The Mental Game "aka" The Fifth Discipline
Swim , Bike , Run , are the first 3 discipline's..... 4th discipline is Nutrition.....
How important is the "Mental Game" and what can we do to improve it ?
I've always been a big proponent of working on my mental game in the weeks leading up to a race.... Song lyrics , motivational quotes , a long list of ONE things , anything to pump me up for game day..... We see the same questions come up in Race Reports all the time regarding that "Mental Toughness"
Two things happened recently to make me think about this even more.
1. Coach P's Race Plan and Race Report for IMTX... Race Plan here. Where there were some amazing recommendations from Dave Tallo about visualization... Very good .... Definitely worth the read.
http://members.endurancenation.us/Forums/tabid/57/aft/18609/Default.aspx
2. “has nothing to do with physical performance. i just need to create a huge mental appetite. almost ready. another few days i'll by going out of my skin”
The above quote is from a friend of mine when I asked him why bother to taper? He is starting the Infinitus 888k footrace tomorrow.... Its 551 miles with a 10 day cut off.... He has averaged 16 miles per week for the last 4 weeks and only run 549 miles since January 1st.... I would say he is absolutely screwed and doesnt stand a chance to finish.... But this guy completed a 500 mile ULTRA last year in 9 days and is also a Deca-Ironman finisher.... He puts WAY more weight on his mental game than anything physical....
So What Can we do to improve that mental game?
Love the Tallo visualization and will incorporate that completely..... I Used to use it quite a bit in skydiving and rock-climbing visualizing the entire sequence of events and seeing nothing but perfection and success....
As mentioned ... I like to collect some song lyrics , visit those motivational sites for vids and sayings , make my list of "one" things , and pump myself up for game day.... For the ULTRA I did this winter I came up with REN (the last 3 N's were the real part of the Mental Game) , relax, rythym, rpm, easy, efficient, effort , this aint nothing, no pain , never stop.....
What do you do?
Comments
Love Dave T's suggestion to put aside 5 min every day to really do the visualization. For me, it's more than just the final few miles though. I need to visualize the whole race. From being calm while waiting for my late wave to start, to being relaxed in the swim, to staying focused at about 3/4 of the way into the bike where I usually get distracted, to feeling the heat come off the pavement and cooking me on the run- loving every minute 'cause for every minute of heat I'm suffering, I know others are suffering even more.
I usually use my Brick runs to visualize those moments from "the Line" to the finish.
I also like to review- and re-review my race plan so that it's seared into my brain.
One other thing I'll do if I'm having doubts about something is to take time to re-script that concern in my brain (this comes from an old timer ENer from way back). So, if I find myself worrying about being kicked in the head during the swim, I re-script that situation to turn the outcome into a positive. "I'm in the swim and it's very crowded. I just took a nasty kick to the head, Ouch! I remain calm and slow up a bit to clear my head and get away from the guy with the roundhouse kick and simply continue on my way feeling great about my day".
Looking forward to hearing what others do too!
I wish we spent more time discussing the Mental Game. Very hard to effectively apply the first 4 disciplines and the many weeks of work on race day without this one where it needs to be.
I think it takes a lot of practice to hone, improve and strengthen over a long period of time and many experiences.
As the training cycle wears on and the cumulative load increases, it is the mental game that I think becomes so important. Many times I know I am driving fitness but I struggle to execute the next workout / plan and that is more a mental problem (mental fatigue) IMO than anything else. The daily postings, discussions and examples from this team help me manage that and improve it.
First I think you have to learn to believe which comes with visualization as mentioned below, then you have to take that to the next level and learn to trust (your fitness, strategy, nutrition) and finally, execute.
I think these three aspects call on your mental game. I don't know about everyone else, but I am still working on mine and will be for a long time to come.
Thanks for leading and starting this thread Tim!
