Training for the mind – Book Reviews

It’s said that running an ultra is 90% physical, and the other 90% is mental! However you choose to do the maths, it’s clear that there is a huge mental component to ultra running. We all spend lots of time training our bodies (and I wrote a post about my training approach last year), but much less training our minds. After suffering a complete mental collapse (a.k.a. losing my shit 🤯) at Thetford BYU last year this is an area I decided it was time to pay some overdue attention to. I put a couple of relevant books on my Christmas list and after reading them over the last few weeks, here’s what I learned…

P.S. You can find these books easily from your favourite bookseller, but if you click through the links below to buy at Amazon it will help (just a little) to support Miles Together at no extra cost to you. Thanks in advance 🙏

How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle by Matt Fitzgerald

Matt is the author of several other books on endurance sports (not that I’ve read any of them), but this one is a collaboration with Professor Samuele Marcora, so it’s got two things going for it: it’s very readable, but also backed up by solid scientific research. The main idea introduced is the psychobiological model of endurance performance, which basically says that our performance in an event is not primarily limited by our physical ability, but by our mind. He uses the analogy of a fire-walking event where we must pass over a bed of hot coals to reach a wall. The wall represents our physical limitations – the fastest, longest or hardest that we could achieve, effectively our physical limitations which can only be improved by physical training. However, our actual performance in the fire-walk (how close we can get to the wall) is limited by our mind’s ability to tolerate the associated discomfort – known as our perception of effort. In a nutshell, our mind controls how much of our physical maximum performance we can achieve in an event. According to Marcora, it is perception of effort, not the actual effort itself that the critical factor that our mind monitors during an event and influences the level of effort the mind can direct the body to generate. As a result, by training our mind to either tolerate higher perception of effort, or to produce more actual effort for a given perception, we can increase our athletic performance.

The rest of the book consists of a series of examples of coping mechanisms – strategies which we can train our minds to use that will increase our performance. These are illustrated by real-world examples from a range of endurance sports including running, rowing, triathlon and cycling. Each coping mechanism is based on a specific psychological principle or effect, with summaries of relevant scientific studies as well as relevant anecdotes. Some of the ones I found most interesting were:

• Bracing yourself, which means preparing mentally for an event by telling yourself that this will be hardest thing you’ve ever done, to expect it to feel tough (or even painful). It’s kind of obvious when you think about it but by setting out this mental expectation, when your mind perceives a high level of effort (things are getting hard), instead of responding by backing off, slowing down, or wanting to quit, it can go “OK, I expected this, its OK to keep pushing”. Putting this in practice for ultramarathons means expecting the race to feel hard! Combined with a sensible starting pace, every ultra should feel easy to begin with, but at some point it is going to feel hard. Exactly when that point is might vary, but I was really hit by this about 20 miles in to By Way of the Glen (180 miler) and finding it unexpectedly hard so early was really demoralising and made me start to think about quitting (and burning my running gear and never running again 🤣), This coping mechanism should also translate well to Backyard Ultras, which of course are well known to be easy… up to the point that they aren’t! When you hit that point, being braced for it means that it’s easier to keep going – after all this was what you expected.
• The audience effect. It’s well known and scientifically proven that people can perform better due to increased motivation (performing for the audience), but also that the mere presence of the audience reduces perception of effort, making the same level of performance feel easier. Not only that, but having a supportive audience not only makes you perform better but even feel capable of performing better, creating a virtuous double-whammy effect! Applying this to running ultras, we all know the boost of seeing our crews at checkpoints, or other supporters along the course. Even talking on the phone to someone, or asking friends to send messages of encouragement as they “dot-watch” or follow your progress should have the same effect. At Race Across Scotland this year I’ll be (hopefully) taking part in a research study where the researcher will actually attend and observe my performance and behaviour at the event – I hope that will contribute to me having a great race 🤞
• The group effect is when we produce an elevated level of performance due to either taking part in an activity as a group (such as a team at a cross-country race, which is one example given in the book), or from being part of a “group culture” which creates a social force leading to greater effort. Interestingly, this effect is biologically hard-wired into us, but we can arrange circumstances to benefit from it. A great example would be the Belgian team at the 2024 Backyard Ultra World Team championships – not only did every single member of their team achieve 48 yards or more, three of them set a new joint world record of 110 yards – and they all appeared to be having fun doing so! If you know me you’ll know I am quite a competitive type and tend to view other runners as my competition, but I’m looking forward to seeing how collaborating can improve performance – especially in the Backyard, where you always need at least two people in order to keep the race going.
• The workaround effect is also a really interesting concept – it’s based on our brain’s ability to adjust dynamically to our body’s limitations. For example, as we become extremely fatigued or even injured during an ultra race, our minds can spontaneously develop new movement patterns (e.g. a modified running gait) that enable us to continue. I think this is strongly related to a concept I heard from John Kelly “it doesn’t always get worse“. It’s easy to think when things get tough (perception of effort increases) that we are on a downhill slope to getting slower and slower and eventually quit (or DNF). In reality (and I have experienced this a few times in races), if you push through, your can find a new lease of life, or a second wind. Knowing that this has a sound basis in psychobiological fact makes it easier to trust this and push through the inevitable low points in an ultra race.

