Even in early October, the Twin Cities Marathon, held between Minneapolis and St. Paul, can be chilly. One year, with the temperature just below freezing at the 7:00 a.m. start, I came prepared, wearing tights, a long-sleeved top, a hat, and gloves. Having attended college in Minnesota, I knew what to expect. Unfortunately, on the way to the starting line, I lost one of the gloves. To keep both hands warm as I ran, I switched the lone glove from hand to hand every third mile. It became a game for me, something to think about, something to help chart my progress. I could look forward to the switch every 3 miles.
If you think in those terms, a marathon is merely eight glove changes long.
Psychologists have long insisted that the mind is as important as the body when it comes to success in sports, particularly in an event like the marathon, where the mind must push the body to extremes. During the glory days of Eastern Bloc athletes, sports psychologists were as important as other coaches or trainers in preparing East German and Soviet athletes for competition. The U.S. Olympic Committee employs psychologists as consultants, as do many professional football and baseball teams. But anyone can use mind games to help get themselves through long-distance events.
I use mind games for survival in the marathon, physically as well as mentally. I divide marathons into fourths and thirds. At 3 miles I think: Just done a 5K. Piece of cake. At 6 miles it’s: A fourth of the race done. And at 8 miles: A third. At 10 miles I console myself: Double digits. At 13 miles: Past the half. Fewer miles ahead than behind. At 16 miles: Only single digits remain. At 20 miles: I’ve passed the wall or Only 10K left now. By that time, you’re close enough to count down like the liftoff of a rocket: Six-five-four-three-two-one. I’m done.
Actually, I like international marathons better than those in the United States because kilometer markings allow you to count down more often: “Ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one.”
Carolyn Warren of Tinley Park, Illinois, takes a slightly different approach, dividing the marathon into approximately 2-mile increments; it is simply thirteen aid station stops. As marathoners, we play various mind games to get ourselves to finish 26 miles 385 yards as fast as possible.
“Every marathon experience is different,” says Cindy Southgate of Kanata, Ontario. “You need to figure out which mind games will work for that particular day.”
While researching Boston: A Century of Running before the classic 100th anniversary race in 1996, I interviewed Dick Beardsley, who finished second to Alberto Salazar at the 1982 race. Coming off Heartbreak Hill in the lead but with Salazar stalking him, Beardsley was toast. At 21 miles, he decided to adopt a strategy that ignored the fact that 5 grueling miles remained. He decided he would run those miles one at a time, not caring whether there was another mile, not worrying whether there would be a tomorrow. “You can hold this pace for 1 more mile,” Beardsley told himself. “One more mile! Only 1 mile to go!”
At 22 miles, Beardsley punched the reset button on his mental speedometer. “One mile to go!”
And at 23 miles: “You’re beating the world record holder. One more mile!” Salazar eventually did outsprint Beardsley on the final straightaway, beating him 2:08:52 to 2:08:54. But it was Beardsley’s mental strength that made their duel one of the closest races in Boston Marathon history.
I have adopted that strategy in several races, including one year at the Disney World Marathon, in which I led the 4:30 pacing team for Runner’s World. I arrived in Orlando undertrained, having failed to do any workouts beyond 13 miles in the months before the race. Though in respectable shape for a 5K or a 10K, I doubted my ability to keep the pace for a full 26. I told my co-leader that I planned to go only 20, then she could take the group the rest of the way.
But at 20 I felt okay, so I tucked in behind the group, focused on the ears of the Mickey Mouse cap my co-leader was wearing, and told myself, “One mile to go. You can hold this pace for 1 more mile!” And like Beardsley, I reset my mental speedometer for each of the next half dozen miles. Although the group did pull ahead by 40 seconds in those closing miles, I finished in 4:30:27. That gave me more satisfaction than many races in which my times were several hours faster.
Marathon mind games are more than strategies for coping with pain and boredom. According to Charles A. Garfield, author of Peak Performance, 60 percent to 90 percent of success in sports can be attributed to mental factors and psychological mastery. Sports psychologist Thomas Tutko, PhD, quotes retired baseball player Maury Wills as saying that success is all mental. “There is nothing mystical about the emotional side of sports,” claims Dr. Tutko.
Unfortunately, your mind can also work against you. One individual commented to me about a top-ranked female runner he formerly coached: “It’s her thinking that keeps her from winning.”
