Keeping Your Head in the Race

For the first time, researchers lift the lid on runners’ mid-run emotional and mental state.

n training, you match your buddy’s pace stride for stride, your V02 max and lactate threshold are identical, you fuel and hydrate the same way. And yet, for some reason, your buddy always seems to out-run you in a race. Why? Well, it could be down to an invisible and, until now, un-measured aspect of athletic performance: your mental conditioning. Measuring electric brainwaves, emitted through the skull and transmitted via Bluetooth to a web application, researchers at the University of Tennessee successfully charted the emotional journeys of two runners at this year’s Chattanooga Marathon. They’re already planning to scale-up the experiment for next year’s race.

I“The potential applications of the research are far and wide” says Professor Gary Liguori, department head of health and human performance, who led the project along with developers at Carbon Five, a large software firm. “Our objective was mainly for entertainment purposes for the marathon but it could impact the practice of sports psychology, the design of race courses and the development of wearable technology. And that’s just for starters.” Participating runners – one taking part in the half and the other in the marathon – wore futuristic electroencephalography headbands immediately before and during the race. Data from the headbands populated graphs charting the runners’ emotions in real-time, based on which area of the brain the brainwaves came from.

While Liguori says his team still have a lot of raw data to sift through, “the two big findings so far relate to excitement and anxiety and how the two runners experienced these emotions differently,” he says.

“Eric, our first-time marathon runner, has peaks of excitement throughout the race while Kelsey, who’s an experienced racer and ran the half-marathon, remained far more calm. Her focus was steady and her excitement rose only in the last couple of miles.”

Eric’s emotions were causing him to “waste glycogen” says Liguori while other adverse effects of too much excitement could include frequent bathroom breaks, exceeding your target pace or forgetting to fuel during the race.

Liguori ’s team mapped the emotion graphs with the race course itself, showing another interesting difference between the runners. “Eric experienced anxiety when he came within sight of every hill,” says Liguori, “and it’s a pretty hilly course.”

Eric’s brainwaves also correlated directly to a period of knee pain he felt during miles seven and 10, “demonstrating the relationship between the physical and mental experiences.”

While the research is still in its infancy, Liguori and his team are excited by the prospects. Liguori sees no reason why more complex emotions couldn’t also be mapped such as confidence or runner’s high as well as athletes’ reactions to cheering areas or refuelling stations. “There’s a big difference between an athlete telling you what they’re feeling and actually seeing it for yourself,” he says. “It brings sports psychology further into the realm of neuroscience.”

Lisa Brown, a performance coach and author of Courage to Win, believes the research could be a game changer for her industry. “Not everybody buys into mental training for sport, people like tangibles,” says the Calgary-based coach who’s worked with Olympians and recreational athletes in more than 200 sports. “It’s a bit like the Force in Star Wars: incredibly powerful but you can’t see it or touch it,” she laughs.

Brown has worked with thousands of athletes over the last 19 years and she’s witnessed incredible performance results from her work; from outright wins to personal bests. “I always remind people that everyone believed the four-minute-mile couldn’t be broken until Rodger Bannister proved them wrong. Within a few years, 15 other athletes had all done it too. Believing in the physical possibly made the physical possible.”

Self-belief or confidence is the issue Brown is more commonly asked for help with from runners.

“Every runner has two runners inside