How To Actually Train Your Mind To Become A Better Runner

Yes, self-confidence can make you try harder—but it can also work in more subtle ways. Telling runners they look relaxed makes them burn measurably less energy to sustain the same pace. Giving rugby players a postgame debriefing that focuses on what they did right rather than what they did wrong has effects that continue to linger a full week later, when the positive-feedback group will have higher testosterone levels and perform better in the next game. Even doing a good deed—or simply imagining yourself doing a good deed—can enhance your endurance by reinforcing your sense of agency.

When I was visiting Tim Noakes in Cape Town, I asked him what his theories about the brain’s role in endurance could tell us about training. If there’s a central governor, can you hone it? He answered me with an anecdote. During his days as a rower for the South African Universities team in the early 1970s, the crew regularly did a workout of six times 500 meters as hard as possible. "And one afternoon, we did our sixth and turned around to row back to the boathouse, and the coach says, ‘No, go to the start again. You’re doing another one.’ So we did another 500. And he said go back. And we did another four. And you know, no one would have believed that we could do that if you’d asked us." That lesson, he recalled, stuck with him—first as an athlete and later as a scientist: "You have to teach athletes, somewhere in their careers, that they can do more than they think they can."

Based on excerpts from Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Copyright ©2018 by Alex Hutchinson. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.