So we always talk about the fact that you do things twice, you do it first in your mind, and then you do it out there on the competition field. Ideally, what we're going to do is we're going to continue to practice the same things over and over both mentally through mental imagery and visualization. But also, while we're actually out there, just doing our regular day to day practices.
Athletes know there are two games, the physical game and the mental game. The same is true in just about every aspect of life. And the more challenging our conditions, the more having mental preparation can help. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College, I'm your host, Steve fast. Today, we're going to talk with a running coach on the mental techniques. He says help athletes get that extra mile or extra minute, he says sometimes the run begins hours, if not days beforehand, in one's mind.
Hi, my name is Ty Wolf, and I am the cross country coach here at Heartland and I am fired up to be working with young people to help them reach their goals.
So when you work with the cross country team at Heartland, there, obviously are things that you can do to coach their technique, the physical part of the game, but also there's the mental part of the game. And as a coach, do you notice different mental needs for your athletes,
we talked about the four Ps of peak performance, and like you said, the physical side of things is one thing. But the psychological side is really probably even more important than the physical side. And so what we do is we really try to think about what are the things that we can do to improve our thinking to reach our optimal potential?
So how much of that goes into competition? And how much of it goes into preparation? I imagine one of those pieces is probably preparation, too. But how do you build your mental toughness to achieve some of those goals? As you're developing, as an athlete,
we always talk about the fact that you do things twice, and you do it first in your mind, and then you do it out there on the competition field. And so what we try to do is we try to practice what we want to do in the competition field, both in our mind through specific mental skills. But then also we use those mental skills when we take it into our actual physical practice day to day. And so ideally, what we're going to do is we're going to continue to practice the same things over and over both mentally through mental imagery and visualization. But also, while we're actually out there, just doing our regular day to day practices,
what are some of the mental strength training techniques, you say? Do everything twice? Once in your mind, once while you're doing it? How do you keep on track and on focus, when you're in that part of the execution, somebody might be trying to get a little bit better time somebody might be trying to go a little bit farther, and they hit that wall? Is there any kind of tip or trick you say, when you feel that mentally you think you can't do something to get yourself to push through that? And remember the fact that you've kind of practiced it mentally first?
Yeah, that in a nutshell, is what we're we're trying to do is get to be consistent in our approach. And so when we think about competition, when we go into that competition, we really want to turn everything on automatic, you know, probably all of us have done something in the physical realm before. And when you're doing that, you know, you always have those thoughts going through your mind, am I going to be able to do this am I going to be able to finish this run. And what we really want to do is we want to turn all those conscious thoughts off, and really focus in on the subconscious and just kind of let the subconscious take over. There's a really good book called flow by my Hayley chicks and Mihai, and it really gets into the psychology of performance, not just performance in running but performance in all endeavors. And it talks about, you know, what, what happens in that flow state. And really, when you get into a flow, state, things kind of slow down in time, things get easy. You're just out there in the moment, enjoying the moment and making things happen. And and that's what we try to replicate through our mental training with the heartland hawks cross country team.
You alluded to this, it's not just the heartland hawks cross country team that you teach some of the skills you teach this for other runners to maybe they aren't doing it in the same kind of competition or maybe not any competition at all. So if you are a novice runner, if you're trying to improve the amount that you run, the frequency that you run the distance that you run your time. What's one of the first steps you would say to someone who is trying to build up those mental conditioning skills ILS, just to get started, what's the very first thing you do?
The first thing we really do is we we talk a lot about the foundational skills of relaxation, and mental imagery. And a lot of people include meditation in that as well. And what we really want to do is kind of relax our body and relax our mind to get into that state where we can really focus in on the things that we want to do. So another thing that we teach our runners is to be very intentional about what we're trying to accomplish. When it comes to an actual race. You know, one of the things with a distance race is you don't want to go out too fast too soon. If you do that, you're gonna have some bad physiological reactions, you're gonna hear lactate, and you're gonna do what runners proverbial called dying out there on the course. And that's, of course, not a good thing for a cross country runner that's running three miles or five miles. And so what we do is we teach our runners how to just relax and feel comfortable at the start, but still, at the same time, be mentally engaged with going out at a brisk pace.
You mentioned the way to meditate and get mentally centered, before you run, is that something that you would do immediately before you run or at some other point, and then later on in the day, having that mindfulness meditation pays off, because I would think, if I were going to try to relax and meditate, then I wouldn't immediately have all this energy to want to do physical activity to the same level. But maybe that's not the case.
