I could have pulled so many quotes from this article! A really interesting breakdown of the ways that our brains influence our training, and how we can train our brains to be more resilient during...
I could have pulled so many quotes from this article! A really interesting breakdown of the ways that our brains influence our training, and how we can train our brains to be more resilient during long runs. I’d be really interested to see some follow up studies on this to see whether the mental resilience from running can cross over into our everyday lives (my suspicion from my own anecdotal experience is that it does, and a lot).
The gist is that it is often not our bodies/muscles/lungs which cause us to want or need to stop running - we stop with a lot left in the tank - it’s our brains and our perception of effort which makes us stop. And if we can train our brains to get through this, to not panic over a little bit of difficulty, we can run further and longer.
Ultimately, then, it’s the brain that determines whether one can be a top athlete, just as much as our bodies and genetic potential.
Distance running (or cycling / swimming / other similar individual races) and baseball are, in my opinion, the two mentally hardest sports. I grew up running track and cross country competitively...
Distance running (or cycling / swimming / other similar individual races) and baseball are, in my opinion, the two mentally hardest sports.
I grew up running track and cross country competitively from when I was in 5th grade until the end of high school. I was good, not great, but good (ran a 4:44 1600m my senior year). Everyone I ever spoke with agrees the third lap of the 1600 is the hardest. Not because it hurts, normally you pace yourself so that you’re only just starting to feel tired at the start of that lap, but because your pace no longer feels easy and you know you have half the race to go. You have a crisis of faith about whether you can stick it out and keep your pace. The fourth lap hurts more because then you’re actually tired and filling up with lactic acid, but the end is so close you can power through the pain. And, what makes it harder than other sports in my opinion, is you’re all alone out there and you can slow down whenever you want. You’re not in a boat with your crew team and a coxswain yelling at you, you’re not at the line of scrimmage with other line men supporting each other when the ball snaps, you’re not in a boxing ring where, even if you’re tired, you can look the source of your pain in the eye and make him regret landing a punch. It's just you trying to force down your subconscious that’s screaming at you to stop this nonsense.
I got hurt toward the end of my freshman year track season. At the time my PR was about a 5:03 for the 1600m. It took me two years to come back from that and break 5:00. The challenge was 80% mental, since it didn’t take too long once I could run for my practice times to surpass my old times. When that third lap hit, I’d have a panic attack. I couldn’t feel my lungs with air, my pace would totally fall apart, half the time I couldn’t finish the race. It was an absolutely awful case of the yips that I only solved by taking a season off and just focusing on training and a few sessions with a sports psychologist. That gave me enough of a mental reset that I could get some confidence back and start succeeding (which generated more confidence).
Baseball is a different beast but also incredibly mental. The sheer randomness of the sport allows for all sorts of self-doubt to creep in. You’re technique can be as good as it’s ever been and you’re just not getting rewarded for it (you make hard contact and but it just goes right to the short stops glove, or you pitch a great game until a guy gets a lucky broken bat single, the next batter doesn’t bite on your breaking ball when the count is full so he walks, and then you hang your first curve ball all game and that’s a three run homer that costs your team the game). Reading Joey Gallo’s last interview as a Yankee made me emotional because I identified in a lot of ways with what he was going through. It’s no wonder great players get the yips and just fall apart until they don’t have a job anymore. Being a consistently good baseball player requires some real mental fortitude to not let the slumps break you.
I don’t know anything about baseball, but I imagine what you’ve said in your last paragraph is somewhat applicable to all sports at a high enough level. Really good point about it being mentally...
I don’t know anything about baseball, but I imagine what you’ve said in your last paragraph is somewhat applicable to all sports at a high enough level.
Really good point about it being mentally tough because you’re out there alone. It’s a common experience to run faster and push further when you’re in a race situation, and it’s because other people are around you in a shared experience, I suppose.
