TRI TIP
Mantras
IT’S LATE INTO the race and signs of fatigue are surfacing. You’re becoming increasingly aware that your form is deteriorating and your mind is wandering. External distractions are creeping in: the blister on your foot, the chafing under your armpit, the slight throb of an old knee injury. Self-talk is veering down the path of uncertainty and negativity, and your willpower is under assault. The sun is suddenly hotter, the finish line seems farther. Your muscles are burning – they have little else to give.
Endurance sports, by nature, often hurt. The quiet suffering is an addictive opiate that envelopes those looking to push their own physical and mental limitations. Many factors determine the hurt factor of a workout or race: muscular fatigue, difficult weather conditions, course terrain, sleep deprivation, stress levels and caloric deficits, to name a few. The accumulation of these can create a potentially volatile combination that might lead to a tough day.
Your brain, however, can fight against such negative feelings. It can restore calm, focus and positive energy. One way you can use your brain to help you get through the tough parts of a race is through the use of mantras.
The Grip
Mark Allen, the six-time Ironman world champion regarded by many as the most versatile and skilled triathlete of all time, was known for his personal spiritual quest that, in the end, aligned mind with body and enabled him to snare every major race on the circuit. Using mantras in training and racing was commonplace for Allen, whose nickname was “the grip,” in part because of his extreme ability to focus.
“For me, a mantra is anything that reduces the stress around a training or racing situation and helps quiet my mind so that the outcome becomes secondary to the intrinsic power of moving with flow,” Allen says. “Having a mantra is a way to override the shut off switch in my brain that can try to get me to stop or slow down. It enables everything in my cadence and rhythm to loosen back up and carry me forward, even though I still may not be sure I am actually going to be able to weather the intensity of the moment.”
One Sanskrit definition of the word says that mantra is derived from the root of man which means “to think,” and tra which means “to free from the mind.” It’s a translation that offers great promise to endurance junkies looking to push beyond perceived limitations.
An effective mantra addresses your thought patterns at a precise moment in time, usually when the stress and anxiety of a race starts. This could be before the race. A mantra returns thought patterns to a key controllable thought or action by repeating a simple, powerful and calming directive over and over.
Typically, mantras are strong action verbs or adjectives. They shouldn’t be elaborate scripts that may be hard to remember. Allen’s mantras were never actually words or phrases, revealing that there are no real parameters for what a mantra can or should be. “On rare occasions I might find myself counting one, two, one, two, one, two, and that in itself always brought me those key results,” says Allen. “But more often, the mantra had something to do with how I was breathing that became a repeated rhythm that got me into a flow where I wasn’t thinking, but was actually just doing.”
Allen describes the breathing techniques he employed as a mantra during the many years he reigned over the triathlon world. By his own admission, Allen says these breathing techniques are extremely difficult to properly define. So much so, in fact, that after he sent his responses, he went for a run to ensure his explanation was accurate. Not entirely content, he revised his wording and emailed a second version. This was the very first time in his athletic career that he’d ever tried to articulate these techniques into words.
“One thing I would do is to sort of disrupt the flow of air in and out just before the very end of the exhale or inhale with a quick flick of my tongue onto the roof of my mouth that blocked the flow for just the smallest fraction of a second,” he says. “That changed the sound of the air going in and out from being one long, continuous sound into something that almost had a very soft click to it, like the tick of a metronome for someone playing the piano. There was one tick on the inhale and one on the exhale.”
A second breathing mantra he used was at that same point of the breath – instead of using his tongue he would “disrupt the flow with the shortest burst, for an instant, that was created by my diaphragm. It did the same thing in that it changed the sound of the air going in and out for just a split second, and that became like the tick of the metronome that became the point of awareness my mind locked on to.”
Sometimes Allen would do both of those things simultaneously; a short burst from his diaphragm and, at the same moment, a flick of the tongue to create a split-second change in the sound of breath that became the rhythm his whole body was following.
The result of these simple techniques was that he stopped thinking and analyzing and trying to be done with the workout, the fast interval, or the race.
“Instead,” he explains, “I just locked into the rhythmic ‘click’ of my breathing and the natural flow of moving in sync with that rhythm. It brought all my energy and focus back into the moment.”
Mantra usage requires practice and patience. Mid to long training sessions offer a perfect opportunity to experiment with simple directives, or breathing patterns, to inspire a quiet mind and instigate simple positive action. When doing these sessions, practice mindfulness to simplify the act of forward movement in a calm, measured, efficient, stress-free state.
There is no generic mantra that works for every athlete. Each competitor needs to understand their body, the specific stresses of race day, and what motivates them to dig in and push through adversity.
A note of caution: be aware of the speed of your mantra usage. Too fast may cause a sense of excessive urgency, too slow may not garner the entire focus of the mind and thereby lose effect.
Most of us will never have the physical or mental talents of Mark Allen. But his clearing of consciousness through mantras and visualisation – whether it’s through words, numbers, or breathing techniques – is proof that mental mastery delivers significant results. Physical prowess, devoid of strategies to bolster mental resolve under duress, leaves an incomplete training and race-day strategy.
Mental and physical preparation and execution belong hand in hand. Using mantras is a prudent and simple way to marry the two.