three simple tricks to being a mentally skilled racer that your doctor doesn't want you to know
(Clickbait headlines like this make me want to punch a millennial in their iphone ... but apparently drive page views, so I roll with it.)
Over the next 16 paragraphs, I’ll state my very simple view: to have great mental skills on race day, you’ve got to:
- Practice them now,
Practice them now,
Practice them now.
And even though it’s the middle of January and the last thing you should be doing is freaking out about a race that won’t take place for another six months, I argue au contraire. It’s exactly at this moment that you should be doing the mental skills work. Why? Because it’s time efficient, it accumulates like compound interest, and has no cost. But then it pays when you need it.
First off, I have to make the case for mental skills. Short version is, they are what move you to a different level in endurance sports. This applies on scale, so in other words, the person with a toolbox of mental skills is the one who finishes, instead of the version of themselves that doesn’t. Or it’s the (legendary) versions of Patrick or John Withrow at Tremblant who can put in a Mile 18 effort where they literally turn themselves a different colour because they are drawing on something deep, versus the versions of them that physically could have just called it a day at mile 20 of the run and shuffled it in to finish. Examples abound in AG through elite levels, but the mental skills piece is what elevates a performance.
This brings me to my second point, which is: I think people get the importance of this, but forum traffic shows they get it sometime between the day their plan says “begin taper,” and the time they drop their bike off at TBT and are printing their boarding pass. Although this isn’t too late, it’s certainly not optimal, and what I want to encourage is getting that work underway right now, so it isn’t a last-minute thought … instead, it’s just standard operating procedure and something you do every time you slap on goggles, shoes, or bike shorts, and on race day, it's not extra baggage.
Of course, I’m not saying anything new or revolutionary. If you’ve spent any time in the OS, you’ve already started to live the “mental six-pack” notion. My twist on it is you should start to be exercising those mental tricks and techniques today, but doing so with a direct siteline to eventually having them becoming well-rehearsed techniques that you have practiced all year, and they have habituated to the degree that you are able to naturally draw upon them in race or critical execution situations.
And you’re out there doing the work anyhow. So my twist is to make sure that your workouts in the early days of OS become not just times to raise your FTP, LT or overall fitness, but also to multitask. So at the time you’re doing a tedious easy pace run on January 21, you are now also deliberately employing a specific mental skill and honing it for race day. Or while you’re in the last 2 minutes of a February LT set, you’re recognizing “ok, this is the time that I rehearse and build on my focus skills,” with the view to growing that focus skill to deploy further down the road.
The steps (and they are dead-simple):
-Take an hour, go to Starbucks with your ipad and
headphones, and watch this video 
https://youtu.be/JKbiBNztErQ. And
really pay attention. Once you get
past the fact that the speaker isn’t Bob Sagett, you’ll see that it’s a pretty
simple set of skills that that his program lays out. I think he communicates them
well, but don’t dismiss it based on how simple or intuitive it sounds: I believe he’s
rolling out a lot of sophisticated stuff in there. (I don’t have any commercial interest in his
method … I’ve just read a lot of the other popular stuff out there and surfed the same 'how-to' videos that you have, and his
seems to rise above the others and resonates with what I think a triathlete
should know what to do, and how). He
also has a book – same stuff. It’s a
great starting point.
-before the next week starts, choose two sessions from the week ahead. They can be hard sessions, easy sessions, or whatever you hit by throwing two darts at your plan. Just establish and commit that those are your ‘double duty’ sessions that week.
-before the week starts, choose one of your skills for that week. Just one. (I start with focus, only because I know when I’m doing it, and know when I’m slacking).
