09/13/2026
Love Hard!
Some of the moments I wanted to end the most are now some of the moments I would give anything to experience one more time. At South Dakota State, Coach Bono and Coach Reader had a way of finding out exactly how much we had in us, then asking for a little more. I can still picture those preseason workouts ending with me laying on the mat in a pool of sweat, completely spent. Legs shaking. Lungs on fire. Everything around you almost completely silent except for the sound of you and your teammates trying to put air back into your lungs. Nobody talking. Nobody moving much. Just a room full of guys who had absolutely emptied themselves. In the moment, all I wanted was for it to be over. But when it finally was, there was almost no better feeling. We had just done something really freaking hard, and somehow that feeling started becoming something I loved.
I did not fully understand it at the time, but those days were changing my relationship with hard. When you are younger, hard usually feels like something you want to get away from. Running hurts, so you want the run to end. The weight gets heavy, so you want to put it down. You drill the same position over and over and wonder how many more times you really need to do it. You try something new, fail, look bad doing it, and part of you immediately wants to go back to what feels comfortable. That is natural. But if you stay in those moments long enough, something starts to shift.
You start realizing that hard is not always a warning sign. Sometimes hard means you are exactly where growth is happening. Burning lungs can mean you are finding a new limit. Frustration can mean you are working through something you have not figured out yet. Looking bad at a new technique can mean you are finally taking a risk instead of hiding inside what you already know. Being tired does not always mean you are done. Failing does not mean you are a failure. Sometimes the hardest moments are simply asking you a question: are you willing to stay here long enough to become better?
That is where confidence starts to come from in a way that is hard to fake. Not from somebody telling you that you are tough. Not from a quote on the wall. From living through moments where you wanted to stop and finding out you had a little more. From getting beat and coming back the next day. From trying something you were terrible at until one day you were not. From having enough proof in your own life that when things get uncomfortable, you do not have to panic. You have been there before.
I know there were moments later in my wrestling career when I was exhausted, behind, frustrated, or in a bad position and some part of me had already been trained for that feeling. Maybe not that exact situation, but I knew what it felt like to be uncomfortable and keep going anyway. Looking back now, I appreciate that Coach Bono and Coach Reader were doing more than getting us in shape for a wrestling season. Those days were teaching us how to respond when something got hard.
That is one of the things I hope kids get from wrestling now.
Life is going to give you hard things whether you go looking for them or not. You are going to lose. You are going to fail. You are going to have days where your confidence is low and your motivation is gone. There will be hard conversations, setbacks, disappointment, and things you are not immediately good at. You cannot control all of that. But you can build your response to it. You can learn that discomfort is not something you always need to escape. You can learn that a bad day does not define you. You can learn that sometimes the way forward is simply to stay in it a little longer.
And I think that is where your relationship with hard really starts to change.
When you are young, you usually fall in love with the reward first. Winning. Medals. Getting your hand raised. Standing on top of the podium. That is the part everybody sees and the part everybody wants.
But if you stay with something long enough, you start falling in love with everything that happens before anybody is watching.
The early mornings.
The extra reps.
The drill you were sick of doing.
The position you could not figure out.
The practice where you felt terrible but showed up anyway.
The workout that left you laying in a pool of sweat trying to catch your breath.
The loss that hurt so badly you could barely think about it, but somehow brought you back into the room the next day.
Those moments start to mean something different.
Eventually, you realize they were never standing in the way of becoming who you wanted to be.
They were how you became that person.
At first, you love winning.
Then you learn to love the work.
And somewhere along the way, you learn to love hard.
