The Mind Games

Training to get faster and go farther is a mind game. Your brain thinks you might get hurt and holds back your pace or tries to get you to stop. The objective is to override the thought process and move beyond the pain, in fact, fooling your brain into thinking what you are doing is normal and you won't get hurt. Our brains are so concerned with our physical well-being that they will put on the brakes well in advance of actual physical shutdown.

Over the years, I've learned that I can push out the point, for example, when I will actually bonk. I've learned to understand my brain's signals that are telling me I might be running out of fuel and sometimes ignore them. And then if I actually make it to full bonk, I rather enjoy it, because it's like I "beat myself." But if I don't, joke's on me--I may be able to make it farther the next time a bonk is imminent.

Same with really hard workouts, especially threshold intervals on the trainer. Your brain is yelling at your legs that what you are doing is hard so you should just give up and quit. But there are ways to effectively ignore the message and just keep going. One way is sheer motivation. After all, if you don't mentally see the point in what you are doing, why would you keep doing it? Another way is by forcing yourself to relax. Yes, relax! When you make your legs relax just a bit, the pedal strokes can become smoother and easier. Another way is to tell yourself that you can finish the interval and then relax. Sometimes the brain gives in once it knows that what you are doing is going to stop soon enough. Finally, there's the element of practice or repetition. If you keep doing something that your brain finds difficult, if you do it often enough, you are able to override the controls.

Why is it that we can sprint at the end of an Ironman, yet we couldn't run that fast the entire time? Because we always have a reserve left in us. Part of the ability to access that reserve is to practice doing it in training. A lot! Like if I'm really tired and would rather not do a workout, I go and do it anyway, because what's the worst that can happen? Partway through I decide to bag it anyway. Or not, and it ends up going really well. On many outdoor runs, I make it a point to run the last mile home as fast as I can for the distance I've gone on the day. It's even become a game to try and hold back from doing this, but it just comes naturally. Just yesterday, it happened again, and I even had a little bit of the dry heaves when I finished! See this is a sign that I pushed it a little, and while my brain is telling my body to make like I'm about to keel over, I just laugh at it (I really do laugh when it happens) and know that next time it won't feel any worse.

Should I play this game during every workout? No. But I have developed a sense when it's OK to go faster or farther than I had planned, and I take advantage of it whenever I can. I suppose that's part of the reason my nickname is Crackhead. But really, it's all one big controlled experiment, because whenever I do try and push the envelope, I find out whether it was the right thing to do or not. And I guess I've just developed a good relationship with Mr. Brain, because part of the game is learning how frequently I can do it and recover from it.

I'm sure it seems to many people that I have the most regimented training plan. In a sense, I do. But now that I am training for something that is only a known ANSWER with an infinite number of QUESTIONS, I am letting the "plan" be a guideline, for what I think I can do at any given point in time. I know very well how to make an ATP, and this time was no different. I chose some events around which to build key training sessions, and then wove it all together with build up, taper and recovery. And then I started in on it, and found out that having no idea what I really could do against the so-called plan, that I felt freer to experiment here and there and it's been completely fun! Well, fun if you like training a lot. Which I do.

But Mr. Brain is always working and just waiting for me to try something that he can make me fail at. There is actually a section of my plan that starts in May that I have a post-it flag on with a note to "revisit this." So far, every time I look at what I have on there I just sort of shake my head and go how the fuck am I going to do that? But I have learned already that I am able to do things now that I didn't think I'd be doing for 3 or 4 months, so maybe by the time May rolls around, I will just "do the plan." Or not. Who knows?

It's been hilarious that I will be in the middle of some workout where I am really pushing myself and I let Mr. Brain just wander and instead of trying to get me to stop, he starts thinking what ELSE I can do! This is an interesting phenomenon, because while that process used to only happen a couple of times a year, now it is happening every few weeks, and it is really fantastic. I only write this down because I have no idea if this is the same thing that other people experience or not. It is just such a cool state of mind to be in, because half of what comes to mind is visualization for finishing Ultraman or what happens afterward (it's a secret for now), and the other half is what can I be doing now to make that a certainty?

I know other athletes who say they "train by feel," and I guess maybe this is what they mean? I guess it's taken me 10 years to get there, but then again, I never was very athletic until now. I am still 100% convinced that the act of training big and hard is very much a mental exercise. You have to believe you can do it, even when other things in your life are dragging you down mentally or physically, when you are having a bad workout (rare for me!) or when you are unable to override your brain and actually hold back your pace or workout time. Underneath all that, is you have to want it, believe in it and feel it. For me, it's this sense of a "mission." What I'm doing to me is like art--I'm doing it for its own sake, because I've figured out how to do it and am somewhat good at it.

To me, this is all pretty cool for a regular working stiff. I am not going to break any records or change the world by doing this. All I can change is myself. I just need to keep Mr. Brain on board with it!