I can relate my lawn tennis experience with their baseball experience. I play recreationally, and there are days when I feel confident and most of my shots land inside the court, but on days when...
I can relate my lawn tennis experience with their baseball experience. I play recreationally, and there are days when I feel confident and most of my shots land inside the court, but on days when I'm mentally tired or feeling low, more than half my shots end up in the nets or outside the court limits.
By the way thanks for sharing this article. I'm going to share this with my Dad. He is a long distance runner and whenever I used to go for a run with him he would tell me that running is all in your head.
You certainly can get the yips in any sport and your mental state will certainly impact your performance. The randomness and semi-individual nature of baseball just amplifies the effect. Baseball...
You certainly can get the yips in any sport and your mental state will certainly impact your performance. The randomness and semi-individual nature of baseball just amplifies the effect. Baseball is fundamentally very random. Hitting a fastball in the majors is very hard. Controlling where you hit it is almost impossible, even for high-performing players. There’s a reason why they play 162 games a year — you need that sample size to identify what teams are better than others. Last year the historically good Dodgers got swept by the not very good Pirates, for example. Due to the randomness, you can be doing everything right and still have an awful stretch of games as an individual. If you’re not mentally strong, you’ll start playing worse in ways I mention in the next paragraph, and the cycle is self-reinforcing.
There’s also not really an easy way to take the pressure off. If I am playing basketball, for example, and not shooting well that day, I can focus on getting the ball to a guy on my team who is running hot and still contribute offensively. In other team sports, you can similarly adjust the strategy mid-game to try and compensate for you not having it that day. In baseball, however, you have to bat or pitch — there is no way around it. Other than taking yourself out of the game, there’s not much you can do to let someone else carry some of that weight for you. The result is that guys get in a slump and the pressure to get back to producing like they want starts to get at them: they can’t throw a strike when they need to, or they swing at bad pitches with no patience, etc. Your options are basically to try and work through it in games or sit yourself, which feels like total defeat and risks losing your spot to a replacement.
Great article. Lots of great takeaways and something we could all apply to our lives. "Athletic performance is determined by a combination of body and mind" - a lesson a lot of us tend to forget...
Great article. Lots of great takeaways and something we could all apply to our lives. "Athletic performance is determined by a combination of body and mind" - a lesson a lot of us tend to forget as we wistfully compare ourselves to elite athletes. It's easy to bemoan access to a gym, a dedicated personal trainer, training partners, etc., but at the end of the day how many of us use that as an excuse to just do the thing?
I recently took a VO2 max test and was assessed to have a 60.7 ml/kg/min. As someone who isn't a professional athlete, I was thrilled for half a second but then was consumed by confusion and disappointment. Why? My last marathon was 4 hours and 32 minutes. According to this chart I should be running a 2:43. According to the data, I have the physical capacity to almost half my time. Is the difference simply my mental resiliency?
There's so much regarding sports psychology that we don't understand. Even in the article, the difference between self-regulated learning and controlling your emotions isn't clearly spelled out. Regardless of what the answers end up being, they're skills that we can all end up using to navigate the stressors of life.
Truly such a good article. Thank you so much for sharing. Not that I've read it, but seems very similar to Endure by Alex Hutchinson. I think the top question that comes to the top of my mind...
Truly such a good article. Thank you so much for sharing. Not that I've read it, but seems very similar to Endure by Alex Hutchinson. I think the top question that comes to the top of my mind though is does the mental training really train? We know that obviously with physical training, physicality improves. But how much of the mental training really improves mental fortitude and how much of it is just placebo?
The way to increase your mental resilience according to the article is to just keep doing it - run when you’ve had a hard day, run when you’re tired, run when you’ve been out the night before -...
The way to increase your mental resilience according to the article is to just keep doing it - run when you’ve had a hard day, run when you’re tired, run when you’ve been out the night before - and in this way it almost has to be increasing your discipline, right? And the thing about placebos is, does it matter if it works?!
