you’re obviously tired. You’ve been running all day, and sleep works. It’s amazing. I know he told me that, and I’m like, “All right, I’m going to eat and sleep just to appease him because I don’t want to.” I knew in my head I was going to quit after, but I couldn’t quit without telling him that I ate and slept. So I did that. I got to 60 miles, then I ate and slept.

To my surprise, I woke up like an hour later feeling like a new person—still a little bit sore but mentally feeling refreshed. I’m like, “I think I can give it a little bit of a go.” I got back on the trail, ready to go, and then ran to the next aid station. I was able to get through that race. There were many highs and lows, but I was able to get through that race by just focusing on getting to the next aid station. That taught me a very powerful principle.

The Strategy of Segmentation

Learning from a Navy SEAL

I’ll add this to the story. I had another 200-mile race, the second one, 18 days later from when I finished that first one. I had to adjust things mentally because I wasn’t going to physically be ready for it. I figured if I came into that race with the same mindset I did the first, there’s no way I’d be able to finish. I was talking to a friend who’s a Navy SEAL, and this is the mental strategy that I was using—I didn’t really know it at the time to end up finishing the first—that I would then use in the second. It’s called segmentation.

Breaking Down the Impossible

It’s very simple. You’ve probably heard about it before, but if we can grab this process and actually implement it into every area of our life, I think we’ll live way greater lives. Segmentation is just taking a big goal or a big task and breaking it down into smaller subsequent parts. For an ultra marathon, they do it easily for you because an aid station is anywhere from 8 to 15 miles apart. All you do is focus on getting to the next aid station, and you will finish the race. Mentally, one of the biggest things that comes up during these long races is people think, “My gosh, if I feel this bad 70 miles into the race, how the heck am I going to go another 130? Or if I’m 110 miles in, how can I possibly do another 90 if I get worse?” No one can mentally process that, but that’s why you have to focus on just getting to the next aid station because you’ll ride these highs and lows throughout the race.

Application Beyond Running

But if you know, “Okay, I only need to get five more miles. I only need to get eight more miles, and then I can refocus and reset and then go after the next one,” it makes it so much easier. So chunking down that big goal into smaller parts—and it’s not just for running. It’s in your business. You have a big yearly goal? Break it down into smaller parts. What can you do today? Just focus on today, because if you string up enough todays, it’s inevitable for you to accomplish your goal.

Staying Present: Avoiding the Future-Oriented Trap

David Charlton: Yeah, it makes so much sense what you’re saying there. There’s two things I’ve picked up. Initially, when you told that fascinating—well, I was going to say fascinating, but rather gruesome story as well—when you had some problems, how that hour of sleep really allowed you to press pause and reset, isn’t it? All of a sudden, you approached it from a completely different mindset. That was one thing I picked up. And then the second one, where you were just talking about chunking down, I guess what you’re doing is you’re avoiding the trap which is going to happen in ultras and long-distance sports where you’re future-oriented, where you’re thinking about the finish line or what’s going to happen in one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, 10 hours. You’re just bringing it back to the moment, really, aren’t you?

Pierce Showe: Yeah, 100%. You’ve got to, or else mentally you’re not going to be able to get through it.

Micro-Strategies: The Art of Losing Track of Time

David Charlton: Yeah. So how do you chunk it down even further? Is it really all you’re thinking about is the next 5 or 10 meters or the next meter in front of you? Do you have any little mental hacks that you use?

Pierce Showe: Yeah. Well, one, I also focus on, “Okay, I’m taking gels or fuel every 30 minutes or 40 minutes.” So that’s something a little bit smaller. And then also, I actually try as best I can to lose track of time. Think about it—there are times in your life where you’re doing things where time goes by so quick. And then there are also times where time moves so freaking slow, like a one-minute plank or two-minute plank. I feel like every single second feels like a minute during those, at least for me. Maybe it’s different for you listening.

That really helps during these ultra marathons because if you are feeling like time is going by fast, that’s going to help so much during the race. I do that tactically. I don’t listen to much while running during these races because if I’m listening to a three- or four-minute song, I have to go through so many different songs. But I could just be enjoying nature and running, and three minutes, five minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes go by very quickly, or at least feel like it, because I lose track of time. I don’t really know what the science behind that is, but that really helps me during these races. It’s like a mental strategy to get through.

Key Takeaways

Building Mental Toughness:

• Mental toughness is not innate, it’s built through progressive challenges
• Start small and gradually increase difficulty
• Each completed challenge unlocks new levels of possibility

The Power of Belief:

• One breakthrough moment can change your entire perspective
• What you think is impossible may just be untested

Segmentation Strategy:

• Break big goals into smaller, manageable chunks
• Focus only on the next immediate milestone
• String together small wins to achieve the impossible

Managing Adversity:

• Mental toughness is a perishable skill—it requires constant practice
• Reset strategies (eat, sleep, pause) can completely shift your mindset
• Avoid future-oriented thinking during difficult moments

Staying Present:

• Focus on the immediate task at hand
• Use micro-goals (fuel every 30-40 minutes) to stay grounded
• Lose track of time by being fully present in the moment

For more episodes of Demystifying Mental Toughness, visit our podcast page.