The Mental-Ness of Running
The mental strength, training and skill required to run well, takes time and practice to develop.
At the end of a street, amongst a sea of houses, my watch chimes the mark of another kilometre. It is the last kilometre of a 15k tempo, gutted out in prime running temperatures amidst neighbourhood streets I’ve run hundreds of times before. I slowed down to a walk, feeling that rush of nausea fill me up, the tightness in my chest, the familiar taste at the back of my throat. I knew these feelings well, but it had been a while since I had gone there and played at those edges.
Standing on the corner of the street, I reflected back on the past 15k. “That wasn’t so bad,” I thought to myself.
But truly, there were moments when it was bad. The mind and body have a way of pushing the pain aside when the finish has arrived. In fact, there was a brief moment, where I thought about calling it and coming back to do it another day; a moment where I questioned if I could hold the pace, succumbing temporarily to the inevitable pain endured from pushing boundaries. This is the rhythm of run workouts; they demand a lot of mental focus and fortitude, the gritty push-through-and-keep-going, in spite of everything indicating otherwise.
It is in these times that I employ an arsenal of mental performance tools. I have a box of them and different situations demand me to pull out different ones. The skill isn’t in just knowing which one to pick when, and how to use it, but also in learning them and putting them in the toolbox to have available. Hard efforts in endurance activities will always be a certain degree of hard — no matter your fitness, experience, or state of flow. It’s about knowing how to handle the hard and manage what arises in between strides and amidst swift paces.
The importance of mental competency and mental performance skills as it applies to running and endurance sports at large, is nothing new. What wasn’t always well known however, is what the specific players were in the mental skills box. As an athlete, what skills should I be focusing on or learning, to optimize my chances of success when it matters?
Recently, researchers in Canada set out to answer that exact question, shaping it in the context of Olympic athletes: what does it take to get gold? Their outcome showed three distinct categories of mental competencies for athletes to address, and three to four sub categories within each, as detailed in the image below. In the graphic, these skills are surrounded by mental health: having sound mental health is the foundation behind being able to improve mental performance and achieve enhanced mental competencies.
While many of the competencies and skills are self-explanatory, or can be intuitively understood, what’s less obvious is how some of them relate to sport achievement.
In 2021, Richard Blagrove published a book, The Science and Practice of Middle and Long Distance Running, where he featured a chapter on the psychology of distance running. Authors Stacey Winter and Carla Meijen (2021), discuss many topics which connect psychology and running, one being emotional regulation. Regulating emotion can have an impact on a runner’s ability to remain intrinsically motivated, perform optimally and maintain overall wellbeing. Similar to self-regulation, both of these require the athlete to monitor their physical and emotional status and then act accordingly ensuring their emotions do not get in the way of their performance (Durand-Bush et al., 2021).
This isn’t as critical on a day-to-day basis as it is the midst of a competition or performance. Having a proved level of self-awareness allows an athlete to know how to manage their stress and their emotional arousal. These emotions are Psychological Factors (Winter & Meijen, 2021). Along with confidence and motivation these factors are the elements which influence running success — for both good and bad. A runner who can regulate their emotions, has a high level of confidence and the ability to engage in productive self-talk, in combination with the appropriate training, will likely see success in their running. Likewise, the opposite of fruition of these traits, and a lack of self-belief, will likely hinder success in performance.
Similar to the identification of competencies by Canada et al, identifying these factors is an important step in working towards an optimised psychological status for performance. Just as important however is understanding the strategies to help improve or develop these factors. How does an athlete increase motivation, develop confidence, or learn to manage their emotions?
Winter and Meijen (2021) highlight a selection of skills which individuals can acquire, to help establish proficiency around these important psychological factors. These skills include imagery, self-talk, goal setting and attentional focus, and act as examples of concrete actions a runner can practice and learn how to engage, in their quest to improve mental skills for performance. For example, an athlete can practice certain mantras or speaking to themselves in encouraging ways. One could also practice imagery and visualization, visualizing success over certain difficult periods of a race or event and knowing what that success would look like.