There’s lots more good stuff in the book, relating to goal setting, dealing with failure and much more! In summary, I found “How Bad Do You Want It?” gives a lot of really interesting ways to think about and look at endurance sports performance. So if a good dose of science is what you like, then you’ll probably appreciate reading it. It didn’t have quite as much as I’d hoped in terms of specific, actionable strategies that can be practiced – but at least for me, understanding more about how and why my body and mind behave the way that they do gives me more confidence in my own ability to manage myself better in a race situation… at least, I think it will. I’m sure I’ll find out during the coming year!

Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness by Steve Magness

The second book on my reading list is a a bit different as it tackles to topics of resilience and toughness in a wider context than just endurance sports. The author Steve Magness is an “Executive Coach” although he has a background in exercise physiology,and most of the examples he uses are taken from the world of sports. The main point of the book is that that traditional view of being “tough”, which involves gritted teeth, a “suck it up” mentality, and hiding any signs of weakness behind a façade of false bravado is flawed. It doesn’t actually help us perform at our best, and worse it can fail entirely under pressure, leading us to “freak out” and make bad choices (for example DNF’ing an ultra).

Conversely, he introduces a different type of resilience, illustrated by anecdotes and backed up by current psychological science. This new resilience is based on four pillars:

• Embrace Reality. The foundation of resilience is developing an accurate appraisal of the demands of a task (such as a race) and an accurate appraisal of our own ability (our fitness, or training status). This immediately helps with realistic goal setting, leading to a positive cycle where our level of stress is reduced, our self-confidence is increased since we know we have the ability to achieve a task, and it can also help avoid the classic pitfall of a “macho” approach of going out too hard and crashing later in a race!
• Listen to your Body. The thrust of this part of the book is that by becoming more in tune with the feelings and sensations that we will experience (during an event), we learn to respond to them more critically. For example, if your knees get sore after 50 miles of running (a feeling) we need to know if it’s just the normal sensation at that point in the race, or if it might be indicative of an injury. Having a solid baseline of information will help us respond appropriately. There are also some really interesting ideas about understanding and controlling your “inner voice”, which plays an important part in determining our mind’s response to feelings.
• Respond Instead of React. This is about creating “space” between the sensation and our response to it, training our mind to make sensible decisions rather than triggering an immediate reaction like spiralling into unnecessary negative thought patterns, or giving in the urge to quit. This section (and the others, actually) has some interesting practical exercises that you can do to train these behaviour patterns. One example I have tried a bit in training runs is called “zooming” – consciously focussing on the task at hand (for example focussing on running form) is zooming in, and disassociating from what you are doing is zooming out. Steve recommends having lots of different strategies available to you so you can make use of them as and when required, depending on the specific demands of the situation.
• Transcend Discomfort. This sounds a bit hippie, but really it boils down to thinking about the “why”, so that when challenges arise (and they certainly will at some point during an ultra) you can put them into proper context. If you see the bigger picture, you can make the “tough” choice to overcome difficulty rather than give in, and find meaning out of suffering.

I’m not sure my summary has fully done justice to the book, but hopefully it gives you a flavour of what it’s about! Handily, there are dozens of little “Toughness Maxims” scattered throughout, which were super helpful trying to recall the key points that I just explained to you. There are also lots of specific, actionable strategies which you can practice. I have tried just a few of them, but hopefully some good ones which I’ll be able to put to use when the going gets tough during upcoming races.

I hope you found this post interesting, I certainly enjoyed revisiting both books to write it! Please leave a comment if you’d like to read more like it – there’s plenty more on the Miles Together bookshelf that I could dive into. Don’t forget if you want to buy either of them you can find them both on Amazon:

How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle by Matt Fitzgerald

Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness by Steve Magness