But these are good questions and I would like to see follow up studies about how this crosses over into other areas of life. I can say that anecdotally I feel more mentally resilient since getting back to running and it’s common advice to exercise to improve mental health so I think there’s something there. I expect studies have been done already but I would love to see some by these same researchers mentioned in the article
I’m really glad I was sent this article this morning. It was my long run day, and I found myself thinking about it a lot on my way round the loop. When I started to feel tired, I knew it was my...
I’m really glad I was sent this article this morning. It was my long run day, and I found myself thinking about it a lot on my way round the loop. When I started to feel tired, I knew it was my brain trying to tap out and not my body. Really helpful article that I think I’ll reread whenever I need that reminder!
Did this knowledge help you get through your run? I’ve often found that I can ignore most the physical fatigue if I’m distracted enough to not focus on it (music, podcasts, runners high etc) but...
Did this knowledge help you get through your run? I’ve often found that I can ignore most the physical fatigue if I’m distracted enough to not focus on it (music, podcasts, runners high etc) but there’s always a point where it breaks my concentration and that’s where the mental game comes into play. My long run is today so I’m definitely going to see if consciously knowing this helps power through.
It really did help! I had a few moments where I started thinking about how my legs were aching and I wouldn’t be able to finish, and then I’d think about that article and tell myself it’s not my...
It really did help! I had a few moments where I started thinking about how my legs were aching and I wouldn’t be able to finish, and then I’d think about that article and tell myself it’s not my body wanting to stop, it’s just my brain getting tired. It helped me push through. How did you go on your run, did it help?
I’ll say marginally lol. I got to that same fatigue point where my breathing struggled and my heart rate was high but the minute I lost my focus it came crashing down. When I stopped to recenter,...
I’ll say marginally lol. I got to that same fatigue point where my breathing struggled and my heart rate was high but the minute I lost my focus it came crashing down. When I stopped to recenter, I could tell my body wasn’t terribly tired and I had plenty left to go on but couldn’t get over the mental aspect once I got going again.
Do you do meditation too? That's what really connected the article with my own practice today. I reached that point of fatigue, but applying a mindful approach (focusing on counting steps up to 10...
Do you do meditation too? That's what really connected the article with my own practice today. I reached that point of fatigue, but applying a mindful approach (focusing on counting steps up to 10 repeatedly) really helped me get over the mental aspect.
I’m thinking that may be the secret to success on this. Meditation provides the skills and mental determination to overcome everything going on around you (not just in running but life itself)....
I’m thinking that may be the secret to success on this. Meditation provides the skills and mental determination to overcome everything going on around you (not just in running but life itself). Running is a form of meditation for me and oddly enough I only practice more traditional methods while on holiday. If you practice regularly I can completely see how this would be very helpful!
As the article says, the only way to make your brain more resilient is to keep doing the tough runs. So even if you couldn’t keep going this time, maybe you’ll be able to next time!
As the article says, the only way to make your brain more resilient is to keep doing the tough runs. So even if you couldn’t keep going this time, maybe you’ll be able to next time!
I could have pulled so many quotes from this article! A really interesting breakdown of the ways that our brains influence our training, and how we can train our brains to be more resilient during long runs. I’d be really interested to see some follow up studies on this to see whether the mental resilience from running can cross over into our everyday lives (my suspicion from my own anecdotal experience is that it does, and a lot).
The gist is that it is often not our bodies/muscles/lungs which cause us to want or need to stop running - we stop with a lot left in the tank - it’s our brains and our perception of effort which makes us stop. And if we can train our brains to get through this, to not panic over a little bit of difficulty, we can run further and longer.
Ultimately, then, it’s the brain that determines whether one can be a top athlete, just as much as our bodies and genetic potential.
Distance running (or cycling / swimming / other similar individual races) and baseball are, in my opinion, the two mentally hardest sports.
