Welcome To Training Your Mind
The purpose of Science Of Ultra is to provide you with a resource of knowledge that you can use to work toward becoming your ultra best. As you define why you run and what you're trying to get out of your running, you also decide what your ultra best looks like. Fundamentally, growing and improving require a program comprising deliberate practices in training your mind, body, and craft. In recent episodes and blog posts, I’ve introduced these concepts and begun discussing some of the features of training the body.
In this installment, we’re going to create an overview of training the mind.
To acquire and develop the mental skills for endurance training and running ultra marathons, you must practice those skills deliberately. Just doing something repeatedly does not necessarily bring expertise. Just running a lot does not give you the mental skills to deal with very difficult times of deep fatigue or self-doubt. Simply putting yourself in uncomfortable situations over and over - running in terrible weather, taking cold showers, or doing any number of other uncomfortable things - will not bring you the mental skills to RISE and thrive when things get hard. Being in uncomfortable situations without a plan for deliberate practice aimed at developing specific mental skills to work skillfully in those situations will only lead to your ability to endure suffering. Fundamentally, the goal of training the mind is to minimize suffering and maximize joy. And that requires deliberate practice.
In the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson explains the nuances and importance of deliberatepractice, which is far more than just repetition. If you haven’t read the book, you should. It’s one of my most recommended books for anyone seeking to get better at anything.
To become your ultra best, get clarity about who you are as an endurance athlete, your why and what. Then cultivate conviction and mindset around those principles. The goal is to align thoughts, words, decisions, and actions to create a high performance mindset. The key features of a high-performance mindset according to my guest Michael Gervais in episode 24 are focus, calm, confidence, and self-trust. Cultivating those and developing them requires grit and optimism.
Endurance athletes choose to do hard things not in the expectation that it'll become easy at some point but rather to experience some aspects or features of the difficulty. Whatever your reasons for doing this, you can smile when things get really hard because this is what you’ve worked hard to experience. If it’s the case that you’re doing this because it’s hard, then you can love the difficulty and fatigue that arises. By definition, it doesn’t feel good or bring you warm and fuzzy sensations in the moment. It’s not supposed to. If you can become familiar with that fatigue and difficulty, with clarity that this is what you want to experience, then you can stay in it and explore it with conscious curiosity.
If you’re going to do something that’s difficult, like running ultra-marathons, it’s important to have a strategy. Inside of that strategy you have to develop and refine skills through deliberate practice. Train your mind, just like you train your body. Start training in simple, calm environments, and then push yourself into more and more stressful environments.
Everyone in the community appreciates that a substantial factor in determining ultra-marathon performance is psychology, the mental skills to perform inside of fatigue. For longer races, like 100-milers, those skills may be the most important. And, yet, most people choose to put nearly all their training efforts into their physical fitness. If the most important factor is your mind, then you need to train your mind the most. Not only do most people not do that but they go one step further to make the situation even worse. That is, in their daily lives, there are no immediate negative consequences of a counterproductive or ineffective mindset. You have a negative reaction to a situation, and moments later you can just be out of that situation. You have negative thoughts, question your confidence, lose your calm and you can easily get right into a different situation that let’s you get away with it. In fact, people are constantly practicing losing focus.
How often do you try to multitask? You have 10 seconds of empty space and you look at your phone. So, we’re constantly reinforcing the habits that won’t help us in our endurance pursuits. We’re even practicing the avoidance of the mental states that we are required to work with when we’re out on our adventures and races. If you're not deliberately working on your mental game every day, then you’re expecting far too much from your physical training. It’s too much to ask of your physical training to make up for a lack of psychological resilience and skill.
In her book Mindset: The New Psychology Of Stress, Carol Dweck describes the differences between growth mindsets and fixed mindsets. I highly recommend the book. Some people have predominantly growth mindsets and associated skills; they may require less training. But everyone can benefit from attention to, and deliberate practice in, training the mind.
In coming installments on training the mind, we’ll dissect the key features of a high-performance mindset - focus, calm, confidence, self-trust, grit, and optimism - while outlining actionable strategies for developing each.