SS
I'm a big believer that the conscious mind is only a very small part of what controls performance and behavior. So training the thoughts you are aware of only gets you so far. The goal for me is to learn and practice letting my conscious mind become a (somewhat) disinterested observer to what's going on. Some professional athletes call this getting into the flow. My best races are when I've let some other part of me, of which I am unaware, take control of my effort. (For more details on the reality of this, just google "Split-Brain research")
So how does one get to this ego-less state without undergoing brain surgery to cut the corpus callosum? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall ... Practice, Practice, Practice. Every workout is an opportunity to lose your "self" in your efforts. All the tricks Tim mentions are tools along the way. By focusing on some repetitive activity - a thought, an aphorism, a song lyric, cadence, breathing, whatever - you give your busy little ego something to do while the body and its cruel race day taskmaster take over. The only thing your "self" should be doing is monitoring the dashboard, making sure the metrics are within the proper range - fluids, calories, pace, power, stroke rate, whatever.
Workouts are also an opportunity to ingrain somewhere deep in your brain the effort level, and the metrics that go with it, which you want to achieve on race day. That's tough for an Ironman, because we really don't get a chance to experience the full effect of a 9-13 hour effort during training. So we have to mimic it in shorter episodes. That means going a bit faster to simulate the effort level we'll be achieving on race day. That feeing of effort - RPE - should become second nature, meaning it does not require conscious thought to pull it out during competition.
Having gone thru a few races in which the flow took over, I know it is both a scary and joyful place to be. Scary, because it requires harder work than my conscious mind wants to deliver. Joyful, because it engenders a feeling of power (some people call this suffering - I say why be negative about it?), awe at what my body is willing and able to do when I just get out of its way.
I've learned I can't think or will myself to victory. Only by letting go of my self can I succeed.
Not just of the physical building of watts and endurance, but of the mind's building of patience and discipline. We use those words to represent how to execute on race day, but aren't we really building that every day, every work out?
Setting goals for race day is a KEY part of the visualization process and mental game. Be thoughtful in your race day goals, they are very likely to be met. The best primary process goals are about optimum power and pace, if your outcome goal is the fastest time.
I think that the depth to which you explore your mental game, like your transitions, is a function of your race goals. A first-timer is best served looking at the logistics...but someone digging for a PR needs to be ready to put the work on the line. I say PR, because after several races you have a pretty good sense of what it takes to "put a race together."
I think the hardest part is helping folks understand that this isn't about "overcoming a blow up / implosion" on race day. Rather, it's the ability to keep your foot on the accelerator even when it starts to hurt a bit...when you want to back off not because you need to, etc.
In my race in Texas, I attribute the lap two slow down to a lack of mental focus. HR, Fuel , etc were all good. Not as hot as lap 1, but not yet lap 3...and I faded. I missed 1st place by 4 minutes...across an 8 mile loop, that's 30" per mile on lap two...not sure I had _that_ in me, but a good reminder that our mind can set new rules and limits on race day...having the preparation in place to avoid that "settling" can mean the difference between a good race and a great one.
Great discussion.
My best performances have come when I've had few expectations, let go out of outcomes, focused on the process, and raced from a humble place, if that makes sense. I don't want to spend mental energy when it's easy, I want to have it in reserve for when it gets tough. Then, I just keep my head inside a 30" box. My only goal inside that box is to work the process and ignore everything else outside of the box, especially time and miles that aren't inside that box yet.
You can tolerate an incredible amount of pain and discomfort if you ignore the fact that the pain may very well continue for several hours and instead focus on your job of enduring it within a rolling 30sec window.
This is a yearly discussion we bring into the forum, and iirc, it's usually a race between Al and I to see who uses the Yogi Berra quote first: "(triathlon) is 90% mental; the other half is physical." So, there it is under the wire, but we raise it every year probably because there’s some kernel of truth in there. (Plus it corresponds to Rich’s workout math.)