-before the session starts, choose a few specific times – again, they can be random, or they can be when the going gets tough, but just make sure you declare them beforehand as your ‘mental minutes’ – in your workouts, and promise that no matter what, this will be a practice time for mental skill. And these should be at least two minutes, maybe three, for now. Yesterday, I committed to the last two 2 minutes of each of my LT run intervals as practice time for “relax.” It was super easy for a minute, but actually required a real deliberate effort to keep in that focus mode for the next 30 seconds, and even harder after that. That’s exactly the point: I want to keep stretching out that minute of it being natural to two minutes, then three, then 5, then the entire interval. But I am starting almost absurdly small, and my only extra task is committing beforehand to practicing the skill, and then carrying through with it. Another example: I find it almost impossible to do a v02 interval without locking my arms /shoulders/neck with stress. My “relax” cue is easy for 5 seconds, but at first, any non-clenched, relaxed state over 30s is almost impossible.
-Then progress. If you’re in the OS, you probably have, what, like 5-10 hours of SBR time every week. 300 to 600 minutes that you’re out there for anyhow, and this progression asks you for 4, then maybe 8 across 3 workouts. The goal is something gets practiced every day, and sharpened or deepened as you progress through your season. Considering that you have a range skills to choose from like focus, relaxation, pain/discomfort management, “grit” and so forth, you’ll never find yourself wanting for variety.
-then log it. The act of writing it down – Training Peaks, WKO, whatever – sounds like administrivia, but it’s actually important in continuing to endure the mental stuff is deliberate practice, and makes the mental skill specific, tangible, reinforces them as concrete cognitive steps, and elevates it to more than just being “mentally tough.” Writing it as reflection moves to the realm of task completion, and starts to skillify it (yes. I made that word up.) so there’s efficacy around mental skills that you’re developing.
In a good year, I’ll plot out the skills for my OS starting in the first few weeks of the season, and map what skill gets randomly assigned to which week, so I’m just painting by numbers and bringing the specific skill or technique on a trip that I'm already taking. My findings have been somewhere around two or three weeks in, something happens where the deliberate practice intervals start to “take,” and I find that I’m just automatically employing things like focus, pain management, etc as a matter of course. But even as these become natural, I try to keep up the assigned work, and practicing the skill. By analogy, maybe think of it like run form, or swimming: Mike Roberts built up to swimming real fast, but through the course of it, he also hit a “form swim” every week, and (to my knowledge) keeps these rolling as part of his continuing work. So, like that.
(In a bad year, I’ll make the mistake of saying “oh, I did a lot of mental skill work last season, and it’s money in the bank because I have reached the status of "Mentally Skilled.” Then, the experience of the first Ride That Counts rolls around at the end of OS/ early prep, and I see myself getting dropped by (the much fitter) Tim C and Satish P for 6 consecutive days – where there’s just no mental skillset to draw on. I think the mentally skilled, rehearsed, better version of me could have done more keeping up, and the amount of capitulating I did that week and it still bugs me, 4 years later!)
Last points:
-These skills roll forward and accrue over the course of the season. Earlier I referred to compounding. The idea is, to have them practiced and at your disposal during race, you have to have practiced them in a race rehearsal. And in order to employ them in a race rehearsal, you’ll have practiced them in your long rides (or long runs). And to be able to draw on them in your long rides, you’ll have been practicing them in your shorter punchier stuff. Or in your easy run. You get the idea.
-even though I say they are “no cost,” I guess there’s the scenario or argument of “I can only train with other runners … how am I supposed to practice when I’m talking?” Or, “I watch movies / need music / need distractions when I train, so living in my head isn’t going to work.” The answer, in my view, for this mental stuff is make the time to train as you would race. Or at least devote some real estate during your session to mental blocks, where you are dedicated to practicing these, and dedicated to getting them right. You're on the bike anyhow. Make the time really count.
-but when do I visualize? Same thing … visualization is a learned skill. I admittedly wait a bit too late in my season to correctly practice any meaningful visualization and deepen that skillset, but I suggest that best practice (and also my 2017 undertaking) is to start to link even the briefest visualization exercise to key workouts, beginning in OS. So, if I’m doing my Wednesday hard run at the end of the day, I’m carving out three to five minutes of quiet time at some point at my desk where I’m running the mental film of doing a tough LT run interval, and making sure that I’m hitting the key points of the exercise, by seeing certain parts of the interval, sensing the pain/discomfort and seeing myself drawing upon a strategy to manage it, and so on.
