Adam Campbell is a professional mountain athlete.Nikos Schwelm/Supplied
There’s a vision of fitness motivation that many find compelling: You pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and hustle. You just have to want it badly enough. And if you don’t … well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?
In reality, the power of motivation over obstacles is finite – often constrained by factors outside of your control. Motivation can be divided between the extrinsic – driven by anything from social pressures to cash prizes – and the intrinsic, quieter but evergreen.
The elements of our inner drives are also more universal, shared by elite athletes and couch potatoes alike. Harnessing them is where the magic happens for lifelong fitness.
Leslie Podlog, a professor at the Université de Montréal, studies the return to sport after injury. As a high-school athlete, Podlog was talented enough to earn a wrestling scholarship from Simon Fraser University, but performance came at a price. After three knee reconstructions and a shoulder operation, his surgeon said, “I don’t tell people to retire but maybe consider something more cerebral.”
Podlog took this to heart, eventually earning his PhD in sport and exercise psychology. His work asks what athletes need to return to sport after injury and explores “why people do what they do – and what drives them to engage in health behaviours.”
Université de Montréal professor Leslie Podlog studies the return to sport after injury.Supplied
After a sports injury, Podlog says there is an instinctive response to want “to build back better, stronger, faster and more capable than before.” But that perspective may be also disconnected from the reality of a person’s recovery. One of the most successful strategies he’s seen involves not only accepting those changes in your body but finding a greater sense of meaning through them.
His work draws upon other validated research on three universal elements of motivation: feeling like you’re in control of your choices, feeling capable and feeling like you belong.
These drives are at the heart of intrinsic motivation – the quality that compels us to pursue things for their own sake – without external validation or other incentives.
“You think about all the elements that one requires to be successful in an athletic context, like motivation, confidence, managing pain, managing emotions, maintaining your concentration on factors you can influence or assert control over,” says Podlog. “In psychology, we think of these as skills.” The athletes most capable of dealing with turbulence are the ones who can apply those skills to their own lives, he says.
To get to the heart of motivation, The Globe and Mail spoke to four Canadians who have overcome obstacles and harnessed their inner drives through different combinations of control, capability, belonging and good old-fashioned joy.
Finding meaning through movement: Adam Campbell
Adam Campbell was more than 60 metres up the side of a ravine in Rogers Pass, a high mountain pass in B.C., when the rock he grabbed for support came loose. The impact of his fall fractured four of his vertebrae, smashed his ankle and sheared off the top of his hip bone.
“Before the accident, movement meant one thing,” he says of the 2016 incident. “It meant really long days out in the mountains and going really hard. And following the accident, it meant trying to take two steps.”
Adam Campbell thrives when running, skiing and climbing.Philipp Reiter/Supplied
This wasn’t the last trauma the professional mountain athlete experienced. In 2020, his wife, Dr. Laura Kosakoski, died after being buried in an avalanche during a ski trip in Banff National Park. “The thing about mountain sports,” says Campbell, “is that they can give us a lot but they can also be incredibly dangerous.”
In time, Campbell began learning to redefine progress and, perhaps for the first time, find peace in stillness. A support group called Mountain Muskox was instrumental in his healing. Campbell thrives when running, skiing and climbing and, when we spoke, was just days away from being married.
When the road to mastery forks: Victor Bachmann
Victor Bachmann experienced – and occasionally dispensed – injury as a professional mixed-martial artist. By the time he was 30, he’d carved out a respectable record through a combination of “pace and pressure,” a style fuelled in part by anger from losing his father at a young age.
He also knew that fighting was not his ultimate destination. “My mind’s made to work in science.” To wit, his fighting moniker, “The Professor,” was a nod to both his personality and his physics major at the University of Alberta.
Bachmann returned to his alma mater to study environmental science. Returning to the gym, however, was another story. He struggled to keep up with his old teammates. This weighed on his competitive mind.
