Imagine that you’re a professional athlete.

Your life is devoted to competition. You train, diet, manage your sleep schedule, watch gameplay footage to study what went wrong and have a team of trainers and coaches at your back pushing you to get 1% better with each session. Your entire financial life revolves around how well you perform in your sport.

Now imagine you’re a professional athlete missing your legs from the knees down.

Would you even be an athlete if that was your life?

For some, this isn’t simply an imagination. This is reality and life for Rudy Garcia-Tolson, a five-time Paralympic swimmer and Ironman athlete, who chose to compete despite his physical condition. One would think that this is a testament to physical strength; however, it’s a story of perseverance and the mental tenacity and intestinal fortitude to push on regardless of what life hands us.

Let’s explore Rudy’s resilience and how you can use his story as an example to persevere and win despite the odds.

Trade Victimhood For Victory

Rudy wasn’t born without legs.

Garcia-Tolson was born with pterygium syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that caused webbed fingers on both hands, a cleft lip and palate, and a clubfoot that forced him to use a wheelchair.

After fifteen operations (yes, fifteen) to try to fix his legs, he told his parents and doctors to “just cut them off.”

And that was before entering the first grade.

Talk about taking fate into your own hands.

Picture how difficult that must have been for a young child who dreamed of becoming a professional athlete. And how gut-wrenchingly painful it was for his parents to tell him the “facts” and the “odds” of his dream staying a dream.

But Rudy didn’t care about the “facts.” He wanted to be an athlete, and he would find a way.

Upon entering the first grade, Rudy got his first pair of “walking legs” and promptly decided to join the swim team.

“Prosthetics back then were clunky, and so I always wanted to take my legs off, and I could do that in the pool,” he says.

“The other kids called me ‘the boy with no legs,’ and that motivated me.”

Six months later, Garcia-Tolson started beating his teammates–teammates with full legs.

The kid who initially received “pity claps” from fellow teammates and their parents now had to deal with complaints that not having legs gave him “an unfair advantage.” Imagine complaining that someone without legs has an unfair advantage. How ridiculous does that sound?

He experienced the power of sport to build self-esteem—something that gave his life purpose, first as an athlete and later as a coach.

But the highlight here is that Rudy made an unconventional choice; He chose not to become a victim. He could have. He had every reason to. However, no true champion aligns themselves with victimhood.

Garcia-Tolson used what life gave him as fuel to outwork his conditions and his competition. A lesson we all could benefit from.

Pain Is the Companion of Progress

If you’ve ever done physical training, you know that pain is inevitable.

The soreness, the buildup of lactic acid, the high heart rate, and heavy breathing are all a part of the transformation to get better. However, during training, it sucks. While working out, your mind is screaming–begging at times–for you to throw in the towel.

But something beautiful takes place when you don’t quit.

As Rudy says after competing during the Arizona 2009 Ironman,

“Several times, I had to stop and sit down and stretch forward to relieve pressure. My running gait is untraditional because I have no knees, so I have to swing my prosthetic blades out to the side, and that puts even more stress on my lower back.”

This man competes in Ironmans without knees. His level of pain is on a different level from us able-bodied humans.

He continues,

“It was a level of pain that was very hard to deal with. Every little voice in my head was screaming, ‘You’ve got this far; no one is gonna judge you if you stop.’ I flipped it for motivation: I’d already got this far, so I had to keep going, step by step.”

Refusing to quit because things are hard makes us mentally and physically tougher. And making that choice in the gym or during our training session is practicing the habit of persevering.

Choosing to endure the pain yields fruits of pride, the feeling of accomplishment, and the payoff of getting closer to our goals.

But if you choose to quit, you’re unintentionally building the habit in your brain that you stop when things get difficult.

Will that help you become a champion? Will that get you to your goals? Is that the type of person you want to become?

Do as Rudy does. Choose perseverance, and go step by step.

How You Can Persevere

We are born pretty useless.

Seriously. We come into the world knowing nothing. Everyone learns everything as we go.

We learn how to tie our shoes, eat with a fork, and drive. Like all skills we acquire, you can learn perseverance–actually, re-learn perseverance. And I say re-learn because we also come into the world naturally perseverant.

When you were a child, and you tried walking for the first time, did you succeed? No. You fell, probably on your face, cried for a bit, and then got back up and tried again.

You continued this process, potentially hundreds of times, until you could walk successfully.

And never in that process as a child did you say, “Man, this is hard. I think I’ll give up and just crawl forever.”

That sounds ridiculous, right?

Yet, that’s what so many of us do with our goals and dreams now as adults.

We quit when things get complicated. We give up. We throw in the towel. We tell ourselves we aren’t good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, lucky enough, etc., to achieve what we seek.

When did we learn to put negative labels on ourselves?

We didn’t do that as children. That’s why we’re all walking around now (if we have legs).

There’s a great book I highly suggest you get and read to alter your mindset, allowing you to break through these self-imposed labels and achieve your goals.

It’s called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.

In the book, the renowned Stanford psychologist illustrates that it's not intelligence, talent, or education that sets successful people apart. It's their mindset or the way that they approach life's challenges.

Dweck shows how a "fixed mindset" can hold you back and how a "growth mindset" can help you to reach your goals.

The BMM Takeaway

Perseverance is a superpower.

Every President, CEO, celebrity, business owner, athlete, leader, and soldier has felt the urge to quit. But the successful people we hear about and look up to didn’t give in or listen to that urge.

Choose to persevere. And it is a choice.

If you can endure and choose perseverance, you can overcome any odds stacked against you and win.

As for Rudy Garcia-Tolson, he’s still crushing it.

Garcia-Tolson became the first double above-the-knee amputee ever to complete an Ironman—an achievement he ranks as his greatest physical accomplishment.

That’s saying something because he’s also a five-time Paralympic swimmer; he specializes in the individual medley and has won two golds, two silvers, and a bronze.

All this from someone who was told by doctors when he was five that he’d never walk—let alone run.

That’s the power of perseverance.