Fit City: Why you should train your brain before running
‘The Runner’s Brain’ by Jeff Brown offers tips to use your brain to maximize performance.
Runners sip beet extract, agonize about shoe choice, analyze heart-rate data, wear compression socks and suffer through ice baths in a quest to drop a few seconds off their race times.
But most hardly give their brains a second thought.
Ignoring that 3-pound organ could be a mistake, according to a new book titled “The Runner’s Brain: How to Think Smarter to Run Better,” by psychiatrist Jeff Brown with fitness writer Liz Neporent.
“Our brains are neglected, and it’s the one thing behind everything else,” says Brown, the lead psychologist for the Boston Marathon medical team and an assistant clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
The book offers strategies on how to deal with the joy, pain and boredom of running, as well as a seven-step training program for your noggin.
“It fills in a training gap that is easily overlooked,” says Brown, who shared some of his best tips on how to use your brain to maximize running performance while he was in Austin recently.
First, if you’re new to running or still don’t think of yourself as a “real runner,” start self-identifying as one.
Tell your friends and co-workers you’re a runner. Hang race bibs in your work cube. Invite people to join you on a training run. Put together a playlist of running music. Buy a subscription to a running magazine. Put a quote from a runner in your email tagline.
“People start treating you differently,” Brown says.
Second, set some goals. They should be measurable
and moderately difficult, but they should also account for outside factors. For example, you might not hit a personal record, or PR, in a race if it’s unusually hot or humid.
Third, talk positive — or at least don’t focus on downers like pain and boredom while you are running. Instead, focus on the things you see along the way, and spend some time describing them in intimate detail inside your head.
Work on visualization skills, too. Picture yourself winning a race. If it’s cold out, imagine yourself by a toasty fire. Visualize yourself struggling, but then overcoming that struggle. Watch yourself, inside your head, giving an impressive kick at the end of a race.
Brown has other tips, too: developing a pre-race routine, relaxing while you are running, and associating good things with running and disassociating bad things from it.
Brown has spent a lot of time talking to anxious athletes before marathons and emotional athletes who find themselves unable to finish a race for whatever reason.
“People will do whatever they can to get to the Boston Marathon, and sometimes they end up in the medical tent,” he says. “Some become depressed because they miss the time by 8 minutes.”
They don’t take into account the fact that a Nor’easter blew in, or a heat wave settled on the city.
If they’ve raced in memory of a loved one, they might feel that they’ve failed that person. Brown helps them sort through feelings and recognize that just by training for the race they’ve already honored that person. He helps runners deal with pain management, lends an ear for some emotional releases and reminds them that all good athletes fail sometimes.
“A lot of runners by their own admission are obsessive people,” he says. “That’s why ‘The Runner’s Brain’ is so important. It helps them understand how the brain can be useful in the course of their running.”
The book includes interviews with a slew of elite runners, including Michael Johnson, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Dean Karnazes and Amby Burfoot.
Five-time Olympian Francie Larrieu Smith, who now coaches track and field and cross country at Southwestern University in Georgetown, gets a spotlight, too. She explains that before indoor track races, which are noisy and somewhat chaotic, she would block out all the distractions and focus on the lights in the rafters for a few moments before lining up at the starting blocks.
Meb Keflezighi, who won the 2014 Boston Marathon, describes his experience at the 2013 New York Marathon, when he wasn’t in peak condition and hit a wall at mile 19. After maintaining a pace of less than 5 minutes per mile, he suddenly slowed and walked parts of the next mile, turning in a mile split of 9:58. Instead of giving up, though, he decided that even though he wasn’t going to win, he was going to find a way to finish. And he did, crossing hand in hand with an amateur runner who encouraged him along those last few miles.
It’s a reminder that even the best runners fail sometimes, and that positive thoughts can outweigh the negative ones.
And it turns out that running well isn’t just about legs and hearts and lungs. It’s also about what’s going on inside your head.