Psychology in endurance sports - the grind
No matter how hard an athlete is prepared, how motivated they are for the event, or how well their state of mind is.
There will come the inevitable brick wall that will either be overcome or stop the athlete dead in their tracks. This is the moment when an athlete has to find the answer to “How bad do I want this?”. If they can’t find the answer that will push them forward, they will lose.
Let’s finish the 2 week blog post cycle with the key benefit of mental toughness - the ability to simply grind it out.
The grind
There aren’t many things that are 100% certain but for endurance athletes there is one thing that will come for sure at one point. It’s when fatigue, both mental and physical, starts kicking in, when motivation is low and every step, pedal or swim stroke is a challenge.
Any athlete that is pushing themselves will hit this at one point or another during a training session or race.
That’s the time when they have to dig deep and find motivation to continue. It might be due to their mental toughness or some other ability which is probably hard to quantify but it’s all about overcoming adversity.
It’s the time where everything an athlete has worked for has to come together into a perfect storm of determination, stubbornness, and will to continue through pain.
Understanding their own body
Every athlete is different and, thus, reacts different to pain. The key difference is how those reactions are manifested.
For athletes just starting out just simple shortness of breath can be enough to force them to slow down or stop. After a while they get used to this and are able to ignore those signals and push on.
The human body is designed for survival and wants to minimize energy expenditure. It will start signalling all kinds of different stuff to our brain and force it to stop.
With enough training humans can ignore most of those signals and just continue with what they are doing.
Depleting the batter
Every athlete has a finite amount of stress they can endure over time. The great news is that this battery is much bigger than most of us think. The bad news, however, is that it’s really painful to get to the last bits of it.
During endurance races or long training sessions, it’s important to listen to one’s body and understand the progression of discomfort into pain into exhaustion.
Only once this is fully understood is an athlete really capable to get the best out of themselves.
Looking for the happy place
The easiest thing an athlete can do is find their happy place and try staying there for as long as possible and getting back into it once they fall off.
It’s not uncommon for endurance athletes to cover large stretches of ground and not remember ever being there.
It’s important to have a place in your mind where you can hide from the pain and be able to ignore it for as long as possible. Anything (legal and healthy) that can get you there is fair game.
It gets worse until it doesn’t
One of the reasons many athletes struggle with pain is that it gradually gets worse. They feel pain in their legs, hips, or knees and it just gets worse and worse until they feel like they have to stop or otherwise they might get hurt.
One thing that many learn over their career is that gradual increase in pain is fine. It’s the sudden manifestation of pain in a certain part of your body that will get you to quit while gradual increase is something you will learn to cope with and will find it staying the same or even getting better with time.
The human brain is a remarkable organ and it is impressive how much an athlete can train it with enough time and patience.
Being able to grind it out is the result of a simple equation that includes experience, training and the desire to achieve a goal.
If an athlete can dial in all those components and fine-tune them to an acceptable degree, they will be able to overcome bad days, low motivation and the inevitable onset of pain.
They just have to trust their training and be ready to answer the question of “How bad do they want this?”