Victor Bachmann competes at an event in Edmonton, in December, 2009.Supplied
“So I switched clubs, switched focus,” he says, adding that he let his training partners beat him, “because I love martial arts and I just want to do this for the rest of my life.”
At home, he models the lessons he learned as a pro for his daughters, asking, “What do they need to perform their best? Is it practice? Is it progressive resistance? Is it rest? Is it support?”
About a decade into his career in environmental science, Bachmann took on a master’s degree. Combined with a full-time job and parenting responsibilities, the pace was gruelling. His exercise practice – once central – was now scraped together, at best. “It reminded me how much I focused on myself when I was fighting,” says Bachmann. His wife’s support was essential. “When I was all done, I told my wife, ‘This [degree] is more yours than it is mine.’”
Open this photo in gallery:On rediscovering the joy of ability: Danelys Sarmiento
Danelys Sarmiento‘s experience of sprinting was of speed and joyful abandon. When she was in high school, a teacher told her parents that she could go a long way with the right coaching, but she feigned disinterest. Her parents, recent Cuban immigrants, couldn’t afford to pay for coaching – but would have broken the bank trying anyway. So, as a 14-year-old, she made the choice for them.
Danelys Sarmiento is a powerlifter and personal trainer.Supplied
Twenty-one years later, she was searching for meaning after losing a twin pregnancy to trisomy-18-related complications. Sarmiento – now 35 – found a home at Athletic Leaders, a gym in Mississauga. She recalls working out next to a woman 10 years her senior and marvelling as she pressed a pair of 30-pound dumbbells over her head. The woman said, “You can do it too.”
And Sarmiento did. In that moment, an old feeling awoke. She began working out regularly, soon pursuing a series of personal-training certifications. She describes her first powerlifting meet as an intoxicating experience. “I forgot I could do all these things,” she says.
She rattles off her numbers: an 185-pound squat, an 118-pound bench press and a 295-pound deadlift. She can also perform 15 bodyweight pull-ups – a feat at any age. At 40, she trained late into her third trimester before welcoming a healthy baby into the world.
“I’m so in love with strength training that I want women to understand what it is and what it does for us.” Now 50, she is beginning to run again.
Belonging on the track: Denise Bonin
Denise Bonin collected some serious hardware at the recent 55+ BC Games in Nanaimo, where she won bronze in the 50-, 100- and 200-metre races – and gold in the 4×100 metre relay. However, a highlight for her was the gold-medal performance of another relay team – featuring two 93-year-olds, one 90-year-old and one 96-year-old. It’s the kind of thing that gives you hope.
Denise Bonin celebrates after a successful medal haul from the 55+ BC Games in Nanaimo, in September, 2025.Michael Hawkes/Supplied
Bonin also recently set (obliterated, really) a Canadian relay record with three other runners at the BC Masters Championships. “That’s the really beautiful thing about these kinds of groups, like the 55+ Games and the BC Masters Championships,” she said. “You just get to know everybody and you’re all part of a family.”
It’s that social dynamic that keeps Bonin engaged. “We have such good role models amongst our teammates. We’ve got lots of 80-year-olds and lots of 75 and older athletes and they’re still here having fun.”
Running to feel like a kid again is a common theme among Master’s track athletes, says Bonin. She estimates that most were track and field athletes when they were teenagers. Bonin was 50 when she found distance running and 60 before she rediscovered track and field.
“Next year,” she says, “I’ll be 70.”
Denise Bonin.55+BC Games/Supplied
When Bonin was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021, she had surgery but kept putting off chemotherapy. “I said, ‘Look, I’ve got a BC Masters Championships coming up and I want to finish that and then I’ll start.’”
After some initial dread, she found solace in her routine and her community – both core pieces of Bonin’s way of being. She beat cancer with minimal interruption to her busy (at any age) schedule of three weekly track sessions, two recovery runs, leading fitness classes and reading to kids at the library.
Bonin also frequently volunteers as a starter for track competitions. Now, she has her sights set on the 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games – where she hopes to fire a starter’s pistol.