Confidence remains an important factor—when we are confident, we can rationalize away any potential problems. Without confidence, even slight threats become magnified.
Confident athletes can relax more easily than ones who feel threatened, but there are tricks to relaxing and eliminating fear. Olympic marathoner Tony Sandoval used a five-to-zero countdown when he went to bed each night. “It relaxed me and helped me fall asleep quickly,” explains Sandoval.
As a steeplechaser, I had my own pre-sleep technique. I would visualize myself hurdling over barriers. It was better, I thought, than the more traditional counting of sheep, but it served another purpose beyond self-hypnosis. I was perfecting my hurdling technique through a method known as imaging. Marathoners can practice a similar technique, mentally reviewing the course before a race and thinking about how they will run it.
One way to succeed in sports is to eliminate outside distractions. Concentration continues to be a key to success for fast runners and should be for midpack runners, too. “The ability to concentrate,” says William P. Morgan, EdD, a sports psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, “is the single element that separates the merely good athletes from the great ones. Concentration is the hallmark of the elite runner.” Elite runners succeed, he says, because they are totally in tune with their bodies, monitoring all symptoms from the nerve endings.
In contrast, Dr. Morgan found that midpack marathoners more often thought of another activity (called dissociating) as a means of coping with pain. Dr. Morgan believes that in addition to possibly slowing them down, this tactic is dangerous: “Runners could be ignoring important body signals and mindlessly run themselves into heatstroke or a stress fracture.” Although dissociation blocks negative messages, it can block positive messages, too. For that reason, listening to music while running may unnecessarily distract you from the task at hand. Particularly at large races, I recommend leaving your music player at home because you will miss a lot of the fun going on around you.
Kazuo Takai of the University of Tsukuba split sixty runners into groups at a 20K race in Tokyo. Half the runners used what Takai described as “attention” techniques to stay on pace; half used “avoidance” techniques and followed the pace of the others. Takai found that the attentive runners outperformed the avoidance runners in achieving their predicted goals. Attention means that you tune in to your body’s signals midrace and let how you feel dictate your pace. Avoidance means that you tune out your body’s signals and go with the flow.
Does this mean that joining a pacing team is a form of avoidance? It depends on your goals and how you hope to achieve them by joining a team. Yes, if you let the team leader do all the work for you. No, if you focus tightly on staying with the leader, monitoring closely how successful he or she is at keeping you on pace. That could be considered a form of attention. Avoidance is not always a losing strategy, however, and some pacing team members may choose avoidance at some points of the race and attention at other times.
Takai’s spin on the subject was to identify five attention strategies that contributed to good race times.
Body check. How does your whole body feel? Are you loose and relaxed? Any tight spots (such as a sore shoulder) may be a signal to slow down.
Tempo test. How is the rhythm of your running? Do you feel smo-o-o-th? You should flow along the ground as though this were an easy practice run.
Leg rest. Can your legs continue to carry you at this pace? Any cramps? Discomfort? Maybe by speeding up, you will actually feel more comfortable.
Image replay. Remember your most successful races or practice runs. Do you feel as well now as you did then? Recapture the glory by picturing past triumphs.
Motion study. Are you running well? Move out of your own body and see yourself as though through a video camera. Now improve that picture.
Takai asked each of his subjects to indicate on a 7-point rating scale (1 = never; 7 = very often) how often they used these strategies to recall pace in a race. He then compared how close the runners came to their predicted time in a 5K. This enabled him to rate them as “accurate” or “inaccurate” recallers. Results showed that the accurate recallers were better pacers, capable of running steady through the race. “Overall,” says Takai, “the accurate recallers ran with a steady pace throughout the race, while the inaccurate recallers were likely to decrease the pace after the first 5K.”
Maintaining a steady pace or even having the energy to pick up the pace late in the race can be an effective strategy, since you will pass a lot of runners in the last half-dozen miles who went out too fast. Deena Drossin Kastor applied that approach in winning a bronze medal at the 2004 Olympic Games. “The smartest way to race is to pick off runners,” she commented after her third-place finish. “I started to get an adrenaline rush every time I saw another girl in front of me.”
