The confident mind works for running

A follow-up to a book review: I've gotten a lot of mileage (get it!) out of applying the ideas form The Confident Mind in my running.

The basic context is that I've been running races since I was a teenager - cross country since middle school, 5ks and half marathons ever since. My times have never been 'competitive' - at my high school peak I was running low 19s in the 5k, which is nowhere near good enough to place in a race or run in college. But I'm extremely competitive: in high school, I'd start getting nervous a full day before the race, and the nerves would tank my performance. I've always had a bad mental game.

The basic advice in The Confident Mind has been helpful, mostly these two things:

Visualization

It's so goofy but visualization works. Trying to imagine the run the night before and earlier the day of the race makes the whole experience noticeably better. Thankfully all the 5ks I've been running are on the same park loop where I train so it's pretty easy to load it into my head.

It also works for life. Visualizing conversations, having a good day at work, weekend activities - it all kind of works, once you get over the weirdness of doing it.

Jitters

The book contains this description of pre-competition jitters:

That adrenaline finds its way back to the heart through the magic of your circulatory system, and from there it gets distributed throughout your body, everywhere the blood goes. Wherever it goes, things start getting active: the heart muscle itself, infused with some “adrenalized” blood, pumps harder (and hence loud enough for you to really notice it); other muscles throughout the body receive their share of the enhanced blood and, together with more “prepare to fire” neuron signals from the brain, twitch in anticipation, making for the jitters you feel in your hands. And the one hundred million neurons connecting the brain to the stomach and intestines also fire faster, making the sensitive smooth muscle fibers in the stomach vibrate like butterfly wings.

The end result of all this activity is that you become a stronger, faster, more alert, more perceptive (your pupils open up, too), more fully prepared to take on the world human being! Essentially, your own body, all on its own, without any conscious effort, produces a state-of-the-art, custom-made, performance-enhancing chemical for your unique biochemical needs and delivers it in precisely the right dosage at precisely the right time when it can do you the most good. And it doesn’t cost you a dime. And unlike many other performance-enhancing chemicals, this one’s perfectly legal! Stop for a second and think about how truly wonderful it is that your body gives you such a powerful gift when it senses you could use a little help.

Of course it's one thing to try and reframe something in your mind and quite another to succeed at it in the moment. But with plenty of repetition and self-reminding, I've succeed at being happy with some jitters.

Before, I would try to fight that feeling and evoke calm. But now I don't: I go with it, let my heart rate increase and my body get a little hyped-up. Going with the flow is much easier than fighting it, and the excitement definitely helps a bit.