Marathon Runners / Endurance Athletes - How do you win the mental game?

I have no suggestions but want to wish you a good climb. I look forward to any pictures/stories you might share when you return.

I'm a long distance cyclist, and for me, I need to break the rides into shorter goals.

Once I've started a really long ride, I can't think about the total distance anymore or it feels way too daunting. Instead, I think about the next control which is usually approx. 75 km up the road. 75 km is a doable ride, so I tell myself that I'm just out for a 75 km ride. When I get there, I go the next 75 km ... and so on. Sometimes I have to break it down even more than that ... just getting into the next town maybe 20 km down the road.

The other thing is to eat and drink regularly. I find that if I get sloppy with that, it has quite an effect on my mental state.

For the really long rides, I need to be eating at least 200 cal/hour, ideally a bit more than that. And it needs to be a mix of carbs, protein, and fat. More carbs, but I need the rest too.

I also need to be drinking approx. one 750 ml bottle of water every 1 to 1.5 hours. And along with that, I need to be getting my electrolytes.

When I'm doing all that, I feel reasonably strong and in a decent state of mind.

However, sometimes, when we're riding through the middle of the night or dealing with long climbs or bad weather, I forget to eat and drink. Not only does my energy level drop but the dark thoughts start ... "I can't do this", "I feel sick", "What was I thinking even attempting this", "I want to stop".

When I start getting like that, my husband usually tells me to eat something ... and yes, it helps.

You'll forget the pain in a week but keep the memories until you're old and senile.

NorthCascades wrote: »

You'll forget the pain in a week but keep the memories until you're old and senile.

This. The pain will fade, but you will always have the memories of an awesome accomplishment that not many can say they've ever attempted. That in itself would keep me going, but then again, I'm stubborn as all hell. Either way, I wish you the best of luck!

I've never done mountain climbing so I can't give specific tips about that, but I do know a little bit about running. I have found that sometimes with shorter runs, I'm so focused on the fact that the run will end soon that I very easily get into an impatient "are we there yet?!" mode. With long runs, I can only be successful if I let my distance goals and my ideas of hitting the end mostly slip away into the background. The goals are of course still there and I need to monitor myself enough to pace/drink/eat properly for the distance and keep track of where I'm going.... but as much as possible I see myself as on a long journey that won't end anytime soon, so my best approach is to settle in and enjoy what's happening as being part of my "new normal" for a little while. Keep focused on what's right in front of me to accomplish and enjoy and go with the flow. A hill coming up, a fun downhill section, oh look a squirrel, boy that view is pretty, let my mind wander a bit. It can be quite therapeutic.

Occasionally I will slip out of this mode and start thinking about how nice it would be to curl up on the road/trail side and take a nap ha ha. Or get too focused on the tiredness in my legs and become obsessed with thoughts of stopping. Those are the hardest miles of all!! If I am picking up on a genuine injury or health condition developing then I definitely need to be smart about how to respond and to not just willfully push through. But if this is just a bit of mental/emotional fatigue setting in then I do try to shut that out and mentally change the subject. Focusing on something else other than my thoughts of quitting and body parts that ache can be helpful, like switching to my favorite song and just humming to the lyrics as I run...or turning on an interesting podcast or talk radio station.... pay better attention to my surroundings and my view....meditation on something monotonous like the sound of my feet hitting the ground or my breathing....anything to get me out of my head and banish thoughts of quitting. Usually once I get refocused on something else for a few minutes, my urge to quit calms down and I get back in the zone I was previously in.

Finally, I can often prevent those moments of misery where I want to stop if I have fueled myself properly, hydrated well, trained well (but not overtrained), paced myself well, gotten plenty of sleep and good nutrition in days leading up to the run, etc. Give good attention to those things so you feel good as much as possible and don't provoke quite as many moments of misery that require sheer willpower to overcome.

As others have said, focusing on the mini goals along the way instead of the big picture or "what is left" is always good. For me, I like to keep my mantras very simple. My training mantra is "Just Do It" and my marathon mantra (especially helpful in the last 5 miles) is "Just Keep Running". So simple, but so effective.

Congrats on the journey you are about to take. I am sure you have worked extremely hard to get to this point. Just trust in your training. Please check back and give us all of the details of this epic adventure. Best of luck to you!

Lots of great suggestions posted here, mine are very similar to what @Machka9 posted about chunking the task up and staying on top of your nutrition.

Two other tips that help me when I'm hurting or just feeling sorry for myself:

1) Shift the focus from the pain point to something else, for example if you're legs are saying "I quit" then focus on your arm swing for the next mile, or focus on your breathing, etc.

