J.O. wrote:I agree. But a lot of runners and coaches get extremely obsessive about what they consider to be 'scientific training' when really they are just kidding themselves and trying to impress others with their fizzyology.
I think that's right. It's important not to take the reactive view and over-emphasize an abstract notion of "the mental." The game is already lost when it becomes a parsing out of the proportions of "mental" and "physical" because these concepts can't be clearly distinguished to begin with and often refer to nothing concrete.
Training, running, racing, these things always involve both mind and body. Instead of getting caught up in a metaphysical dispute about which is more essential, it's best to talk about the specific and concrete mental and physical capacities that are addressed by a specific training act and to relate the need for these capacities to the history and goals of the athlete in question.