3 Secrets Of Mental Strength

Train your brain as much as your body to supercharge your running. Sports psychologist Justin Ross explains how

Training your brain to help you deal with the tough runs

THE GREAT PAAVO NURMI (aka ‘The Flying Finn’) once said, ‘Mind is everything. Muscle, pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.’ Nurmi set 22 long-distance running world records in the early 20th century, so he knew what he was talking about. As athletes, we are always looking for improvement. We work hard on the physical aspects of our training, but we often leave the condition of our mind up to chance by not establishing a deliberate practice for engaging and working on high-performance mental skills.

In my career as a sports psychologist, I’ve worked with athletes of all levels and from a variety of backgrounds. I have found that those who reach self-determined levels of success concentrate on three key elements of the mental game: first, they acknowledge that the mind has a powerful influence on outcomes. Second, they see that mental strength is a skill and that, like all skills, it requires practice. Third, they adopt a consistent practice of refining their mental craft.

That’s not to say you can simply think your way to breakthrough performances – it just doesn’t work like that. The real power of using psychology to aid performance is learning what happens in your mind as it relates to your approach and engagement in your training.

This includes your decision making, behavioural choices and how you manage the physical experience of running. The ultimate task in endurance-sports psychology is learning how to better deal with discomfort. This requires pushing through your perceived limits without always listening when your mind tells you it’s too difficult, or that you should slow down or stop. You can override those messages, but you first need a psychological training platform.

So here’s the good news: you don’t need to hire a sports psychologist to learn how to adopt a high-performance

mindset (how’s that for writing myself out of a job?). If you’re working to better understand how your thoughts, attitudes and actions influence your performance, you’re already on your path to becoming your own sports psychologist. Here’s how to start.

1. Build awareness

You cannot change what you are not aware of. This goes for both sport and life. Developing a sports psychology platform begins with bringing awareness to your mind as it already functions. A stream of consciousness flows throughout your life, giving you an opportunity to pay attention to your thoughts before, during and after a workout. You are first trying to better understand how you talk to yourself and decipher the messages that are continually floating through your mind.

TRY THIS You are probably already recording your workouts using some system (Strava, Garmin Connect or a notebook). But how much are you capturing what you are experiencing during your runs? My guess is that most will focus on the metrics of the run: the time, distance and pace, and perhaps other factors such as heart rate, cadence and stride length.

Don’t get me wrong, these are important quantitative factors. But you need to be capturing the qualitative factors, too. Psychological experiences during training are less tangible than mile splits on your watch. When you record your runs, be sure to also jot down the following: what did you notice in your thoughts? What were you telling yourself about how your body felt? What happened in your cognitive appraisals when you got tired, bored or the run became a long one? What did you notice about your surroundings? Beginning to expand your frame of awareness from the objective metrics to your internal framework is the first step in becoming your own sports psychologist.

2. Mind your narrative

We each carry a narrative in our minds about who we think we are as people and who we think we are as runners. This narrative can build us up or bring us down. It shapes how we approach just about everything we do in life. We can talk ourselves into difficult tasks, or tell ourselves we are unable to be successful – or, worse yet, that it’s not even worth trying. If we find we are defending our own self-perceived limits, the outcome is inevitable – we will never go beyond them.

TRY THIS Take a day when you shape the ‘I am’ or ‘You are’ self-talk statements in the most negative way possible related to your training. For example, tell yourself some version of the following: ‘I am failing at this. I am never going to achieve my goals. Why bother?’ Then see how that type of negative rumination affects not only your performance, but also your mood and your interactions throughout the rest of your day. You probably already feel how terrible this idea sounds and can detect a shift in your mood just contemplating engaging in this task.

Then take the next day to be positive and encouraging about your training: ‘I am crushing my workouts! I am feeling myself get stronger. I am on the path to reaching my goals. I am unstoppable!’ See or feel the difference?

The point with this exercise is that your thoughts shape a tremendous amount of the experience you have with your performance. Finding a mixture between being realistically optimistic, hopeful and encouraging will set you up for approaching your training in a more productive manner. Learning how to deliberately and intentionally work these messages is a critical step in the process.

3. Embrace challenge

Everyone wants to talk about mental toughness, but the truth is that mental strength only exists in the context of a challenge. You cannot be mentally tough without there being some hardship or difficulty to face. Sports psychology skills have the opportunity to develop most when you are actively challenging both your mind and body.

TRY THIS Difficult workouts on the training calendar provide the greatest opportunity to come into contact with how your mind responds to a challenge. In these moments, we can adopt a challenge mindset or a misery mindset.

Runners love to be challenged, and if we approach these workouts with the right cognitive framework of accepting and deciding to meet the demands of the challenge, we are better able to respond and engage in tackling harder efforts, tempo runs or mile repeats.

A misery mindset is the opposite. Telling ourselves how awful the task is and how we can’t wait until it’s over not only makes the workout that much harder to bear, but it is also more likely to lead to your quitting early, which leads to negative feelings later on.

The task of embracing challenge with a deliberate cognitive framework is a good reminder that the way you mentally respond in training is exactly how you will respond in racing, and that this type of thinking is entirely within your range of influence.

We often think we need to develop courage or confidence to do hard things, but it’s the other way around: confidence is born out of doing hard things. We have to embrace challenges and try difficult tasks to learn how we might respond. Doing so gives us the chance to experience the default tendencies of our own psychology and thus grants a glimpse into what may be possible, changed or challenged in our approach. This level of guided mental focus then requires daily repetition and attention alongside your physical training. And that, fellow runners, is what sports psychology is all about.

WE HAVE TO EMBRACE CHALLENGES AND TRY DIFFICULT TASKS TO LEARN HOW WE MIGHT RESPOND