Recently posted on my triathlon team forum:
“Can you train to ignore the thoughts from your brain that says this is hard? according to the Central Governor theory [when things start to get tough, late in a workout or race] the Brain will send signals to the legs and say ‘ease up cowboy’ this is gonna hurt…..Are their mental tricks to overcome this?”
My response: “I know very well that the conscious mind is often one’s biggest enemy when trying to achieve a breakthrough race performance. I seem to do my best when my mind is more of an observer than a controller. Highly successful athletes talk about being “in the zone”, or “in the flow”, or being “centered”. I think they are talking about letting their body do the work. Your question, “Can you train to ignore the thoughts from your brain that says this is hard?” cuts to the heart of how one achieves this state.
I’ve certainly experienced the sensation of knowing that what I’m doing is hard, but letting it happen anyway. There may be two things I’ve done which make that state easier to achieve in a race. First, successfully completing the hardest workouts, week in and week out, seems to train the letting go process. For me, those workouts seem to be the run intervals and the bricks. And second, I seem to do better when I “let go” of the race, meaning I have given up thoughts of success (time, place), and just immerse myself in the process.
My best race performances have all come when I see my competition literally pulling away from me, or know they are so far in front I don’t have a chance to win. My response is NOT to get angry, or TRY harder. What I do at that point, it seems, is just let my body do what is has been trained to do; and let my mind do what IT has been trained to do, which is to pay attention to the details of race execution: what and when to eat and drink, observing power or pace, and staying within my known limits. It may be that focusing on that minutiae, keeping the mind in observer mode rather than controller mode, is the mental trick I use to ignore the damage happening in my muscles, bones and joints.”
Then someone else added that he was going to learn meditation – 30-60 min a day, separate from, on top of swimming, biking, and running. I wanted to write back, “No! You don’t get it! What you want to be learning is how to meditate WHILE swimming, biking, and running.”
The trick, the training tool, to get to that state is to pay attention to process, not outcome. This is actually an old management mantra I learned over 20 years ago, when I was running our giant medical group. Focus on the means, not the ends. Get the means right, and the end takes care of itself.
So what I wrote back to HIM was:
“My observation is you can learn to achieve the same effect as meditation while also doing your workouts. You don’t need to separately teach yourself meditation techniques anymore than you need to separately use weight training exercises. The thing to practice is to pay attention to the PROCESS of what you are doing while you are doing it, not the end result/outcome. Sometimes, though, the work IS so hard, that it seems you can’t really pay attention to anything, anymore. You “lose focus”. That’s when it’s time to get simpler. A first step might be to pay attention to the physical motions involved – pedaling circles, not squares; longitudinal body rotation while swimming; timing of breaths to strides while running. If even that fails, then get simpler still: count strokes or strides. Get to 300, 0r 100, or 10, and start again.
About six years ago, on an exceptionally hot day at the Xterra World Championships, the women’s winner, Melanie McQuaid, allowed as how she didn’t really remember most of the run, except for the fact that she counted each stride, got to ten, and started over again. That was all she was able to focus on, just counting to ten over and over, for 11K! To this day, she still can’t really remember the run portion of that race.
Some people use a catch phrase they repeat over and over, like a meditation mantra, when their mind starts to wander away from the task at hand.
So that’s my observation: when losing focus in a workout, get simpler in what you’re paying attention to. Dissociate your “self” from the task at hand by giving your mind a simple, repetitive task to keep it busy, and thus out of the way. Do that over and over, week in and week out, and eventually your mind will learn to pay attention to things other than the pain, or the boredom, or whatever it is that seems you mind is calling the desire to quit.
Once you’ve able to routinely achieve that state, the next step is to learn how to give your mind something useful to do, rather than busy itself with trying to find reasons to quit. Time to start observing pace, or power, or HR, or RPE, but without any purpose other than to observe. Drop all expectations of needing to hit certain numbers, just see what they are. Your body and unconscious brain will use that information they’re being fed, and the knowledge of how hard you intend to work in that session or race, to do the best they can. And, more often than not, you’ll be surprised by the results.”
Success in athletics a result of using the principles of meditation? A dissolution of ego? It works for me.
(To be cont’d, but not like you think)