Overcome Your Greatest Obstacles - Lessons on Grit, Grace, and Mental Health | World Champion Obstacle Racer, Amelia Boone

Amelia Boone (0:01)

The work is making it a priority, putting aside time for self-reflection, for mental health. It is the breaking down of all of those walls and those barriers, and saying, I need help and I need to fix this.

Just being humble enough to know when you need to course correct.

Michael Gervais (0:31)

Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais. By trade and training a high-performance psychologist, we all face uncertainty every day. No matter how detailed our to-do lists are or how specific our routines are, everything that we engage in has an unknown outcome.

So certainty is an illusion. Each moment is unique. Each moment is unfolding and wonderfully unknown.

So how do you work with uncertainty? What feelings does it provoke? And is it excitement or curiosity or is it mostly anxiety?

With that in mind, I am stoked to introduce our guest today, Amelia Boone. She is a four-time obstacle race world champion with over 30 victories, a three-time World's Toughest Mudder, and through her various triumphs, she's earned the title, the Queen of Pain. In addition to her honors in extreme sports, she also excels as a full-time attorney for a multinational corporation. And she's accomplished all of this while grappling with not one, but two lifelong mental health diagnoses, OCD and an eating disorder. So Amelia credits a hard-won ability to embrace uncertainty with helping her navigate the extreme mental and physical demands of her chosen life pursuits. She shares her insights on how she works with anxiety. And we get down underneath the surface about how she pursues mastery and how that is fundamentally different from the pursuit of achievement and excellence. Now her story is a testament to the resilience we all require to face life's mental and emotional and physical challenges. Through her eyes, we see the interconnectedness of physical endurance and mental toughness and how fostering self-awareness, leading with vulnerability and relentlessly pursuing personal growth in every aspect of life builds a foundation for success. This conversation is a powerful blend of grit and grace and introspection. And I just can't wait for you to learn from Amelia's insights. So with that, let's dive right into this week's conversation with Amelia Boone.

Amelia, I am stoked to have you on the Finding Mastery podcast. And before we dive in, how are you?

Amelia Boone (2:58)

I am doing very well. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

Michael Gervais (3:03)

Would you say otherwise if you were not? Would you say if you were having a really tough time, would you say otherwise?

Amelia Boone (3:11)

You know, it depends on who I'm talking to and what kind of conversation I'm having. For the most part, I like to be very honest.

Now at this point in my life, I like to tell people, you know, I actually been kind of a rough one, but getting through it.

Michael Gervais (3:29)

The reason I asked you that question is because on your Instagram, you present in a way that is overuse a word right now as a placeholder, but there's an honest, a real, there's an authenticity about the poorest nature between your external world and your internal life.

I want to get into the mechanics of how that poorest nature between those, the internal and external has worked for you. Before we dive in, can you explain obstacle racing? Can you give us a sense of what that is so that our imagination can be clear about how you've spent most of your life?

Amelia Boone (4:09)

Very good question. I like to describe obstacle racing as kind of a combination of American Ninja Warrior, what people are very familiar, I think, with that show. And so you're climbing on things, you're jumping on things, but then also a lot of running and heavy lifting, kind of a military-inspired course. So you're out there for 10, 12 miles, sometimes for 24 hours, depending on the race, and you are crawling under barbed wire, you are climbing over walls, you are carrying heavy things up a mountain, you are swimming in freezing cold lakes.

So just very much a variety of strength and speed and endurance and skill. I started obstacle racing actually not until my mid-20s. I was already an attorney at that point. And then figured out I was actually really something, I was good at this as well.

And so I spent several years at the top of obstacle racing, and decided at that point, I kind of wanted to transition to ultra running as well. And so I started running ultras, and I started running a hundred milers and all of these crazy races. And I had to manage injury in this because I was also hiding something that I didn't want to admit to myself or that I didn't want to admit to others, was that during this arc of my obstacle racing career, the eating disorder that I had dealt with as a teenager came back in full force. So I was relapsing hard into an eating disorder. I was running in a training, absurd distances, and I started to break.