How Bad Do You Want It? Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle

Gratitude” is about letting go of desired outcomes and fully embracing the privilege and process of pursuing goals and dreams. “Believe” refers to the confidence that arises naturally through this process, a self-trust that is the antithesis of the doubt-fueled fixation on goals and dreams expressed in Siri’s nightly fantasy of having the perfect race at the 2000 Olympics. Siri

One cannot improve as an endurance athlete except by changing one’s relationship with perception of effort.

Studies on the phenomenon indicate that a person with a high tolerance for pain is likely to also have above-average capacity to cope with the stress of a job layoff or a cancer diagnosis, and this same person is more likely as well to have experienced a moderate amount of psychological trauma in his or her past. It would appear that a certain amount of misfortune is needed to toughen the mind against suffering and hardship, but excessive trauma leaves scar tissue.

What is the logic of punishing yourself each day, of striving to become better, more efficient, tougher?” He went on to answer his own question. “The value in it is what you learn about yourself. In this sort of situation all kinds of qualities come out—things that you may not have seen in yourself before.

Every athlete who has pushed beyond his or her known limits of endurance in the quest for improvement understands these sentiments. There is no experience quite like that of driving yourself to the point of wanting to give up and then not giving up. In that moment of “raw reality,” as Mark Allen has called it, when something inside you asks, How bad do you want it?, an inner curtain is drawn open, revealing a part of you that is not seen except in moments of crisis. And when your answer is to keep pushing, you come away from the trial with the kind of self-knowledge and self-respect that can’t be bought.

More often, they insist that their advantage lies not in having more to give but rather in being able to give more of what they have. Past

Starting today, you’re retired. The way you look at this sport and the pressure you put on yourself are just all wrong. You started doing triathlon because you loved it. Let’s go back to that. Let’s just see how fit, how fast, and how strong Siri Lindley can be—and have fun doing it.

The truth of the matter is that the stronger or more capable the body is, the weaker or lazier the mind can afford to be.

no matter how gifted and successful an athlete may be, she must always brace for the worst to race her best.

Why go out there every afternoon and beat out your brains? . . . What is the logic of punishing yourself each day, of striving to become better, more efficient, tougher?” He went on to answer his own question. “The value in it is what you learn about yourself. In this sort of situation all kinds of qualities come out—things that you may not have seen in yourself before.

Endurance athletes perceive less effort and perform better when training and racing cooperatively than they do alone.

Being heavy is not a virtue in itself for rowers, but strength is. Strength comes from muscle, and muscle is heavy.

sports. In a 2012 paper titled “The Rocky Road to the Top: Why Talent Needs Trauma” and published in Sports Medicine, sports psychologists Dave Collins and Aine MacNamara argued that “the knowledge and skills [that] athletes accrue from ‘life’ traumas and their ability to carry over what they learn in that context to novel situations certainly appear to affect their subsequent development and performance in sport.” If this is true, then having things too easy in life can actually put developing athletes at a significant disadvantage.

Because you never know exactly what you’ll find inside that black box until you open it, there is a temptation to hope—perhaps not quite consciously—that your next race won’t be one of those grinding affairs. This hope is a poor coping skill. Bracing yourself—always expecting your next race to be your hardest yet—is a much more mature and effective way to prepare mentally for competition.

Perceived effort actually has two layers. The first layer is how the athlete feels. The second layer is how the athlete feels about how she feels. The first layer is strictly physiological, whereas the second is emotional, or affective.

In reality, the scenario I’ve just described could never happen. Perceived effort is essentially the body’s resistance to the mind’s will. The fitter an athlete becomes, the less resistance the body puts up. Therefore increased physical capacity is always felt.

Interpreting running as an opportunity to discover and become his best self, and to give his best to others, through the relentless pursuit of toughness, or guts—a kind of courage.

Exercising mental fitness was a daily battle for him, but a battle he chose.

It was a very hard race from the word go with a combination of great runners and a tough course,” he wrote. “I had my problems winning. I felt several times like giving into the pain and letting Gary [sic] win but I just couldn’t. I just kept driving myself harder and harder, longer and longer.

The best source of knowledge concerning the most effective methods of coping with the challenges of endurance sports is the example set by elite endurance athletes. The methods that the greatest athletes rely on to overcome the toughest and most common mental barriers to better performance are practically by definition the most effective coping methods for all athletes.

So, when looking at white dominance of a particular sport, white people tend to look for a social or environmental explanation, such as a strong work ethic, but when looking at black dominance of a sport, they are more likely to look for an explanation in breeding.

Science has shown that mass below the knee is very costly in terms of its effect on running economy.

people often choose to expect the worst of an upcoming experience in hopes of creating a more favorable contrast between their expectations and reality.

If you accept as fact that the only limitations you ever encounter in your sport are mental, then you will become a better fire walker, creeping closer to your unreachable physical limit than you would otherwise

mainly by increasing tolerance for perceived effort and by reducing the amount of effort that is perceived at any given intensity of exercise.

Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition.

If you want to get a sense of what a very high level of perceived effort feels like in isolation from fatigue, find a steep hill and run up it as fast as you can. (You should probably warm up first.) That feeling of trying as hard as you can that hits you immediately, before fatigue sets in, is the feeling of a very high level of perceived effort.

My own term for a highly developed overall coping capacity in endurance sports is mental fitness.

To become the best athlete you can be, you need to become really good at coping with the characteristic forms of discomfort and stress that the endurance sports experience dishes out, beginning with perceived effort and extending to the many challenges that are secondary to it, such as fear of failure.