Mark Agnew
Endurance sports require mental and physical training. Photo: RUN 4 FFWPU
Four mental strength exercises for endurance athletes, from ultra runners to ocean rowers
Training for an endurance sport is about more than just the physical aspects of fitness. Finishing and performing is about body and mind, neglect one at your peril.
Mental strength and resilience are not innate, they both can be trained. There are some easy ways to incorporate mental training into your programme.
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Mental strength is ability to keeping physically pushing yourself when your mind is telling you to stop. Resilience is the ability to deal with adversity or unexpected challenges, such as dealing with unexpected weather or even a minor injury. You can train both at the same time.
Physical training
The first step to mental training, is physical training. Your mind will get used to the physical rigour of the task at hand, just like your body will. It will also get used to the monotony of training.
Mental strength is the ability to keep going when you want to stop.
There will be days when you don't want to get out of bed, or you want to quit early. The discipline of training, will train your mind to ignore the voice telling you to give up or slow down on the day.
We all have good days and bad days when training. The days when you feel great and set a personal best do little for your mental strength. If you view the bad days through the perspective of mental training, then they become a tool to build resilience and mental strength.
What's more, if you are fit, strong and injury free from your physical training, then you will need less mental strength on the day of your endurance sport. If you are under trained physically, you will have to rely more on mental strength. So, make it easy on your mind by preparing properly physically.
Reframing
Mental strength and resilience are both about experience. If you have experiences your mind can draw on, as proof that you have overcome difficulty before, then you are more likely to be able to overcome the difficulty now.
Resilience is the ability to deal with unexpected adversity.
In life, only the lucky few have come through unscathed. Before you event, it is worth re-visiting tough times. If you re-frame those experiences you can turn them into tools for resilience in the future.
"I did that then, so I can do this now".
Even if you objectively failed, gave up, dropped out, did not finish, it can still be useful. You are back at another event, aren't you? That is proof that you are resilient enough to bounce back from the disappointment of failure, and go again. With the wrong perspective, your failure is proof of your lack of resilience. With the right perspective, it is proof of your abundance of resilience.
Training times
Mental strength is finite, just like physical strength. If you run at a certain speed for long enough, sooner or later you have to slow down, and also if you concentrate hard enough for long enough, sooner or later your mind wanes. But next time, you will be able to run/concentrate for longer.
Many ultra runners therefore plan their training runs to start when they are mentally depleted. For example, why not plan your long run for a Friday evening, after work, when all you want to do is have a beer and relax. Your mind has been working hard all week, so is already depleted. You will then practice that feeling of mental exhaustion during the end of an event, which is hard to replicate otherwise.
Monotony
Boredom is an easy way to replicate mental stress. That stress in turn will make you mentally stronger and more resilient. So, plan a session that is intentionally boring, for example, on a treadmill or a rowing machine, with no music.
Pushing through the urge to end the session early will help your mental strength grow.