I grew up running track and cross country competitively from when I was in 5th grade until the end of high school. I was good, not great, but good (ran a 4:44 1600m my senior year). Everyone I ever spoke with agrees the third lap of the 1600 is the hardest. Not because it hurts, normally you pace yourself so that you’re only just starting to feel tired at the start of that lap, but because your pace no longer feels easy and you know you have half the race to go. You have a crisis of faith about whether you can stick it out and keep your pace. The fourth lap hurts more because then you’re actually tired and filling up with lactic acid, but the end is so close you can power through the pain. And, what makes it harder than other sports in my opinion, is you’re all alone out there and you can slow down whenever you want. You’re not in a boat with your crew team and a coxswain yelling at you, you’re not at the line of scrimmage with other line men supporting each other when the ball snaps, you’re not in a boxing ring where, even if you’re tired, you can look the source of your pain in the eye and make him regret landing a punch. It's just you trying to force down your subconscious that’s screaming at you to stop this nonsense.
I got hurt toward the end of my freshman year track season. At the time my PR was about a 5:03 for the 1600m. It took me two years to come back from that and break 5:00. The challenge was 80% mental, since it didn’t take too long once I could run for my practice times to surpass my old times. When that third lap hit, I’d have a panic attack. I couldn’t feel my lungs with air, my pace would totally fall apart, half the time I couldn’t finish the race. It was an absolutely awful case of the yips that I only solved by taking a season off and just focusing on training and a few sessions with a sports psychologist. That gave me enough of a mental reset that I could get some confidence back and start succeeding (which generated more confidence).
Baseball is a different beast but also incredibly mental. The sheer randomness of the sport allows for all sorts of self-doubt to creep in. You’re technique can be as good as it’s ever been and you’re just not getting rewarded for it (you make hard contact and but it just goes right to the short stops glove, or you pitch a great game until a guy gets a lucky broken bat single, the next batter doesn’t bite on your breaking ball when the count is full so he walks, and then you hang your first curve ball all game and that’s a three run homer that costs your team the game). Reading Joey Gallo’s last interview as a Yankee made me emotional because I identified in a lot of ways with what he was going through. It’s no wonder great players get the yips and just fall apart until they don’t have a job anymore. Being a consistently good baseball player requires some real mental fortitude to not let the slumps break you.
I don’t know anything about baseball, but I imagine what you’ve said in your last paragraph is somewhat applicable to all sports at a high enough level.
Really good point about it being mentally tough because you’re out there alone. It’s a common experience to run faster and push further when you’re in a race situation, and it’s because other people are around you in a shared experience, I suppose.
I can relate my lawn tennis experience with their baseball experience. I play recreationally, and there are days when I feel confident and most of my shots land inside the court, but on days when I'm mentally tired or feeling low, more than half my shots end up in the nets or outside the court limits.
By the way thanks for sharing this article. I'm going to share this with my Dad. He is a long distance runner and whenever I used to go for a run with him he would tell me that running is all in your head.
Edit: Replied to the wrong person
You certainly can get the yips in any sport and your mental state will certainly impact your performance. The randomness and semi-individual nature of baseball just amplifies the effect. Baseball is fundamentally very random. Hitting a fastball in the majors is very hard. Controlling where you hit it is almost impossible, even for high-performing players. There’s a reason why they play 162 games a year — you need that sample size to identify what teams are better than others. Last year the historically good Dodgers got swept by the not very good Pirates, for example. Due to the randomness, you can be doing everything right and still have an awful stretch of games as an individual. If you’re not mentally strong, you’ll start playing worse in ways I mention in the next paragraph, and the cycle is self-reinforcing.
