Mental Toughness for Triathletes: The Secret is Training
In this current age of “visualization”, “mindfulness”, and “meditative contemplation”, mental toughness is *very* trendy. It can help in business, personal relationships, and most importantly for us - sports. An individual's ability to cope with difficult situations and overcome obstacles can allow them to be more consistent, more confident, push harder, and ultimately, succeed. Athletes may have physical limits, which are adapted from hard/consistent training, but mental toughness is what determines how close to those limits you are able to push… and most of us never truly get close. For some real mental toughness watch this video…
Don’t put icing on the cake before you bake it: If you’re new to this sport (1-3 years experience) and you find yourself googling techniques to unlock your potential through visualization and breathing exercises you should probably lace up your shoes and get running first. I’m not saying that mental toughness techniques aren’t valuable and worth practicing but honestly you need to exhaust all your physical resources (meaning training) before you’ll get a lot out of mental training. I visualize crossing the finish line at Lake Placid on the podium during all of my rides and runs, seriously I do, but I don’t let that take my focus away from my power, heart rate or pace. If you rely too heavily on your mind rather than your body you’re essentially just dreaming. I don’t mean to undermine the value of mental toughness, but you first have to train your body to be capable of competing before you start training your mind, and that could take years of practice.
“Finding what you dislike and what you’re scared of and practice the hell out of it is the best way to build mental toughness...but ya know keep visualizing too.”
Do more of what you don’t like to do: Once in a while you’ll have to swim and you’ll have to run off the bike...sorry but it’s the sport you choose. Doing things you don’t want to do is a great way to build mental toughness. Fortunately it’s pretty simple to turn something you dislike into something that is, at worst, a non issue and that is repetition. Repetition. Repetition. The more you practice the more you’ll train your mind to accomplish your goal. If you’re nervous about the open water swim, go find a lake or the ocean (bring a friend or floatation device) and swim. If you think you’re going to have trouble running after the bike and you’re dreading it, run off the bike every time you ride. It’s extremely common in this sport for the distance to be the thing that gives you the most anxiety. Roger Bannister, first person run under a 4:00 minute mile, classically trained by running 1.5 mile repeats at a slower pace than 4:00 minutes per mile to make the 1 mile seem less formidable. Finding what you dislike and what you’re scared of and practice the hell out of it is the best way to build mental toughness...but ya know keep visualizing too.
Turn off the Music (Perceived Effort): Perceived effort is a two fold process - 1) how you feel and 2) how you feel about how you feel. Whether you realize it or not listening to music while training gives your brain subtle cues, and hearing an awesome song distracts your brain from *feeling* how hard the effort is, which makes the training run with music feel like a breeze. But if you need your favorite song to pump you up for a hard interval on the bike or a run, your mind will start relying on that cue to push you and it could make a race without music suddenly feel far harder than you were expecting (the dreaded *part 2* of perceived effort). If your perceived effort is suddenly sky-high doing your trained-for race pace on the day of, you’ll panic. If you like working out with music, my advice would be use it for all your easy runs but when it comes time for a long run or an interval run turn off the music and let your mind work on coping mechanisms for dealing with the effort. You need to learn how to intrinsically motivate yourself, and anticipate that it will be a challenge, especially during longer workouts, or you won’t be able to mentally handle a longer race.
Understand yourself: Before you can unlock your potential mentally you have to take a hard look at yourself as an athlete and start being honest with yourself. Triathletes are surrounded with this stigma that they are all Type A personalities who are super driven and competitive...at best most are Type A-...at best! The vast majority of triathletes are simply out there having fun, being healthy and being part of an amazing community that accepts everyone! That in itself is the beauty of this sport. What isn’t as beautiful is when athletes embrace this Type A mentality when it is so clear that it isn’t their personality. In 2019 I watched the very last finisher of an Ironman race cross the line at one minute before midnight, it was a beautiful visual and symbolized that humans can achieve anything they set their mind too...until I found out that this athlete had done this before at a previous race. Then after looking at some time splits it became clear that this athlete was intentionally crossing the line in last place for praise of the audience! I bet he/she is a real Type A, captain of industry, trains 25 hours a week and through every ounce of their being they cross the line...nope they paid $800 to wait around and get some applause from strangers. This took zero mental toughness, zero. If the best you can do is finish at 11:59pm I am just as happy for you as I am for the person who won the entire race, seriously I am, I know it doesn’t sound like it but Ironman is so hard that anyone who dumps their entire being into it deserves to be praised. Doing your best requires some level of mental toughness, but intentionally not giving your all is the opposite of mental toughness. The ugly truth of the sport is that most people just act like they dump their entire being into to get some cheers from strangers. Unlocking your mental potential becomes impossible if you’re lying to yourself. Know yourself and unlock your mind so you can start pushing the limits.
Figure out what Drives you: I put this last because it can be extremely difficult to articulate and understand. It can also take years to figure out. What is your motivation? More motivation lets you tolerate a higher perceived effort and be grittier in achieving your goals, so it is important… but hard to pin down. Ask anyone if they like triathlon at mile 23 of an Ironman and if they say “yes” call them a liar because at that moment they are lying. I get asked all the time why I train so much what drives me to be so obsessed and competitive with a sport that yields me virtually no money or recognition. My answer is simple “it’s a hard sport”. Seriously that’s my answer and it’s true. Training is hard, racing is hard, competing at a high level is really really hard. If the puzzle was easy I wouldn’t be interested in doing it, I’d simply put it together and find something else to do. The extreme difficulty and impossibility of being the best is what drives me. I get annoyed when someone wins a race I’m not even at if I think I could have beaten them on that day! The below quote from Matt Fitzgerald kind of gets at my feeling:
“There is no experience quite like that of driving yourself to the point of wanting to give up and then not giving up. In that moment of ‘raw reality,’ as Mark Allen has called it, when something inside you asks, How bad do you want it?, an inner curtain is drawn open, revealing a part of you that is not seen except in moments of crisis. And when your answer is to keep pushing, you come away from the trial with the kind of self-knowledge and self-respect that can’t be bought.”
Everyone’s “reason” might be different, and that answer is complex… but that is kind of the point, there is no simple answer for everyone. Once you figure out what drives you to train and compete, even if you’re like me and it's the challenge itself that draws you, you’ll be able to tap into more of your potential and ask more of yourself.
