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"Be water, my friend." |
A gymnastics balance beam is four inches
wide. Walking along a four-inch-wide
line just above floor height is simple for anyone, but elevate that beam up four
feet off the ground, and most people will find it much more difficult. Raised thirty feet off the ground, all but
the bravest of adrenaline junkies would refuse to walk it, even with a safety
rope. Using this as an analogy, we can
see how elevating the value of a race in a runner's mind is akin to raising the
balance beam ever higher in an attempt to motivate them to cross it. If you set concrete and ambitious goals,
visualize your race ten times over, listen to a self-talk CD and your pump-up
mix before a big race, but don't run your best, what happens to your mental
state?
Thus is my opposition to most sports psychology
strategies. If an athlete is performing
well in workouts but not on race day, the first issue to address (other than poor
pacing—most often going out too fast—which is frequently the true culprit for
"not being tough" at the end of a race) is the level of emotional
investment and expectations in races. I
believe that, physically speaking, races should be approached exactly the same
way as a workout, down to the specifics of the warm-up. If your training approach is sound and you
are a reasonably experienced racer, you should not have a problem putting out
solid performances on race day. This
doesn't mean every race is going to be a slam dunk—just like every workout
isn't a slam dunk either.
To be sure, there is value in being prepared for a race. Having a plan, having some conceptual goals, and having themes or
concepts to focus on at different points in the race can all be very
helpful. "Hah!" you say. "So you do use sports psychology!" Well, to some extent. But it's one thing to make a race plan, and something else
to make a good one. A good race plan is one that does not invest
your self-worth in your performance and keeps you focused on the task at
hand—essentially, one that allows you to run as if you're doing an extremely
hard workout. You can read more about
how to make a successful race plan in the companion article to this one,
conveniently titled "How to make an effective race plan."
I am opposed to race visualization, meditation,
contemplation, or any other significant mental or emotional engagement with the
race before it actually takes place. You
only have to run the race once in the real world. Why expend the energy to run it ten or twenty
times in your head? Even visualizing running a race represents a significant
investment of mental and emotional energy, which really ought to be conserved
for the race. If you've ever had to run
a hard workout by yourself, you've probably found yourself imagining you're in
a race—barreling through the last mile of the state cross country meet,
perhaps, or crushing the last 10k of the New York City Marathon. And your workout goes great!
Take this as evidence that the mere mental image
of racing is an additional "energy reserve" that you can tap into
when needed. It makes sense not to drain this reserve before you
need it most: during the race! So, do not lock yourself in a quiet room to
meditate on your race plan for an hour the night before a race, or take cold
showers in the dark to visualize every piece of the race (I was guilty of the
latter during high school).
Mental energy is a semi-limited resource. I say "semi-limited" because its
limits are not as tangible as those of physical fatigue (we can't reliably
measure your mental energy levels, nor will we ever be able to), and the limits
to mental endurance aren't absolute—there always seems to be a little more you
can squeeze out when you need to.
I am not of the opinion that the ability to endure
pain and suffering is a rare or difficult to develop ability. If you want to see people endure pain, don't
go to a cross country meet, go to a hospital. There, you'll see completely ordinary people who, without
fail, draw upon immense determination and tenacity to endure the pain and
suffering of surgery, cancer, infections, and other afflictions. If these people, who have likely never faced
suffering of such magnitude ever before, can manage, surely any runner can push
himself or herself to the brink of exhaustion, if in the proper mental state.
Sports psychology is full of buzzwords, most of
which I'd be quick to dismiss as hand-waving social science hooey, but there is
one concept that I am particularly fond of, and it should be familiar to any
competitive runner: Flow. I barely even need to explain it; anyone who has done more than a
few workouts and races knows what it is.
You know that Flow is the special sensation you get when flying at the end of a workout, or pulling
away from an opponent in the final stages of a race. More than anything else, this element defines
a "good" performance. So, the
mental project for any runner is simple: Flow.
Most people will agree with this principle; the problem is how to
achieve it.
At its core, Flow is a state of relaxation, a
state of efficiency, and a state of calm.
This is why it is easier for most people to achieve in workouts than in
races. It is internal, which is to say,
not created by external motivation.
Fundamentally, Flow does not come from aggression, tension, or
anger. This is a radical departure from
the motivational speech, team cheer, crowd enthusiasm, Hollywood movie depictions
of the inspired runner that are popular in Western distance running popular
culture.
To be sure, a major component of a great
performance is dependent on strength, power, tenacity, or some other 'fierce'
state of mind. My position is that even
the mental will behind the hard drive to the finish in a distance race can be a fierce and powerful state of mind
that originates from a place of calm
and focus, not one of aggression and negative emotions.
Approaching the optimal mental state from the
perspective of calmness, tranquility, and non-action is not a popular
stance. Many people could reasonably
disagree with me on these points, but regardless, that is my view. Ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote:
"Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving
the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it," and indeed water is my
metaphor of choice for describing many aspects of running. Many years later, Bruce Lee echoed this in
his famous advice: "Be water, my friend."
Embracing this idea took me many years. It is not the traditional way, the way of
grinding and hammering and forcing your way to the top. I don't expect anyone to make a sudden
conversion. But perhaps you can begin to
see the fine distinctions in philosophical approach begin appear in running:
the difference between fast and hard, the difference between relaxed and slow, the difference between focus
and aggression. This is my philosophy of running. What is yours?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as I was reading the article thinking that Self-Actualization, then, must equal Flow in this case. In my experience, it's been true, too. Any time my mental or emotional life is out of whack, so is my running - it just seems to get harder and harder... whereas the opposite is also true: when my inner life is awesome, so goes my running!
"Flow" - I see here some John Kellog`s inspiration
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