Finally, attentional focus draws on the ability to choose and be intentional about where your attention goes and how you distribute it. The ability to have a focus and streamline control over incoming stimuli is critical in the seconds that matter of a race effort. This is also a critical piece of emotional regulation; learning how to designate attention to emotions appropriately so that emotions that arise can be used productively. Emotions can become a distraction or derailment. Preventing this through attentional control and emotional regulation abilities, is a skill that has to be practiced and developed over time and over many different situations and exposures (Winter & Meijen, 2021).
It is worth differentiating between mental competencies and mental skills. Part of gaining competency in the recommended area is having the skills to do so and having skills to employ in sport-specific situations. As outlined above developing these skills requires committed practice and a selection of actions to test and try. Not every recommended activity is going to be effective for everyone. The only way to know is to practice, tweak and tailor your tools and then know how to put them into play when it matters.
After over two decades in the long-distance running game, I have spent some time acquiring and practicing these mental performance skills. Some, I have realized, are in the-moment actions that I apply, such as a mantra or specific word or phrase on repeat. Others, are carefully crafted, individualized skills that I have practiced and moulded and forged for myself over many years and hundreds of kilometres. Others still are pertinent and useful only at certain times, while a collection of them are the evergreen version that I can use in every run.
I find it is particularly helpful if I take an outside perspective — seeing things unfold not as if I am in my body, but as if I am outside of it. It is this ability to be observing externally, letting it happen; a movie that just plays through. Thousands of hours or practice mean I have honed the intuition to know what is coming and what something will feel like, and I know to search for that. When it arrives, even if it is uncomfortable, it’s like a relief. “Oh hey there old friend, I’ve been waiting for you.”
When I think about those hard threshold runs, I can reflect back on the skills I use to keep pushing me forward — relentlessly grinding forward. I have found that there is this constant status of self-regulation and awareness in myself, a cognisance around checking in to see how I am doing, looking beneath the superficial layers. Without this, the outermost layer can convince me it is hard and it hurts, that on this run I am dying. Dig a little deeper though, and I hear the shy inner voice ask, “Is it really hard? Are you really hurting, or you can go deeper?”
“Can you hurt more?” I ask myself.
This constant circle of checking in builds up resilience. Each time I get through a period in the hurt locker, by convincing myself it’s not that bad, I have the evidence the next time that I can get through it again. It builds confidence, keeps me focused and breeds a layer of toughness. That thick layer needs to be completely broken down before I will quit or walk away. Otherwise, I’ll just keep reminding myself, “next step, next step, next step.” Because if you don’t believe in it and yourself, why should anyone else?
This cycle of self-awareness, and stress and emotional management, coupled with increased confidence and resilience mean I show up at every run or every start line thinking about what is possible. Not because I think it is going to be easy, or because I am naïve enough to think that it will never be hard, but rather because I expect it to be and I’m waiting for it to show up: “Welcome back! I’m glad you’re here.”
As I turned and exited out of the round-about at the end of my tempo run, this was what I felt. This familiarity; that feeling of pain and discomfort that I had trained myself to hunt down, that I knew so well and went after when it mattered. It had been a while, but my friend was back.
References
Cusumano, K. (2022, July 14). Why elite athletes are getting serious about mental coaching. Outside. https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/elite-athletes-mental-coaching/
Winter, S., Meijen, C. (2021). Psychology of distance running. In R. C. Blagrove; P. R. Hayes (Ed.), The science and practice of middle and long distance running (1st ed., pp. 66–76). Routledge.
Durand-Bush, N., Baker, J., van den Berg, F., Richard, V., Bloom, G. A. (2021). The gold medal profile for sport psychology (GMP-SP). Journal of Applied Sport Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2022.2055224
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Change, start, cultivate or quit, I use movement and mindset to help people show up better for themselves. Learn more in my Weekly Drop In, a weekly email featuring some honest talk around our daily real life struggles and successes on the journey that is being human.
