We runners are generally as tough as bunions. Many of us wear the black toenails, sore muscles, twinges and tweaks as badges of honour. Still, every runner I’ve ever met has a weakness. No matter how many long runs you’ve logged or how fast you ran your repeats, your mind can throw a hurdle your way on race day that can sabotage all your hard work.
As a runner, your brain can be both your biggest asset and your greatest enemy. You must put in the miles and the time to run your best. But I believe physical conditioning alone isn’t enough to put wings on your feet. What you think and feel on race day has a huge influence on how well you perform.
Being head psychologist for the Boston Marathon for 14 years, and having worked with thousands of runners, I can tell you that understanding the mechanisms behind your thoughts can help you run your best. Just as you may have a tight IT band to overcome, you probably also have a psychological Achilles heel.
Below are a few mental obstacles that runners commonly encounter on race day. I’ve paired each with coping mechanisms, based on neurological science and proven psychological techniques. Soaking up this knowledge will help give you the edge you need to run your best race.
How to cope with pre-race jitters
You selected an event, circled it on the calendar and trained your heart out. Then you get to the start line and you’re so nervous you think you might pass out. You know it’s just a local 10K, but emotionally it feels like an Olympic final.
What’s going on?
Your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) controls your heart rate, blood pressure and blood vessels. That nervous feeling you get just before the race starts is caused by the SNS pumping adrenaline and other hormones into your bloodstream. When the race starts, this flood of ‘fight or flight’ hormones starts your heart racing and causes your blood pressure to climb, leaving you primed for action. If you’re too keyed up, however, it can be an issue. In an overly agitated state, you’re likely to rocket off too fast, leaving nothing in the tank for the later part of the race. Pre-race planning helps you strike the right balance between the SNS response and keeping your cool.
How to cope
Visualise success: Before the race, take a few moments to imagine that you have just achieved your goal. Picture yourself crossing the finish line and hold that mental picture in your head, conjuring up as much detail as you can. Use all your senses. Is there a cheering crowd? How does your body feel? What are your emotions? Building mental familiarity with the race in this way can help you relax – and even boost your performance. Envisioning yourself running well appears to create neural patterns in the brain that almost match the neural patterns created when you run. This seems to code the muscle, motor, and behavioural memory of a skill. When combined with enough physical training, visualisation may imprint the skills into your brain and help train your muscles to do what you want them to do. Reaching a goal mentally might help make it easier for you to achieve it physically.
Think positively: When you come down with a case of the butterflies, it means fear has set in. Fear throws off your pacing, makes you doubt your strategy and messes with your sense of energy management. That’s when you start making mistakes.
You can manage your anxiety by thinking confidently. Prepare mantras you can remember and repeat to yourself, such as ‘I’m strong, I’m fast, my speed will last.’ Mantras that can take potential negatives and turn them into positives also work well.
Be superstitious: On race day, stick to a routine – eat only what you tested in training, for example. And if you have ‘lucky’ shoelaces, use them. Shoelaces don’t possess magical powers, of course, but people who develop superstitious behaviours can use them to help calm their minds. Instead of allowing your anxiety to hamper your performance, the ritualistic behaviours of a superstition help keep you calm, which can positively affect your performance.
How to cope with a fear of hills
To many runners, hills are the enemy. They are an obstacle standing in the way of fast times; a burden to be endured; a soul-sapping exercise in pain. I’m the psychologist for the Boston Marathon, home to Heartbreak Hill, one of the most feared stretches of incline in the world. Over the years, I’ve watched people of all abilities face Heartbreak with all sorts of emotions and outcomes. I have seen fear, anguish, pain and rage.
What’s going on?
So many times a runner will come to a hill with a preconception of how horrible it will feel to run up it. Those negative feelings form a feedback loop in the brain, stoking your hatred of hills. When you come to the base of a hill with thoughts like that in your head, you set yourself up for a terrible experience.
How to cope
Love them: Instead of cursing a hill before you even climb it, try convincing yourself how much you love it. Really. Tell yourself that hills are the greatest thing ever. They make you stronger. They make you tougher. They give you amazing glutes. Tell yourself you’re the little engine that could, that slow and steady wins the race, that what goes up must come down – whatever cliché helps you embrace the climb. After a while, this new thought pattern – even if it seems far-fetched – will evolve into an actual belief.
Resting heart rate: Mental imagery can help you conquer climbs. One runner told me she sights something along the edge of the road, such as a tree, a lamp- post or a car, then throws a mental rope around it that she imagines she can use to pull herself up. As you approach a hill, picture yourself cresting it and gliding down. Staying calm and positive in the face of a monster incline will help you conserve energy, energy that will help make the actual physical climb easier.
Tune in – or out: Some runners disassociate by going to their happy place, trying to forget how hard they are working. Others do the opposite, embracing and ‘owning’ their pain. Muscle aches and fatigue only make them push harder. Or they think about their bodies and coach themselves with mental comments such as, ‘Relax your shoulders’ or ‘Stay tall’. Most runners don’t stick exclusively to one mental strategy. Without realising it, you may switch between several approaches in different situations.
How to overcome the boredom of a marathon
You might think that as long as you’re in the middle of a race with cheering crowds and booming music, your mind will never go numb. But while racing can be exciting and inspiring, it may also sometimes feel dull and repetitive – especially in a long-distance
Hot bath or ice bath which is best for recovery.
What’s going on?
Hot bath or ice bath which is best for recovery
to by releasing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that brings on sensations of joy. It really doesn’t matter if you are on a treadmill or running through the streets of Paris – once the novelty of running or racing wears off, the tap for those feel-good chemicals is turned off, and you may as well be listening to a lecture on the organisational management of office cubicles.
