There’s a great deal of pain associated with being a winner. Not the twisted knee variety or the swollen ankle – although that can be tough to deal with. We’ll talk about dealing with injury a bit later.

But this is the torture of mental pain and anguish about wanting to win so much – and not quite making it. It’s about dealing with the pain of failure. It’s also about dealing with the physical and constant pain in training and how you build the essential mental toughness that you will require to be a winner.

Scotland and Rangers’ football star, Barry Ferguson, isn’t everyone’s role model as a sporting hero. But he deals with his pain in a public way. He told the Mail on Sunday in an interview:

“I think you must train the way that you play. If I’ve lost a game in training, then I’m raging. We’re passionate guys here [at Rangers]. Sometimes, maybe, too passionate. Maybe that was the criticism. People tell me I’m a moaning-faced bastard. But I’m just a passionate guy who wants to win.”

He went on: “That’s the way I’ve been brought up by my dad and brother and when I came through the ranks. It’s my job. I don’t like getting beaten and, if that is a criticism, then I think the game is pretty much messed up. If it’s a crime to be aggressive or not happy losing, then I’m guilty.”

He says he just wants everyone in his own team to be better. “If it comes across in a grumpy way, then it’s in a good way.” Ferguson, whose career nearly ended after a fall out with former Rangers boss Paul Le Guen, says he moans at his team-mates constantly because he wants then to be the best. “How can that be a cultural clash? Everyone should want to win,” he says.

There is something in what Barry Ferguson that is very admirable. This leading Scottish footballer is expressing, in his own way, his pain at not winning. That is what is driving him to become a better player.

But the pain is also about building up a mental strength. And this is the mental strength of champions. David Wilkie, Scotland’s Olympic swimmer, revealed some of this when he talked to In the Winning Zone about his extreme regime to win a gold medal.

His training regime was 7am until 9am every day, then 2 until 4pm, including Saturdays. Sunday was a day off, but it was expected that the swimmers undertake some exercise activity. There would be two-week training camps in Jamaica or the Bahamas with his team-mates and individual coach Charlie Hodgson. It was all geared to producing winners. The training would be very physically hard, up to 20,000 metres a day – which is 400 lengths of a 50 metre pool.

This gruelling intensity of training up to six hours a day drove Wilkie into a state of mental toughness – reaching an even higher level. “You are talking the body into an environment which is alien to it, to maintain an improvement and a standard of excellence you have to swim this hard. Six hours at day to give you that mental strength. Physically, you could get away with two hours a day, but mentally you need six to be stronger. The dreariness and drag is part of the mental process. The biggest part is the mental toughness – that’s why I believe a lot of swimmers might be physically fit they mentally inadequate for high performance winning. To be at the top, you need high levels of toughness like the Australians or the Americans,” he said.

But how can you deal with the pain of pushing yourself continually to its limits. It is something that Chris Hoy has considered. For him, the difference between winning and losing is often no more than the breadth of a hair.  A nano-second is the harshest division between delight and despair. Training to win is the only way.

When Chris Hoy was high with excitement after winning the men’s team sprint cycling in Melbourne in March 2006, he spoke with passion about his long-term ambition. His aim was to compete not only in the London Olympics in 2012 – but also in Glasgow at the Commonwealth Games in 2014. By then he will be 38.

“Competing in front of a Scottish crowd in 2014 is a huge motivation,” he said. “One of the reasons I’m thinking about going to London is because it’ll be a British venue.”

The issue for Chris was not his age – or the racing. But the training. How would his body react to its daily pounding? “It’s the training that’s difficult. If I can deal with the daily monotony and pain of the training, I’ll be there.”

When In the Winning Zone spoke to Chris in early 2007, the fight and the motivation was still burning strongly. What he had come to accept was that the pain was the price of driving for his goals. Once he stopped pushing himself to his limit, then his performance would suffer and he could no longer be able to compete at that level. Once the pain and desire was gone, it is almost impossible to get it back.

So learning to handle and master pain is an essential element in the winners’ tool kit. We’ll come back to this later.

KK

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