There’s also not really an easy way to take the pressure off. If I am playing basketball, for example, and not shooting well that day, I can focus on getting the ball to a guy on my team who is running hot and still contribute offensively. In other team sports, you can similarly adjust the strategy mid-game to try and compensate for you not having it that day. In baseball, however, you have to bat or pitch — there is no way around it. Other than taking yourself out of the game, there’s not much you can do to let someone else carry some of that weight for you. The result is that guys get in a slump and the pressure to get back to producing like they want starts to get at them: they can’t throw a strike when they need to, or they swing at bad pitches with no patience, etc. Your options are basically to try and work through it in games or sit yourself, which feels like total defeat and risks losing your spot to a replacement.
Great article. Lots of great takeaways and something we could all apply to our lives. "Athletic performance is determined by a combination of body and mind" - a lesson a lot of us tend to forget as we wistfully compare ourselves to elite athletes. It's easy to bemoan access to a gym, a dedicated personal trainer, training partners, etc., but at the end of the day how many of us use that as an excuse to just do the thing?
I recently took a VO2 max test and was assessed to have a 60.7 ml/kg/min. As someone who isn't a professional athlete, I was thrilled for half a second but then was consumed by confusion and disappointment. Why? My last marathon was 4 hours and 32 minutes. According to this chart I should be running a 2:43. According to the data, I have the physical capacity to almost half my time. Is the difference simply my mental resiliency?
There's so much regarding sports psychology that we don't understand. Even in the article, the difference between self-regulated learning and controlling your emotions isn't clearly spelled out. Regardless of what the answers end up being, they're skills that we can all end up using to navigate the stressors of life.
Truly such a good article. Thank you so much for sharing. Not that I've read it, but seems very similar to Endure by Alex Hutchinson. I think the top question that comes to the top of my mind though is does the mental training really train? We know that obviously with physical training, physicality improves. But how much of the mental training really improves mental fortitude and how much of it is just placebo?
The way to increase your mental resilience according to the article is to just keep doing it - run when you’ve had a hard day, run when you’re tired, run when you’ve been out the night before - and in this way it almost has to be increasing your discipline, right? And the thing about placebos is, does it matter if it works?!
But these are good questions and I would like to see follow up studies about how this crosses over into other areas of life. I can say that anecdotally I feel more mentally resilient since getting back to running and it’s common advice to exercise to improve mental health so I think there’s something there. I expect studies have been done already but I would love to see some by these same researchers mentioned in the article
I’m really glad I was sent this article this morning. It was my long run day, and I found myself thinking about it a lot on my way round the loop. When I started to feel tired, I knew it was my brain trying to tap out and not my body. Really helpful article that I think I’ll reread whenever I need that reminder!
Did this knowledge help you get through your run? I’ve often found that I can ignore most the physical fatigue if I’m distracted enough to not focus on it (music, podcasts, runners high etc) but there’s always a point where it breaks my concentration and that’s where the mental game comes into play. My long run is today so I’m definitely going to see if consciously knowing this helps power through.
It really did help! I had a few moments where I started thinking about how my legs were aching and I wouldn’t be able to finish, and then I’d think about that article and tell myself it’s not my body wanting to stop, it’s just my brain getting tired. It helped me push through. How did you go on your run, did it help?
Definitely helped me on my run just now!
Excellent! Great job!!
I’ll say marginally lol. I got to that same fatigue point where my breathing struggled and my heart rate was high but the minute I lost my focus it came crashing down. When I stopped to recenter, I could tell my body wasn’t terribly tired and I had plenty left to go on but couldn’t get over the mental aspect once I got going again.
Do you do meditation too? That's what really connected the article with my own practice today. I reached that point of fatigue, but applying a mindful approach (focusing on counting steps up to 10 repeatedly) really helped me get over the mental aspect.
I’m thinking that may be the secret to success on this. Meditation provides the skills and mental determination to overcome everything going on around you (not just in running but life itself). Running is a form of meditation for me and oddly enough I only practice more traditional methods while on holiday. If you practice regularly I can completely see how this would be very helpful!
As the article says, the only way to make your brain more resilient is to keep doing the tough runs. So even if you couldn’t keep going this time, maybe you’ll be able to next time!