Race psychology

Yesterday during my trawling of various triathlon/endurance sport blogs, I came upon a very interesting read in Matt Fitzgerald's blog. It's a discussion on a recently published paper on the role of emotions on pacing strategies and performance. I highly recommend the post for a full viewpoint, but I'll give you my main takeaway message.

As he discusses, there is an interesting relationship between emotions and performance. The physical effort can affect your mood, as anyone who has done a hard workout can attest. But on the flip side, emotions (whether positive or negative) can impact performance ("this sucks"=slow down, "I feel great"=go faster). Simply put, the physical affects the psychological, and the psychological affects the physical. And from my last couple of races, I think this may be part of my issue during the run legs.

I can testify that this phenomenon caught up with me at Clearwater, and it may be catching up with me now. I don't think I've been paying enough attention to how it feels to be running fast (uncomfortable, but fun when you're flying), and instead just counting down the miles. I do the same thing during interval training, focusing on the minutes/seconds left. This negative psychology ("only three more kilometres to hurt") can't be doing me any good. Part of the problem is that I'm a better chaser than chased. When I have people in front of me, I can go get them. When they aren't there, I focus on how much longer I have to keep away. As I get better at this game, I need to change my psychology.

So, outside of any time/place goals for the weekend, I want to have a day where my head is in the right place during the run. If I can see them, I'm going to run them down. If I can't see them, I'm going to focus on "enjoying" the work being done and the sensation of moving quick.