I was recently contacted by a documentarian who is doing a film about extreme sports like The Race Across The West, a 930-mile cycling endurance race. The filmmaker wanted my psychoanalytic take on what motivates these extreme efforts. Very good question.

Years ago Bob Lipsyte, the Pulitzer  Prize-winning New York Times sport journalist had a TV program  called “The Health Show” and he invited me along with Rodger McFarlanne and Yvonne Robinson-Voaer to discuss extreme sports. McFarlanne and Robinson-Voaer were ultra-marathoners who had just participated in the Eco-Challenge, a 10-day contest of non-stop running, kayaking and mountaineering.

My unfortunate role in this affair was to publicly analyze these two super-jocks and try to explain their underlying motives that prompted them to go through such torture. Was this what they call a death wish, madness, courage in action, masochism?  Now much to the chagrin of Bob Lipsyte, I could not and would not publicly shame or humiliate these two extreme athletes, especially  since they were so much bigger than me.

Lipsyte, ever the fierce journalist looking for a provocative angle, proceeded to publicly humiliate  me on the air by suggesting that I was perhaps intimated by these two big athletes and so was soft soaping and minimizing their psychopathology. It was one of those extreme moments for me, but thankfully I was able to save the public face of McFarlanne and Robinson-Voaer.

A perfect example of extreme sports  occurred this weekend when Long Island was host to an Ironman Triathlon  Race at Jones Beach. This  was actually a half triathlon with the participants  swimming for 2.4 miles, biking for 56 miles and running for 13.1 miles, but let’s not quibble over minor details.  If you were out driving on Wantagh State, you got a gander of these folks peddling along in the driving rain.  A tropical storm is no match for these warriors.

What would motivate a person to do this? You can argue that it’s a good way to see the world since they have Ironman races in Nice, France, and Kona, Hawaii.  The typical answers to the question of motivation to play a sport does not apply in the case of extreme sports. Most sports offer the adult a chance to travel, get fit, make friends and get away from one’s normal life, but extreme sports is another matter entirely.

There are some theories we can use to comprehend the motives that lie deep within  the extreme athlete.  Alfred Adler, one of the founders of psychoanalysis felt, that such overcompensation stems from a deep sense of inferiority that the person is actually running away from.  There are many examples of this.  President Richard Nixon was born into poverty and so he had something to prove to the world. He eventually  ruined his name and embraced the shadow of his shame by questionable covert efforts to win election.

Tiger Woods, the world’s greatest golfer, was raised in an all-white neighborhood, had a stutter and was physically abused by bullies who tied him to a tree and painted racial epithets  on his chest. He reacted to this by becoming an extreme worker, similar to Ben Hogan who had similar childhood horrors stories.

Many star athletes I work with have early childhood scars from physical abuse, poverty, emotional abuse and more. This kind of experience brings with it the shadow of shame that the athlete unconsciously attempts to undo by achieving greatness on the playing field. This is what Adler meant by overcompensation. It is the fuel that keeps them highly driven, but it also leads to wreckage. There is an inability to assimilate their own greatness so they keep on trying in a variety of ways and this leads to burnout. Whether it’s womanizing, drug use  or a greed for power, the story of overcompensation often ends badly.

Sigmund Freud also had a theory called repetition compulsions, which describes the endless tendency to face and to prove to themselves that they are strong and not helpless or weak. As an example, abused children will often choose an abusive spouse. A repetition compulsion was nicely  demonstrated in the film “The Hurt Locker” where Jeremy Renner played the part of a bomb diffuser in Iraq.

He got through his tour of duty without getting killed and in the second to last scene they show him back home, shopping for cereal in a supermarket aisle, looking bored and confused. The last scene shows him once again wearing an armed bomb suit, walking down another street in Iraq going to diffuse another bomb.

What I will be telling the filmmaker about what drives endurance athletes is this valiant attempt to transform themselves from being shadow children into a better version. This drive is a part of human nature. I had an older brother who was a true genius,  got straight A’s and won many academic awards.  This meant that he introduced me to many good things in art and literature. He had me reading Vonnegut, Dostoevsky and Henry Miller when I was 11 years old.

But having an older brother who was so smart convinced me that I was mentally deficient which  prompted me to get a Ph.D., write syndicated columns and publish two books with another two on the way.   Overcompensation  is what Alfred Adler called it.  It gets you to reach beyond your limits.

But it also means that at 3:28 PM on a Sunday afternoon when all of my friends are watching college football on the TV, I am in my office typing away to meet my Monday  morning newspaper deadline. Tiger Woods, Richard Nixon, Ironman runners and me, all shadow children, running frantically to get out of the shadow and into the light.