-again, no cost.
Your thoughts and experiences?
Comments
I don't personally have a Coach Rich switch to simply turn on/off, but I do use more of a back-door approach to the same sort of thing. I repetitively tell myself (and others) that I am mentally tough. Then during those long FTP sets or during a low-point of a long ride/run when I'm ready to break, I keep repeating to myself something like "Okay Mr Tough guy... You've said over and again over how tough you are, now here's your chance to show it". It often works, but sometimes does not. But what it does do is reinforces that continuing through the pain (or quitting) is mostly in our minds. And every time we test that boundary, we have an opportunity to redefine where exactly that "break line" is. So if we're conscious of this over and over again throughout the season (or over many seasons), we gradually move that imaginary line further and deeper into that dark place where most unknowing folks would have long since broken.
The other tool I use is visualization. You mentioned my 2014 IMMT race in your post. I can tell you that I had lived that run dozens (maybe hundreds) of times throughout that year. I envisioned every possible scenario. Often my legs hurt, sometimes they did not. Sometimes I was chasing a guy for a Kona slot, but more often I was being chased. A few times during my long runs when I was really hurting I would find a person up ahead of me and decide that he was the guy standing between me and my Kona slot, then I would track him down and pass him and literally imagine myself coming across the finish line ahead of him. Much more often than that live training scenario, I got to that dark place over and over again while laying in bed at night. I actually fell asleep to those visions (and sometimes woke up to them). When it came to race day, nothing was new. I had literally been there and done that so many times that I knew exactly what to do. I simply did what I had already done so many times and it required very little extra mind work during the race, I simply lived the movie that I had watched so many times. Not that different than knowing every line of your favorite movie, it's still fun to watch, but you simply get to play along that last time. It wasn't just the run, in the months before the race, I had visualized what I would do during a flat tire, lost goggle, stomach problem, etc. etc. Luckily none of those bad things happened during the race, but if they did, I would not have panicked. The deeper we ingrain these things, the easier they are to follow them when they are happening.
A few of the responses have me thinking ... I wonder if mental skills techniques are something that those who were competitive athletes in College (Al, Rich, Pat, John, a gazillion others here ... ) had drilled in when they were putting in the Long Yards, are that are able to more readily recruit them, even years later. Doug's point about mental toughness from football is a good one too - even though it's a different skillset (amping up instead of relaxing; raising arousal instead of managing and metering it out), it's still commanding your brain to regulate a body to do something it wouldn't otherwise do.
https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-Mindset-Endurance-Champions-Principles-ebook/dp/B00PWX7T2C
https://www.outsideonline.com/2151696/the-art-of-training-by-feel?utm_source=fitness&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=01282017&spMailingID=27687069&spUserID=NzQ1NjI0NzAyODIS1&spJobID=965547148&spReportId=OTY1NTQ3MTQ4S0
Key quote:
Kristen Keim, a clinical sports psychologist in Raleigh, North Carolina, believes that many athletes rely on instruments like their GPS watches, power meters, Strava data, and heart rate monitors as validation for their performance goals. “It’s become so easy for athletes to lose touch with how their bodies are feeling and end up relying on gadgets to boost their motivation and confidence,” she says. “I definitely understand the importance of these instruments, but context is key. There needs to be more focus on athletes learning to race by feel, being more present, and realizing that their own bodies and minds are powerful tools as well.” [Emphasis added]
Less experienced athletes (of which I was many years) need the tools as guide posts. Frankly, I need the PM when my body is telling me it cannot/will not complete the last 5 minutes of that 20' FTP interval and the PM data says "Yes you will....."
Racing however, which I am still trying to master, I am now learning to go more and more with the "By Feel" method, especially on the back half of the races and on the last 1/3 of the run legs, where I now am practicing the method of throwing out the HR data, the paces, and everything else, believing in my fitness, and leaving nothing on the table to bring it home....
great thread....
SS
Thanks for the articles / book links. Looking forward to this week's reading!
* hypocritical, from a guy who has watched youtube playlists of Brittney Spears videos in his FTP work this week