5 Best Survival Books – Improve Your Ultrarunning Mental Strength This Year

The top 5 survival books to help improve your mental strength for ultrarunning and endurance sports. Boost your mental toughness.
5 Best Survival Books IMPROVE YOUR ULTRARUNNING MENTAL STRENGTH FOR 2019 trail and kale
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Ultrarunning and other endurance sports is not just your physical preparedness for a tough day out, but your mental strength to help you endure and even thrive under challenging circumstances. Having read a number of excellent survival books and true stories of mental toughness and physical endurance, in this post I am excited to share my favorite books on this topic, which I consider to be the best survival books out there (with no doomsday survival or mountaineering books mentioned).

Boost Your Mental Game

My selection criteria are as follows: did I LEARN FROM, AND ENJOY, the book?  Whether or not I did is a combination of these three:

  1. Inspiration – Did the tales of endurance and mental toughness inspire me to channel more mental strength when I’m out running? And… did the story / stories inspire me to grow and develop as a person in not just my ‘running’ life, but my entire outlook on life?
  2. Perspective – did the survival book help me put my own (relatively trivial) issues into perspective? For example: the author broke their leg and got frostbite, survived. I suffered a minor blister and complained about it?!
  3. Practical advice – do I feel that I learned some practical tips on how to manage the situation if I find myself in a survival situation, for example if I get lost or suffer an injury in a remote location?

The Best Survival Books to Improve Mental Strength for Ultra Running and Endurance

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REVIEWEDMegan Hine: Mind of a Survivor Book Review


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[crp]BONUS – Natural Navigation Skills

I really enjoyed this book and believe what I learned from it has made me more aware of, and confident in, my environment, when out on the trails, whether in forests, hills or mountains.

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Why Not Try Audible Instead: A word about using Audible to read/listen as Audiobooks

If you’ve never tried Audible or haven’t got into audiobooks before, I highly recommend signing up for a free trial! The biggest advantages of using Audible to listen to books, rather than reading them, are that:

  • Get a FREE book. When you sign up for a free trial of Audible, you get 1 free audiobook + 2 free Audible Originals to get you started. After 30 days of your free trial, you get 1 audiobook and 2 Audible Originals each month for $14.95/mo. If you decide to cancel online at anytime, you get to keep all your audiobooks.
  • Listening to someone narrate the book can be more impactful than reading written words.
  • You can listen to audiobooks and get your fix of motivational self-improvement books while doing other things – boring things that don’t otherwise enhance your life, such as commuting, and doing household chores.
  • You can consume information quickly. If you like to consume information fast, you can actually playback the audiobooks faster than just 1x speed. The faster you play them back, the more the narrator will sound like a chipmunk, but the benefit is you can absorb more information SO much faster than reading a book, or even listening to one at normal speed for that matter.
  • Audible is always with you… If you have your phone with you, you have your audiobooks with you.

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