I’m out in southern France at the moment, and Sunday I had a 20 mile run planned, sat on the back of an already big week, 43 miles before I’d even started this one. It was always going to be tough. Add in 33 degrees, 65% humidity, and a late flight the night before, and it turned into something else entirely.

The first 15 miles were fine. The last 3 were hell. I drank 4.5 litres of water over the run and still finished dehydrated. But somewhere in that last stretch, dragging myself through it, I found myself thinking about something I’ve believed for years, learning to suffer is one of the most important things you can train.

The doors taught me first

In my early 20s I trained martial arts with a guy who trained alongside genuine pro UFC fighters. This wasn’t self defence for the sake of it, it was hardcore, it was basically fighting with gloves on, and I got hurt plenty. I was working the doors at the time, and when it got tough in training, that’s what he’d say to me, what are you going to do on the door, give up? Or keep going?

Those years had a huge impact on forging who I am. Not because of the fighting itself, but because of what it taught me about staying in something when every part of me wanted out.

Then a man who’d survived prison showed me another gear

A while later I met a guy in the gym who’d done a long stretch in some of the worst prisons in the country. For him, training wasn’t a hobby, it was survival, and he trained like an absolute animal. He introduced me to German volume training, 10 sets of 10 on one exercise, except he’d do that across 6 or 7 exercises in a single session. People in the gym told him constantly that he couldn’t train like that. He did anyway. Eventually, so did I.

Against everything the traditional gym goer would tell you, that period made me the strongest I’ve ever been, benching 180kg, overhead pressing 60kg dumbbells each arm, pushing ridiculous weight for high reps. It was arguably harder than the MMA training. But it forged me, and now what’s easy for me is hard for most other people.

What suffering actually builds

That’s the pattern I keep noticing across everything I do, MMA, German volume training, Ironman, marathon training. It’s never really about the sport. It’s about capacity.

There’s a quote I keep coming back to, to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. Learn to almost enjoy the suffering, but more importantly, build your capacity for it. What feels impossible today will feel manageable next year, and what feels impossible now will be possible in two years. That’s not motivation talk, that’s just how capacity works. It builds slowly, week after week, month after month, not in single big days but in the accumulation of them.

Business runs on the exact same principle. What kept me awake at night five years ago, I barely notice now. Life is no different. The more capacity you build, the more you’re able to carry, and the more you can achieve.

The business world is only just catching up

There’s been a lot on social media lately about the idea of training with pro athletes and mimicking their discipline and work ethic in business. I’ve been saying it for years, it’s the same skill. Discipline under load in one part of your life builds discipline under load everywhere else. Anyone who trains purely for the physical result is missing one of the biggest things training actually gives you, capacity.

Most people don’t get that. Most people won’t understand it. My wife genuinely cannot understand why I put myself through hell in training. But putting myself through hell in training is exactly what makes the rest of life feel manageable. It’s perspective, it’s resilience, it’s growth, and it’s something every single one of us should be training for, because every single one of us will suffer at some point. There’s no getting out of that part. The only choice you get is whether you’ve built the capacity to meet it, or whether it floors you when it arrives.

Build the capacity now

I’m not saying training makes life easy. It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t. What I am saying is that a greater capacity for hard things will always lead to a greater life, because the hard things are coming either way, in training or outside of it, and the only real question is whether you’ve been practising for them.

That’s what I was thinking about in the last 3 miles on Sunday, dehydrated, cooked by the heat, a long way from being done. Not that it was fun, it wasn’t. But that I was exactly where I needed to be, building the one thing that will matter far beyond this run.