Also, before progressing, I want to demystify the mental game a little bit: I think it is much more accessible and broadly applied than to just <g class="gr_ gr_111 gr-alert gr_gramm Punctuation only-del replaceWithoutSep" id="111" data-gr-id="111">elites,</g> and is likely in the interest of anyone who wants to do better. It's like the "aero wheels" argument: yep, the pointy-enders definitely benefit from the sharpening of performance that it gives over their 9-10 hour day, but if you're out there 15 or 16 hours, or longer, well, it's just more time to deploy and apply the mental stuff. <br />
Also, I think it's important to demystify the mental game as something between shamanistic Mark Allen spirituality, and East Germany lab brain experimentation. It's not. It stuff that we all practice already, and it;s likely already part of our regular near-daily training and racing - we just don't organize it into a specific skill set, or deliberately call it something. The stuff you do to keep progressing during your ftp or LT intervals is a mental skill, whether you call it <g class="gr_ gr_118 gr-alert gr_gramm Punctuation only-del replaceWithoutSep" id="118" data-gr-id="118">that,</g> or something else. The stuff to get out of bed the day after a long ride and do another ride is a mental skill. And so on. <br />
Moving on, I think the starting, middle and ending point on this topic came about 3 or 4 posts ago from Al: the mental game is something that is a specific repitoire of skills, techniques, and actions, but the key part is practice. You practice them in workouts, hard and easy. You practice them in warmups. You practice them in the dark parts of the darkest intervals. You also practice them by writing - not cutting and pasting, but actually writing - a race report. There are two reasons for all of this: first, when race day, and more closely, a crappy moment on race day comes, or when you are glycogen depleted and not making the best decisions in the last few miles of a race, you have developed a sound set of skills that come with much, much less difficulty than if introducing them fresh as just saying "HTFU".
The second part is the practice adds value to the training work itself. When you start employing pain management or disassociation techniques during a tough part of your <g class="gr_ gr_93 gr-alert gr_gramm Punctuation only-del replaceWithoutSep" id="93" data-gr-id="93">workout,</g> and really work on the specific skill, you also yield a better outcome in that session itself. it might be a few more watts, a second or two faster per lap, or whatever, but these things start to accrue. <br />
I'm now going to cop out a bit: I originally intended to write up a prescis of a book that more or less covers it all. It's not esoteric, it's very reader-friendly (I think of it as an "airplane read") and the author is a very good communicator. So, instead, take 30 mins to skim, or an hour to do a moderate dive into it, regardless of what point you are at in your season or your triathlon experience. It's worth it.
AND IT'S ONE FRIGGIN' CENT USED ON AMAZON. That's the price of one three hundredth
of a cup of coffee. http://www.amazon.com/Triathletes-Mental-Training-Ultrafit-Multisport/dp/1931382700
Moving on, then. A few of my own experiences on the different approaches:
-Practice. At the very least, in advance of every workout, I set out one specific mental skill that I want to practice. And write it down. Before yesterday's ABP bike, I decided I wanted to practice pain / discomfort management through associative techniques - kind of becoming friends with the discomfort and reframing my experience of it - so that was job 1. In my FTP runs, my default mental skill is to practice focus skills, and will set out, and then employ, verbal cues in structured ways to make sure they happen (so, in addition to regularly practicing focus, I mark the 300m part of the track as my cue every lap to remember to tune back in and get the brain back on task 100%).
-scripting. There's no excuse for not writing a race plan. I think this is one of the most valuable things in race prep. Write it, make it detailed, and approach it like an operations manual that you had to hand off to someone as they are being told “You’re being deployed to run an IM in 10 minutes. Read this."
-Visualization. See the link in Tim's post. As I mentioned there, I treat my weekly long run with all of the importance that I would treat a non-A race ... and for a few days before, I visualize perfect running, and immerse myself in a picture of self-at-mile-15-of-long-run with good form, light feet, tall posture, smile, etc.
-Pain. I’m a huuuuuuge suck and back off from pain quickly. I need to work on this, but there are a number of specific pain/discomfort management approaches - visualizing a specific colour (for whatever reason, blue relaxes people), smiling during pain, internal focus, external focus, external motivations, cue words, and so forth. A different sports psych tells a story of Natasha Badmann running - in some distress - in Kona along the seawall on Ali’i, and as she’s going along, raises her arms and for a few seconds, looks at the ocean and kind of “flaps her wings.” Reportedly she does / did this to feel light, and to be mentally buoyed by the wind and ocean, like a bird. In any case, she gets through the tough part, keeps her going, gives her some energy, and on FTW.
-Confidence. There’s actually a lot to this, and when Rich (in this thread) or Al (in other threads) talk about thinking about "the process” during execution, I think it’s built on a foundation from being very confident in the work they have done leading up to the race, and having the multiple experiences of seeing previous years’ work result in previous excellent performances. The confidence that yields, I think, lets them continue knowing a terrific performance is a likely outcome of this particular race. (I don’t think I could have done that in my first few races, and it has taken me a long time to get what they meant when they talk about process in race execution.)
Anyhow ... buy the book. I don't get a cut of the penny.