2) Another technique is to have your personal "Why" statement in your head, something that you have thought about that drove you to attempt this challenging activity in the first place. Then, when you are struggling, think of your "Why" and maybe a mantra that you've rehearsed to give you the lift you need. For me, this often helps pull me out of a funk during the run leg of a triathlon when I'm ready to quit. I often recall the memory of two of my lifelong friends who passed away several years back, and I imagine them telling me how lucky I am to be doing this and to "suck it up" and get the job done. I know other triathletes who bring keepsakes or handwritten messages from their families in their special needs bag and carry these items during their runs. It can be a powerful motivator when you want to quit.

Good luck. Looking forward to reading your post climb story.

For me, finding different ways to chunk up what I've achieved within the race, and what's next. So for a marathon, it's just over four 10Ks, two HMs. So when I've run 30Ks I've only a short training run left to complete.

Running a lapped race, giving myself targets per lap. Last one was 7 laps for a marathon, so time goals on each one.

Less psychological would be remaining adequately fuelled;. Tailwind, granola bars, soup, fruit, coffee. On lapped races I also change regularly. Fresh top and shorts make a huge difference to how things feel.

Jealous, I've wanted to do that for a long time. Some day!

My answer is similar to Machka's -- I focus on smaller bits or play math games (when swimming 100 laps I do 1% done, 2% done, 1/10 done, 1/5th done so on -- focus on getting to the next big interval. With running it is the same--focus on each mile, focus on hitting milestones (10 miles!), focus on manageable amounts (2 10Ks left). For a marathon (or your event) you can add eating and drinking into that -- three more miles and then I get to eat. The benefit of this is I sometimes to math in my head (convert K to miles, say), which is distracting.

I also imagine other distances sometimes -- like I know how far it is from my house to various local landmarks, so I think "just like running to WF" or some such. For my run during my half ironman (which was tough for lots of reasons) I focused on getting to specific landmarks that I saw up ahead.

For running when listening to music I sometimes count by number of songs. Of course when there's scenery I try to not focus on anything but the moment and looking around at times.

My longest runs have been a 60 miler and a 50 miler. Both over 15 hours. Breaking stuff down in to smaller bits will help for a bit but in the end, even those smaller bits feel like hell.
You will be beyond tired, every single bit of you will hurt. Physical exhaustion will make every step feel like your legs are made from lead and you will want nothing more than you just sit down and catch your breath or just stop altogether.

You need to focus on the why, what was the starting point of your journey. What have you done and gone through to get you to this point. Think about all the people who have helped you along the way and all of the people you are with and what it has taken for them to get there as well.
If you are with people, then talk, laugh, joke, try to bring up stories which made you laugh.

At the end of my first 60 miler, I was pretty much at the very end of my rope. I had torn a muscle in my thigh and my left knee was in agony from a fall in the dark, I was running alone along the river thames and I just wanted to call it a day and get picked up.

I ended up thinking about my dad, he passed away when I was 18, here I was 16 years later doing something which he would have been immensely proud of. All the effort and hard work I had put in to go from being unable to run a 5k to completing a 60 miler.

You are going to be doing something which some many people could only dream about doing. Use that to push yourself onwards. You will finish that climb with such a better understanding about yourself than you ever imagined possible.

Good luck and I look forward to seeing the pictures of you at the summit in this thread!

@rankinsect

I've asked myself this question before, and never really come up with a "one size fits even me" answer. I think for me the how I get past the mental game is less important to me than the "why" I find a way to beat the mental game.

I like to push myself, and I think most of this was fostered during military training type stuff, when surrounded by people with the group mentality and high fitness levels. And I realized after getting out of the military that it just fueled the same mentality when working out alone, but using my own goals as my measure of how far I can push. I have times I kill a workout and am disappointed that I could have dug deeper, and I have times that I don't kill that workout but I know it was my 100% on that day, so I'm satisfied.

And either way, if I stay goal focused I really mostly block the pain until after the fact. I reach a point where the endorphins, small goals, pace, etc just remove my mind from most of it. From there it's all about being fair to myself how far I pushed, or if I slacked off some. I guess to some extent I revert to that expression of "it's the things you do when nobody is watching that define your character". When I've reached the point of a hard push, I really don't care if anyone else things it was great or if they think it sucked, it's my personal motivation that really matters in my head.


And having seen you mention this climb a few times over the last year or so, I hope you summit with energy to spare! I think it's an awesome goal, and I'm sure the view will last in your memories for many, many years to come.