When I ran marathons near the front of the pack, I always considered concentration to be as important an ability as a high VO2 max. I focused on every stride and was acutely aware of any signals my body was sending. I always liked the idea of running on scenic courses—except I almost never saw the scenery! Usually the better I ran, the less I recalled of the surroundings. I had run the Boston Marathon ten times and knew that the course passed somewhere near Fenway Park, where the Boston Red Sox play, but I was unaware how near until one year in the 1970s when I first covered the race for Runner’s World as a journalist. After the lead runners had finished, I decided to wander back over the course to watch the remaining runners. Less than a mile from the finish line, I came upon Fenway Park. I was startled. Intellectually, I had realized that Fenway was right on the course, but I had never seen it before. For me to have missed it while racing, my field of vision must have been very narrow.
Other runners agree on the value of concentration. Olympic marathoner Don Kardong states, “It’s absolutely essential that you concentrate on your competition, monitor your body feedback, and not lose touch with what’s happening around you. If you lose concentration in a good, competitive 10,000-meter race, you immediately drop off the pace. There’s never time to think those favorite thoughts you have on easy training runs.”
Greg Meyer, who struggled to regain his form after winning Boston in 1983, ran several meets in Europe one summer. “I’d lose concentration for a lap or two,” Meyer told me, “and that would get me out of the race. I’d drift off, get gapped, and never make it up.”
Meyer felt that a series of injuries contributed to his inability to concentrate. “You start focusing on the injuries instead of racing,” he said. But it was possible that in winning Boston, he had satisfied many of the inner demons that had driven him to success. He may have lost some of his will to win and, with it, the ability to concentrate.
Kardong notes that some distance runners have difficulty switching from roads to track or cross-country. He suspects that the biggest factor is not training but concentration: “When in an unfamiliar setting, you’re distracted by it initially. Later, you adapt.”
During a marathon, Bill Rodgers would think of specific things to help him concentrate: splits, competition, the course, the wind. If he had a chance to win, he thought: What’s my best way to race certain individuals?
Meyer learned he could concentrate better in training if he ran fartlek, rather than straight distance: “Rather than doing mindless 20-milers, you vary the pace, which forces you to pay attention.” Sue King, while training for the New York City Marathon, found she could concentrate more by running long runs alone so the conversation of friends did not distract her.
“The physical training your body does during the 18-week buildup to the marathon can all be washed away if the mind wanders,” says Frank Walaitis, a 3:02 runner from Carpentersville, Illinois.
Rodgers believes concentration must begin before a race. He avoids warming up with others, preferring to focus on the upcoming race. He also believes that the clinics, dinners, and social events he often attended as part of sponsor commitments diminished his concentration.
Nevertheless, many runners are less interested in developing or maintaining their powers of concentration in order to run fast. They are more interested in keeping mind and body together long enough to finish!
Judith Henderson of Denver, Colorado, counts steps—almost for the entire length of the race. “If I count every left-foot plant,” says Henderson, “it takes 440 left steps to run a mile. I keep the game up even through aid stations and brief conversations with other runners. It’s like a mental metronome. In the final miles of the marathon, I keep my focus on just the numbers, and it’s amazing how much this helps to keep moving you forward.”
Tracy Musacchio of New York City works out math problems in her head: “It’s 70 degrees out. What’s that in Celsius? How high can I name prime numbers? What’s 86 squared? It seems silly, but it works for me.”
While training for a marathon, Lori Hauswirth of Merrill, Wisconsin, keeps herself moving with what might be considered personal threats. “If I’m having a bad run, I tell myself that if I stop to walk, I won’t qualify for Boston,” she says.
Autumn Evans of Melbourne Beach, Florida, uses a similar drill sergeant approach when it comes to the final miles: “I resort to telling myself, ‘Suck it up, you weenie!’ I don’t want to disappoint myself by giving up or quitting.”
Nicole Long of St. Louis used an omen to spur her to a Boston qualifying time. “I told myself around 19 miles that I’d qualify for Boston if I saw a beagle on the course. So I spent the next several miles looking for one. Luckily, I spotted a man with a beagle. Later I saw the same man and his beagle at the finish line. I thanked him for bringing it.”
It may be risky for a runner to depend on the supply of beagles in the crowd for success. Ultimately, learning to improve your attention span and ability to concentrate for longer periods may prove to be the best strategy. But how can you learn to concentrate? How do you focus your mind on the business at foot?
