How Do you Stay Mentally Tough in a Race?

you'll feel better once you finish. Picture how good it will feel once you're done.

When you start getting fatigued during a race do not relax, everybody says to relax, but relaxing means losing focus!!! When you are tired, look at the first person in front of you and say to yourself, " Don't be a pussy, he is right there in front of you, hurting just as bad, don't be a pussy" this works for me and I begin to close in on the enemy, my advice pretty much is don't let up and don't relax, focus on the race!

High Schooler wrote:

My question is, how do you stay mentally tough in a race? Sometimes when I get very tired during a race, I consider just settling for second. Does anybody have any mental tricks or ideas on how I can fight through the pain?

Easy, settle for second just once.

Then, next time you have that option, recall how shitty that felt.

Darkwave wrote:

Easy, settle for second just once.

Then, next time you have that option, recall how shitty that felt.

This is good advice. The pain of your disappointment in wimping out will far exceed the pain of fatigue. You'll rmember feeling like a loser for giving in and settling for 2nd. You won't want to feel it again.

don't wimp out, picture defeating your enemy

Relaxation is good advice but what does it mean? I.e. how to do it? Try to relax a specific part of your body that tends to tense up, say your neck, shoulders, whatever. Arm carriage is important. Think elbows and knees.

When tired and beginning to struggle midrace, pick up the pace. Counterintuitive, but most of the time it works and you wil feel better faster. If you concede and slow down, well, very few people come back after being broken.

Break down your race into 100m legs and just hit the next split. Don't think about the next one or next lap or beyond. Just the next split. You've done it a million times in practice. That's where confidence in your training comes in.

Last lap or last 200m depends on change of pace drills. Separate subject.

Lastly, remember that everyone hurts, even the great ones, and that your competitor is hurting too, so make him suffer more. You'll get through soon enough. The deep satisfaction of balls out makes the transitory distress more than worth it.

just run

just think about the finish, relax, picture how tired your opponents are

pain is temporary

W. Mitty wrote:

When tired and beginning to struggle midrace, pick up the pace. Counterintuitive, but most of the time it works and you wil feel better faster.

This was Zatopek's(?) famous mantra: Every time I felt tired, I picked up the pace. It really does work, too: puts you in a more positive frame of mind and a more productive/efficient body posture/alignment. (Think of all the times you've seen people racing with "sorry for myself" form. It *looks* slow, doesn't it?)

Even so, most people interpret this advice as simply "trying harder," and it often doesn't work as well as the coaches say it should. So here's something specific you can do: the checkout.

A checkout is basically 10-15 quick steps (should be less than six seconds' duration)--not a gradual acceleration, but a "throw the switch" shift into a higher gear. This skill comes readily to some runners, more slowly to others, but just about everyone can acquire it pretty quickly. You can work on it in Indian-file drills.

[The reasoning behind the checkout is that you're recruiting some relatively fresh muscle fibers, and because you're using them for <6secs, you'll develop almost no additional lactate--sorry, I'm using the term inexactly--there.]

After the checkout you're more likely to settle back to efficient form, and often to a slightly faster pace that may actually feel more comfortable than what you were running before the checkout. Perhaps more to the point, when you check out of a tough pace you are *doing something*. It's much easier to stay competitive and focused on beating others if you're doing (something--almost anything) rather than feeling (fatigue).

Checkouts are especially helpful in the last half of a race, when you want to pass people with authority and not just settle right in front of them, acting as a shield for the wind. In the first half of a race, if you're keeping steady pace you'll just slide by a lot of people who went out too fast; but in the second half you need to make a break as you pass people (so they don't just leech off you), and checking out as you pass is the way to do this.

Key points:

1. Checkouts are BRIEF, 20 steps at the absolute most (shorter is better). We're not talking a Webb-style 100m midrace sprint here, or even 50m.

2. People differ on how frequently (within a race) they can do these, but many can do them as much as twice, even thrice, in a 400m lap.

3. It may help to shift your brain to your arms, not your legs, when checking out. Think "quick elbows" or "fast hands."

4. It does take some guts to check out of a tough pace--"Go faster? I can barely keep this speed!"--but once you've tried it a few times, you'll see how much relief it can provide.

just keep running

you need a strong desire to win

focus on what you can do to win the race, remember that your competiters are tired too

just picture your opponents as more tired than you

i learned this trick back in high school from my coach. he would have me and the rest of the XC team cut down to having 1 bowel movement per week. he told us this would help us run faster and persevere through the race. and guess what, it worked! for most of the race i was only concentrating on not pooping right there in my shorts and it really took my focus off the pain. though i do remember one race were a runner on the team accidentally pooped while running up a hill. however, it was not a big deal since he was able to discretely walk off of the course. no biggie.

my coach told us that this was an old native american technique used when going on long deer hunts. i suggest keeping a sort of log to record your bowel movements in. this is a little-known trick, but it has been used by some of the best runners in the world.

forget about the pain

suck it up

I trained mostly by myself so after doing hard w/o' on my own the mental toughness was developed through the training.

I think there might still be 1 or 2 sports cliches in existence that haven't been posted in this thread yet.