Bringing Your Mental Strength To Race Day

So there you are, you’ve done an easy warm up jog, stretched, and put on your racing shoes.  There’s 30 minutes until the gun goes off for the 10k road race. You feel like you’ve done all you can to get yourself ready for the race and now has time to kill.

Seriously…what do you think? Are you really prepared to run the race and run it fast?

It seems like you’ve done a great job of getting your body ready for the race, but what about your mind?

Anytime an athlete steps up to the starting line of a race, they bring both their body AND their mind with them.  So both their body and their mind need to be prepared for the challenge ahead.

The element that is missing in the above scenario is the mental strength preparation. This means that you haven’t consciously and with intention directed your mind to the 10k race ahead of you.

You can benefit tremendously by taking the necessary mental strength steps to fill your mind with the images, self-talk, focus, and goals that will improve your athletic performance.

While this makes complete sense, on an intuitive level, to recommend that an athlete needs to be prepared both mentally and physically very few take the necessary mental strength steps to stack the odds in their favor of achieving peak performance.

To assist you in understanding the importance of mental strength preparation for peak athletic performance I’m going to provide you with two pieces of convincing information to persuade you of the value and importance of mental strength preparation so that you can reach your peak performance.

1- Psychological profiles of elite athletes reveal that “having a well-developed mental routine” is a critical characteristic related to success.

2- Research on past Olympians found “developing and adhering to physical and mental preparation plans” was a characteristic that distinguished more versus less successful Olympians.

These findings advocate that use of a mental strength program is essential to peak athletic performance.  This goes for ALL athletes, Olympians, High School, Professional and you.

Now that you’re convinced…and you are convinced aren’t you? , Let’s look at the fundamental of mental strength preparation.  This will help you begin to develop your own mental strength preparation routine to achieve your personal peak performance.

• Mental Preparation Is Highly Individualized – There is no single “best” mental strength preparation routine that applies to every athlete. Instead, each athlete must develop a mental strength preparation plan that works best for them. Research supports the idea that each athlete has a zone or mental state at which they perform at their best. This mental state includes the thoughts, the focus, goals, attitude, confidence and anxiety of the athlete. The best combination of these variables differs from athlete to athlete and from sport to sport.  One thing remains consistent, however. Prior to a competition, when an athlete is in their mental zone they have better performance.

• Identify YOUR Peak Mental Zone State. A useful way to figure your peak mental zone is look at your past peak performances. Think back to a great personal performance and try to recall what you were thinking, how nervous you were, how you were focused, your confidence level, and how you were feeling physically and mentally. Write it down. Now, do the same assessment for a poor performance.  A race where you didn’t perform as best as you could. Now compare your mental state prior to the great and poor performance. You will find that there are a significant amount of differences. Use this information as a starting point in helping you determine your pre-competition mental strength preparation so that you can consistently achieve peak performance.

• Develop a Routine to Develop A Pre-competition Mental Zone State. Now that you’ve determined how you need to think and feel prior to a race to reach your peak performance it’s time to create the mental strength plan. So the next step is to figure out how to get into this mental zone state on a consistent basis. Your pre-competition mental strength routine should incorporate various mental strength skills and strategies to purposefully get you into your optimal mental zone state.

I’ve mentioned several of these skills in other posts and let me give you a few examples that will help clear up and confusion.

Jeremy realized that he tends to race the 5k best when he is focused on himself (not the other runners), fells confident, and has very little nervousness energy. After much practice, he learned that for him to keep his nervousness low, it was best for him think about something else beside the race and to keep his mind off the other runners.

Yup…easier said then done.

So, he decided that he needs to distract himself from the race environment and he brings a MP3 player to race.  He goes off by himself and listens to his favorite pre-race music.  During this time, he mentally rehearses the race two times, seeing and feeling himself achieve his goals. His purposeful self-talk focuses on cues about what he needs to do—relax the first mile, work your arms and pick up the pace on mile 2, then bring it home. Jeremy uses this mental routine prior to every race, and finds it helps him reach his personal peak performance.

After learning about mental strength preparation, Jessica approaches competition a little differently. Instead of “killing time” prior to the race, Jessica is using this time to create an ‘unfair advantage.’

She has learned she races best when she feels confident.  So to build her confidence she reminds herself of all the awesome workouts she has run and the consistent high quality of her training. She uses positive self-talk and tells herself “you can do it, you’re trained and ready” and “manage your pace through the 5k then slowly pick it up.” The image in her head is of a cheetah running through a field. She imagines herself running like a cheetah – effortlessly.

Each of these athletes takes a different, but equally effective, approach to mentally preparing for their race. Instead of just “seeing what happens,” they take the time before a competition to focus their thoughts and to get mentally prepared.

You can and should do the same thing…but only if you want to achieve peak athletic performance.

If you decide to take control of your mental strength training it’s important for you first to determine the mental zone state at which you race best and then piece together mental strength skills and preparation strategies to help you attain this state.

Developing a routine does not happen overnight, but you can start the process today and soon you can be running “out of your mind.”

You can start to build the fundamentals of mental strength by picking up a copy of “Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior” today by going HERE.