At least one study shows that the average runner can learn to think like the elite runner. Researcher Hein Helgo Schomer, PhD, of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, improved the concentration of a group of ten non-elite runners over a period of 5 weeks. Before they were coached, the runners used association (being tuned in to their bodies) only 45 percent of the time. By the fifth week under Schomer’s instruction, they were associating 70 percent of the time while running, and their average training intensity also increased.
Learning to concentrate takes time. Each spring, once the snow melted, I used to head to the track for weekly interval training to try to regain speed lost after a winter of slow running. When I ran quarters, I knew that to run my fastest, I had to concentrate. Yet invariably I would get on the back stretch and my mind would wander and my pace would lag. Only after 5 or 6 weeks did my concentration improve to the point where I could keep my attention on running for a full quarter as well as during the interval of slow running between quarters. My track times then started to drop, convincing me that the improvement resulted from both stronger muscles and a stronger mind.
I typically did 400-meter repeats (with a 400 jog in between) to prepare myself for track races. Marathoners might benefit from doing long repeats of a mile: 1600 meters, or four laps around a track. I even have done 2-mile repeats around a subdivision loop near my home. I say 2 miles, but I never measured the loop; I figured it was about 2 miles based on the time it took to run it. The loop might have been longer or shorter, but the confidence I got from nailing a “fast time” became one of my mind games.
I also found various forms of speedwork—tempo runs and fartlek in the woods and strides on the grass, in addition to intervals on the track—to be effective in improving my concentration. Sometimes I would head to the golf course several times a week to run a half dozen or more short sprints—not flat-out but close to the speed I reach in a track mile. I did these “strides” to loosen my muscles for other longer and tougher workouts. I would return from the golf course running much faster, with my mind totally focused.
Although sometimes I would have difficulty concentrating during track workouts, particularly on distance runs, I usually managed to get my act together for important races: Competition tended to focus my mind. It enabled me to achieve speeds in competition that were beyond my reach in training.
How do you get mind and body in tune to run long distances faster? Here are several tips to help you block out mind drift.
Prepare yourself. Have a game plan for workouts and particularly for important races. Where are you going to run? How fast? How far? Against whom? Get yourself in a running frame of mind. Learn to relax. Following a regular warmup routine before running can get you into the mood to perform. Find a routine that works best for you—whether chanting a mantra or stretching—and stick with it.
Discover how your body works. While running fast, try to be aware of what the various parts of your body are doing. Can you discover what it feels like to run smoothly? If so, you may be able to duplicate that feeling on other occasions. Remember: Given equal physical skills, the ability to concentrate separates the merely good runners from the great ones.
Practice instant preplay and replay. If you can imagine before running how top runners run successfully—preplay—you’re halfway to emulating them. Practice running mentally as well as physically. Try replay as well. When you run well, remember how you ran. Fix that image in your memory, adding it to your mental video library.
Head for the track. Running against the clock and attempting to match preset goals forces you to concentrate. Learning to adjust to the track’s rhythm—running turns, for example—also helps, as do fartlek sessions and other forms of speedwork done on trails and on the road.
Plan days of maximum concentration. Not every workout needs to be fully focused, but select at least 1 day each week to practice concentration. Racing, particularly track or cross-country races, may help focus your mind.
Avoid race day distractions. Friends, traffic, or dogs (even beagles) can distract you from the act and art of running. Run solo when you can, to improve your concentration. If you want to succeed with your race plan, keep conversation to a minimum even if you are running with a friend.
Talk to yourself. Paul D. Thompson, MD, director of preventive cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, believes runners need pep talks. “I talk to myself when I train,” he says. “The year I ran best at Boston, I focused on what to tell myself during those last few miles, when it hurts.” Thompson placed sixteenth at Boston one year by telling himself “Keep going” and “I’m a tough dude.”
Landmark the course. What are the key points on the course you plan to race? Where are the hills? Where are the flats? What sections of the course will drain you, and what sections (such as by Wellesley College, where the women come out to cheer Boston marathoners) will give you strength? Do not wait until the course tour the day before the race to learn what you will be running.
Focus hardest when it counts most. If you find it difficult to concentrate during the full 26 miles of a marathon, save your focus for the miles when you need it the most. Kardong used to dissociate the first half of the race, then associate the second half.
Concentration cannot compensate for lack of training or basic ability, but it can help you maximize your potential.