How to cope
Hot bath or ice bath which is best for recovery: After months of training, your enthusiasm for yet another long effort may be running seriously low – even if that long run is the race itself. Breaking up the full distance into smaller, more manageable chunks helps; for instance, three 40-minute hits of exercise is easier to face than one two-hour slog.
Entertain yourself: By all means, stick on those headphones and crank up the tunes. Have a motivating playlist or podcast ready that engages your brain and takes your mind off the road. Or play a mental game, such as counting how many cows, or red cars or post boxes you see along the way. Run your race with a running buddy, even if you didn’t start the race with one. If you see someone who’s running at a similar pace, you could attempt to strike up a conversation to see if you could share a few miles.
…Or don’t! Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about boredom as a bad thing and reframe it as a valuable mental opportunity. Between smartphones, TV, the internet and countless other forms of distraction, our 21st-century brains are so used to being switched on and engaged that it’s easy to feel panicked anytime there is nothing entertaining going on. But emerging science is showing that the brain is far from quiet during those supposedly dull times. Scientists have found that a neural circuit switches on when the brain isn’t preoccupied with an external stimulus, and an elaborate electrical conversation takes place between different parts of the brain. Studies suggest that daydreaming and creativity are generated by this network. This is an ideal state for the brain to be in when it comes to solving problems. So if you can embrace boredom and let your mind wander along, you might stumble across your best ideas. Remember this the next time you’re an hour into a treadmill session.
How to cope with hitting the wall
The Americans call it ‘bonking’, and by any name it’s a pretty awful experience. When you hit the wall, it feels like you have run face-first into a stack of bricks. Your legs start feeling like concrete posts, every step is a triumph of will and you seriously doubt that the race actually has a finish line.
What’s going on?
The prevailing notion is that hitting the wall is a purely physical phenomenon. The theory goes that the overwhelming fatigued feeling and leg heaviness is the result of muscle failure; the muscles and liver have wrung every last drop of glycogen, the body’s preferred source of fuel, from their stores. With no more in the tank, you are forced into a survival shuffle. But there is a more recent theory – one that takes the brain’s contribution to your performance into account. Noted exercise physiologist Dr Tim Noakes agrees that runners feel the wall physically, but he doesn’t consider it a purely physical phenomenon. The brain, Noakes believes, tells the body it’s time to hit the wall whenever it feels the body has gone too far, too fast. When the brain determines you have reached what it considers your breaking point, it increases levels of the chemical serotonin. This reduces neural control to recruit muscle fibres, which, in turn, triggers the sensation of extreme fatigue. Although a voice may whisper in your ear that you’ve given all you have to give, Noakes says in reality you can dig deeper and give more.
How to cope
Distract yourself: Investigations into which brain strategies work best for non-elite runners have found external disassociation (focusing on scenery, crowds, things not directly tied to the race) appears to be the most effective wall-avoidance strategy and results in a later onset of fatigue. A cheering crowd, a spectator’s sign or a band playing in the distance may be just enough to distract your brain from the punishing bodily sensations of running, but without causing you to lose focus on pace and water stops.
How to taper right to be marathon ready: Positive self-talk and visualisation play a huge part in avoiding the wall. Before the race begins, do some visualisation exercises in which you hit the wall and picture yourself dealing with it effectively. If you believe you will dominate the wall, you are more likely to make those beliefs a reality.
Face reality: If you do hit the wall, sip some sports drink to get carbs into your system, but don’t overdo it. And it’s best if you have a running partner who can help encourage you through the worst and run with you to the finish. Please remember, however, that hitting the wall can affect your ability to think. I have seen plenty of runners disorientated and slurring their words, then being taken into a medical tent for treatment. I feel concern when I see them wobbling on the course, trying to make it to the finish. There is a point of no return that you need to accept. Going beyond that can be dangerous. If it’s not your day, it’s not your day. There will be others.
How to cope with the post-run comedown
Once the journey is over and you’ve told your tales of victory and defeat over a few well-deserved post-race drinks, you may be left feeling a little lost. After training, thinking and planning for so long, what do you have left to look forward to?
What’s going on?
Hitting your goal is an amazing feeling that is often followed by a real comedown. Completing a race you trained hard for can leave you asking, What purpose does my training now serve? Also, if you’ve stopped running, you might be missing all those feel-good chemicals that were feeding your brain.
How to cope
Enjoy your break: You pressed the ‘go’ button for so long that it’s hard to power down. But that’s exactly what you should do. I know plenty of runners who experience a vague sense of guilt when sleeping in after a race, but R&R is what you need. Even if you have something else big planned in the future, it won’t set you back if you take time to pay attention to other things you have neglected in life. So turn off the alarm for a few mornings. Hang out with friends. Catch up on your reading. In general, recharge before you hit the road again.
Reflect: Think about your race performance – what worked and what you can do better next time. However it went, it’s worth analysing why things went the way they did. You’re stocking up information for the next time you’re standing on the start line; it’s all fodder for positive thoughts or better planning. Avoid the trap of letting others bring you down, especially if you’re already feeling a tad disappointed. If someone asks about your time, tell them you finished and it was great. If you didn’t finish, tell them you’re happy with your effort. Don’t indulge in comparisons that leave you feeling like you somehow came up short.
Divide and conquer: After you take a break, consider hitting the accelerator again. If you feel burned out, dedicate yourself to something new. Set your sights on a different distance or even a new cross-training activity. Having a new passion project can stoke your love of the road. And a fresh perspective is never a bad idea.
