Peak performance is hard to achieve.
Really hard to achieve.
I’d argue that most of the time, even when we perform our best, we feel we've left something on the table.
But, now and then, magic happens and we run OUT OF OUR MINDS.
It’s a perfect alignment of physical and mental readiness.
As runners, we are constantly in search of these days. The “I can’t believe I just did that” days.
I know I do.
I’ve realized through experience in this sport that the more you try to make those days happen, the more they backfire.
At least that is the case for me.
Many of my “magic” days have come from days when I convinced myself that I wasn’t even going to race. Two races stuck in my mind where I talked to my coach beforehand and said, "I’m not feeling well today, I’m probably going to drop out."
And then guess what happened?
I ran two of the best races of my life, go figure.
What happened is that I removed the pressure and expectation from myself to perform. The result was that I felt FAR better than I could’ve ever expected. I felt so good that I decided to roll with it. And because I no longer had the mental weight caused by my pre-race anxieties, I was able to dig deep and run a lifetime best.
The opposite of this is also true.
After running two of the best races of my life, I got cocky. I took those races as confirmation of who I now was. I felt like I was unbeatable. I expected the stars to align every race.
The result of this was failure to epic proportions.
As soon as I started to feel the pain creep in, I panicked and all systems shut down completely. I was withdrawn and slogged into the finish line defeated and embarrassed of my failure.
What was I to do?
Knowing that my best races came from when I resolved myself to failure, I took that approach.
It sounds silly to go into a race thinking to yourself, “Yeah, I’m just going to quit” but for some reason, it worked for me in the past.
This did not work.
This mindset just made me want to quit and gave me the excuse to quit. It was one thing to resolve this under extreme anxiety; it was another to make this my intent.
Next, I tried to go into my races with the thought of caring less. If I put less emphasis on the race itself, then I could potentially achieve a greater outcome. This worked! Instead of obsessing over the course, weather, the competition, and the pain of racing, I let it come to me. This provided some mental freedom that allowed me to race successfully.
But, with anything, there is a limit (and some regrets).
Like most things, I took it to the extreme. The more I didn’t care for the race, the more that became true. I stopped caring at all. And when you don’t care at all, you will surely not race well. I mean, think about it - what sense does that make?
Now I need to make a change. I need to find a way that I can not get so anxiety-driven that I turn into a shell of myself, but then I don’t get so careless that the race has no meaning.
Like most things, there’s a balance, and somewhere in the middle is the right direction to go.
I need to prepare my mind to be willing to push, compete, and go deep, but I need to have enough free space in there to not let that turn into crippling anxiety that results in catastrophic blow-ups.
I'm working on it!
Where do you fall along the spectrum of low versus high arousal/excitement? Do you need to be pumped up or do you do better with a more zen-like approach? Perhaps you’re somewhere in the middle. It’s worthwhile to explore what mental approach allows you to perform at your best because the faster you can get dialed into what works, the more likely you’ll find those magic days again.
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