Mindfulness and Mental Toughness in Running

Mindfulness and mental toughness are buzz words floating around and gaining popularity over the past few years, and rightfully so. Not only can these two concepts have a profound impact on your training as an athlete but can equally affect the quality of your day to day life.

You have probably heard the phrase at some point that endurance running is 80% mental. Physical fitness will only get you so far when you are striving for that personal best on race day. Yes, it is important, but the mental tasks of pushing through discomfort, managing nutrition and hydration, and maintaining focus become more important. In shorter races like 5k's and 10k's you need to push through intense discomfort to run your fastest time, while in longer races like marathons and ultras you need to manage that discomfort and continue to run for long periods of time. 

No matter if it is a short distance or long-distance race, at some point your mind is going to be trying to tell you that it is ok to slow down, and this is where mental fitness becomes just as important as physical fitness.

Mental fitness also becomes very important for your day to day training. There are days for all runners when you don't feel like getting out there for your training run. Training your brain with mindfulness practice is a great way to help you be a more resilient athlete who is able to cope with all of life's distractions to get your runs done no matter what. 

There are two ways in which we can train to push our bodies harder. The first way is evident. You need to train hard and suffer through hard workouts and eventually, you will get tougher. The second is through mindfulness and mental toughness. When you train your brain outside of your workouts, you will focus and perform better in your training and races.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is defined as a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. For me, this means honing my superpowers of taking my brain off of autopilot and taking back some control over how I react or choose to act in certain situations. It also means learning how to listen to what your body is trying to tell you instead of going with your brain's first interpretation of how it thinks you are feeling. 

A powerful analogy used to understand how this applies is driving in a car. You drive your car every day to work, so much that you don't even need to think where you are going anymore. Your brain knows where to go and what exits to take on auto-pilot. This path has become warn in and familiar. You may drive by many other different exits along the road, but you almost don't even see them anymore. One day you decide that you want to take a different way home. So you plan your route, and you know what exit you want to take. You are a bit nervous about missing that exit as you have never taken it before, but you find it and get off. When you exit the highway, it feels a bit unfamiliar. You are not quite sure where to go but, you see a beautiful lake and some lovely views up ahead, and you decide that you like this way home. The next few times, you think about going this the new way home but, you keep missing the exit because you are so used to going the old way home. Eventually, the more you get off on the exit, you want to take the more familiar and automatic it because you train your brain to go the new way instead of the old way. 

How this relates to running is, for instance, if you always find that you are easing up at the end of a race when you think you should be able to push through and finish hard. You need to train your brain to have a new response to the discomfort of your sore and tired legs. Right now, the old way that your brain is used to, is that it tells you not to finish hard when see the finish line even though you told yourself that you would when you started the race. You can train your brain to have a different response in this situation, which will allow you to finish the race harder.

What is Mental Toughness?

Mental toughness or mental resilience is defined as the ability to resist, manage and overcome doubts, worries, concerns, and circumstances that prevent you from succeeding, or excelling at a task or towards an objective or a performance outcome that you set out to achieve. So for me, this means having the strength and courage in situations when things get tough, when you are mindfully aware that your brain is telling you to do one thing, but it contradicts what you know you need to do to succeed, you can push through the doubts and continue moving forward. 

It is clear that the concepts of mental toughness and mindfulness are linked or even just different applications of the same idea. The good news is that, like the "driving in the car" analogy, you can train your brain to work this way so that you can be more in control and less on autopilot.

Mindfulness Exercise

Here is an exercise you can try:

Start sitting (or lying down) with your eyes closed. Take three deep breaths fully in and fully out. Then just let your breath flow naturally. Focus on your breath. Start to notice the rise and fall of your chest or belly, feel the air coming into your lungs. Now start counting your breaths. Odd on the inhale, even on the exhale up to ten. Then start back at one. Don't get discouraged when your mind wanders off and you lose track of your count, or you keep counting past 10. When you notice you have gone off track, simply start back at 1. The whole point of the exercise is to be aware when you lose focus and gently bring the focus back. Start with 5 minutes and see how it goes.

Combining the Mindfulness Practice with Running

This is where it gets really fun and exciting. After you have gotten the hang of this exercise, you can start incorporating them into your training runs, just leave out the sitting down and eyes closed part out. 

When you are out for a run, and you find you are getting distracted. First, you noticed that you are distracted! That is a big win! You can be distracted thinking about how stressful your day was, what you have to do when you get home, or by the fact, the run is really hard. 

When used while running, this breathing exercise can be very helpful to allow you to tune in to how you are feeling instead of letting that voice in your head telling you to slow down and give up in your head get the better of you during your workouts, long runs, and races.

Mental Toughness/Resilience 

Pretty much all of us can agree that we would all like to be more mentally tough. To be able to push through some of those mental roadblocks both in life and in running. One way we train this is by doing hard things like interval workouts and long runs. However, you have now just learned how to focus on your breath and calm your mind.

When you are running, and things get difficult, your brain comes up with all of the excuses to try and get you to slow down, or it's ok to take that walk break. Your mind knows all of your weaknesses and uses every one of them against you. The thing is that this response from your mind doesn't just come into play with you are doing something that is physically demanding. It happens when you are doing things that are mentally demanding. For instance, you have a tight deadline at work, and it shows up at home when you are mentally fatigued from a tough day of work and training, and you have a pile of laundry and dishes to do. Can you start to draw some parallel here with running and life? I hope so. 

The next time you are running in the last 10 k of your marathon or finishing up a hard interval workout, and your mind is screaming at you telling your legs are fried, and you're hitting the wall, instead of panicking and going into to a pity party, you have now started to learn how to train your brain to be able to refocus on your breath and the task at hand of finishing your race.

If you found this information interesting, I also wrote about how Olympians increase their mental toughness.