In the past 2 months I’ve done a lot of reflecting on my past year (well, 11 months) of training. Where have I succeeded, where have I failed, where will I grow, what am I missing in the triathlon world? For a while I would send training-related emails to a friend who was training for a marathon. Usually any adivice I gave her was also applicable to myself–as if I were sharing the things I was thinking about myself. We had shot some emails around about mental fortitude, and I wanted to share some pieces about the importance of our minds when it comes to endurance sports. Mental strength is important in any sport, but applying it in a sport where you have no teammates is very different.

Let me start by quoting the Arnold.

“Experiencing this pain in my muscles and aching and going on is my challenge. This area of pain divides a champion from someone who is not a champion. That’s what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they’ll go through the pain no matter what happens. I have no fear of fainting. I do squats until I fall over and pass out. So what? It’s not going to kill me. I wake up five minutes later and I’m OK. A lot of other athletes are afraid of this. So they don’t pass out. They don’t go on.”

Bonus points to anyone who read that with the appropriate accent in your mind.

Body building is far different from endurance training. Passing out is definitely not going to be a good thing for athletes to try on a regular basis. I came extremely close as I finished my first half marathon last year, and I did pass out a month after that following a 20 mile training run. Passing out from extreme effort is also much different than passing out because your body is shutting down. Don’t worry, I will not advocate passing out here. But I will advocate the kind of effort that will make you want to.

I read an article recently about teaching yourself to race. For anyone who wants to read it, the link is: http://running.competitor.com/2012/10/training/teaching-yourself-how-to-race_60581/1 The article epitomizes the concept of running being mental—which is something I concluded a long time ago when I first started out and was surprisingly successful without much training. Last year I found that even though I trained all summer and fall, I didn’t get much faster than I was in the spring. Why? I had literally just picked up the sport in the spring, so it would stand to reason that I’d get faster once I actually started training. I believe there were many factors involved in my slow progress, but I really believe one of them was my mind. Once I’d done some races and trained a lot, I began to understand what my “limits” were. Limits are a crutch—not a barrier. We create limits based on how we feel when we train. Suddenly those perceptions control our training and our concept of how well we can do in a race.

Picture my first race I ever did in 2009—ten mile canal run in Hancock, MI. Hadn’t run all summer (nor before that), but played a lot of basketball and was in good shape. I had no experience to help me decide how fast I could or should run–no crutches to lean on. So I went out with the leaders and did a blistering 5:30 mile to start out. Then I was in lots of pain and backed off the throttle (enter the hecklers… yes, no kidding I backed off) until I hit mile 5 and then it was a mental decision that made me pick it up again. Why was I deciding to be comfortable, when I knew I could deal with the pain? So I ran sub 6 minute miles for the next 5 miles. I breathed like I was running wind sprints the whole time. I paid for it the next day/week, but here I am years later and I feel great about it. Same thing with my marathon. I ran about a 7:10 pace for 26.2 miles, but do you think I had run that pace in any training run that was longer than 6 or 8 miles? Nope. But when I ran the race, there was no concept of picking a pace based off of my training or experience. Partly it was because I was still so new and didn’t understand the sport like I do now, but partly it was because my mentality was more of a “here is what I’m going to do” than “here is what I think I can do.” I still had no crutches. I picked 7:10 because that was Boston. That was definitely a painful race, and I paid for it again the next month with shin splints.

As that year went on my perceptions of what I was capable of began to surface and I suddenly knew what my limits were. Now I had crutches to lean on so I could be comfortable. Who would want to be in pain every day? And so I trained all summer and barely gained a thing. By training our bodies every day we become afraid of going beyond our limits–for many reasons. The pain, injury, failing, conventional wisdom, the training plan, etc… But we don’t only compete on race day. We compete every day. If we want to overcome the pain on race day, then we need to push beyond our mental limits when we train. We need to feel that point where we can’t go on, and then prove that we can. We cannot afford to believe that the pain will slow us down.

For those of you who’ve participated in team sports, you might understand what this is about. Let’s pick basketball, because I’ve been fortunate to have friends who were great basketball players. If you played basketball, I’m sure you had workouts where you pushed yourself harder than you thought you could go. To the point where you were dizzy. To where you wanted to puke. The motivation might have been teammates, a championship, coach, whatever… But limits weren’t something to stay within. The mentality is different, because it’s how we want to play the sport—that’s how you become great. Now when we run, we have GPS watches and HR monitors, and we track our miles and paces… and the knowledge of those things creates mental barriers—crutches that we lean on so that we stay comfortable or at a pain threshold that we know. But we have to be careful not to believe we are only as good as the pace that we set, or the pain that we feel. Whatever pain it is, there’s always another level where it’s worse, and that’s the one where we want to be.