Yeah, no, that's a great question. We actually teach our runners to do it actually, at two times before a race, we want to do it about the Monday before a race where we will take 10 or 15 minutes and get totally relaxed, and then go through our mental imagery routine that prepares us for the race. And then we will do it again on the Friday before race if let's say it's a Saturday race. And the reason we want to do that twice is because again, just like we talked about before you do things twice, first in your mind, and then on the competition fields. But if you're constantly practicing those skills, you actually are really reinforcing that and building up your mental muscle, just like you build up your physical muscles. And so so we try to do it twice very intensely. And then what we talk about also is flipping a mental switch. So when we do that practice, we'll flip that mental switch on and do our mental imagery. But then we're going to flip the switch off again. Because if we have that switch on from Monday, all the way through a race, let's say on Saturday, we're going to be burning up a lot of our mental energy and, and you know that mental energy and emotional energy are all tied together. So we really don't want to burn up any excess mental energy. We want to save it all for our race and our our big performance,
when you talk about getting centered. And this is a big part of meditation is being in the moment, and allowing yourself to not let distractions come in or let your mind wander. So as you've practiced that ahead of time, I would imagine that would help when you're actually running the race. But what do you tell runners when they start to have those distractions come in while they're actually racing?
Yeah, that's, that's the $64,000 question that every runner has to answer for themselves. But we have some specific strategies that we try to use, and one of them is we'll try to key in on some key words. So some key words that a lot of runners use are relax and go, keep pushing, then if those types of strategies don't work, because sometimes you know, you get to a point where there's so much distraction from either discomfort from your breathing heavy or your muscles are screaming with lactic acid building up and then what we teach another technique called the stop thinking technique. And what we basically do is we would just try to say to ourselves, we're going to stop thinking about whatever those thoughts are, that are going through our head at the moment, whatever we can do to kind of turn off those conscious things that are kind of running through our brain is probably the better because again, what we want to do is we want to get into that sub conscious level where our performance is just just on automatic and we're just going out there and performing and enjoying. So you know, there's other things that we can do. There's some research on simply smiling so when you start to feel that pain, when you start to smile and if anybody has tuned in to you live Kip jokey who set the world record sub two hour marathon. One of the things you To notice with Kip shogi is from about mile 16 on. At times in the race, you'd see him just break out in this huge grin. And you know, somebody might be saying, well, what's going on? Does he have earpiece? somebody's telling him a joke? No. Actually, there is some research out there that says, If you smile, that is going to reduce the mental pressure, it's going to reduce the pain and so smiling out there when you're starting to feel fatigue is really a key performance enhancer.
Well, that's interesting. And you kind of talked about this a little bit earlier. Have you found that any of these techniques that you're talking about in this mental preparation is something that you've applied outside of running and outside of athletic activity?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we try to do is we talk to runners, and this strategy can apply either to running or to academics, or even to, you know, your personal, professional work environment, but we really get in there and try to relax. So we talk about releasing the tension, and then setting an intention for what you want to do. So thinking about what actually you want to accomplish, how you want to accomplish it, how you want to feel while you're doing it. So it really is just a simple matter of relaxing. And again, you know, could be a cue, word, relax, and then setting the intention. And then just kind of going out and doing whatever it is that you're trying to do, whether it could be doing a job interview, where you want to really connect with the person that's doing the interview with you, it could be taking your three four year old niece out to the park and just having a great time and enjoying the moment with your niece or nephew.
So this is the first season for the Heartland hawks cross country team. It's the first time that we've had this sport at the college. But it coincided with the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic. So that's, that's thrown everything up in the air, there's got to be a lot of indecision. I'm sure that a lot of your athletes were very motivated to get going, but then didn't know really what could happen. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, and some of the uncertainty and how you've had to coach through that uncertainty. I mean, some of these techniques, I think would help because it sounds like it helps you get a little bit more calm and patient. But how did it affect you and your team?
Yeah, that's that's a great question. And I think one of the reasons that we are having a very successful season is the fact that we did start meeting through zoom in the summertime. And we really started talking about controlling what we can control. And you know, when we think about what's going on with COVID, and all the uncertainty, what really, it amounts to is it's really shaking up the applecart. And nobody can do what they plan on doing. There's nobody that's doing what they thought they were going to do 10 months ago. And so what we really try to focus in on is controlling what we can control. And those same relaxation, meditation, mental imagery techniques can also help us with confronting COVID and some of the uncertainties with COVID as well. So what we talk about is we say, Okay, well, what can we control? Well, we can control who we're around, we can control wearing our mask, we can control, social distancing, we can control not putting ourselves into a bad situation. But then, you know, if you think about it, and I also have two children of my own, that are college age, and in school, it's been kind of a tough shake up for the college students, okay, they're not getting the typical social experience that they would. And so recognizing that and talking with runners, and also trying to be able to put some fun into our practices into what we do, to kind of give them that social interaction, that fun experience of being around their peers, is something that we really try to do on a day to day basis.
Best of luck for the remainder of the season. And, you know, we don't know what's in store for us beyond this. So I appreciate you joining us today to talk a little bit about some of these mental techniques. And I think we can all maybe use that sort of approach to get through whatever we have to encounter with barriers with COVID or anything else,
for sure. Hey, thanks a lot. Thanks for having me on.
sigh Wolf is head cross country coach at Heartland Community College. He also teaches a continuing education course on mental preparation for runners open to the public. If you'd like to hear more interviews on personal enrichment or other topics, subscribe to random acts of knowledge on Spotify, Apple podcasts or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening
