Endurance Nation has a thread running now about mental training, as if it were a separate discipline, like nutrition. Here is my contribution:
I’m a big believer that the conscious mind is only a very small part of what controls performance and behavior. So training the thoughts you are aware of only gets you so far. The goal for me is to learn and practice letting my conscious mind become a (somewhat) disinterested observer to what’s going on. Some professional athletes call this getting into the flow. My best races are when I’ve let some other part of me, of which I am unaware, take control of my effort. (For more details on the reality of this, just google “Split-Brain research”)
So how does one get to this ego-less state without undergoing brain surgery to cut the corpus callosum? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall … Practice, Practice, Practice. Every workout is an opportunity to lose your “self” in your efforts. All the tricks Tim mentions are tools along the way. By focusing on some repetitive activity – a thought, an aphorism, a song lyric, cadence, breathing, whatever – you give your busy little ego something to do while the body and its cruel race day taskmaster take over. The only thing your “self” should be doing is monitoring the dashboard, making sure the metrics are within the proper range – fluids, calories, pace, power, stroke rate, whatever.
Workouts are also an opportunity to ingrain somewhere deep in your brain the effort level, and the metrics that go with it, which you want to achieve on race day. That’s tough for an Ironman, because we really don’t get a chance to experience the full effect of a 9-13 hour effort during training. So we have to mimic it in shorter episodes. That means going a bit faster to simulate the effort level we’ll be achieving on race day. That feeing of effort – RPE – should become second nature, meaning it does not require conscious thought to pull it out during competition.
Having gone thru a few races in which the flow took over, I know it is both a scary and joyful place to be. Scary, because it requires harder work than my conscious mind wants to deliver. Joyful, because it engenders a feeling of power (some people call this suffering – I say why be negative about it?), awe at what my body is willing and able to do when I just get out of its way.
I’ve learned I can’t think or will myself to victory. Only by letting go of my self can I succeed.