On a practical level, your running practice is a great place to practice what happens when you get nervous.
Do you get nervous before a big goal race? I do! A vivid memory from my adult running life is being the one of the last runners out of Wave 1 in the 2014 Brooklyn Half Marathon, despite being in D corral. I was so nervous I retied my shoes upwards of 20 times (no joke)! Over the past seven years, as the parent of a competitive athlete (for my new friends - my son Beckett - “Bex” - is a highly competitive rock climber in USA Climbing), I’ve watched my son deal with the same nervous energy before his rock climbing competitions that I have before my races.
Since this past September, though, his nervous energy before and during competitions has been replaced by confidence, connection and joy. Sure, he still gets nervous, but not like before. And it doesn’t do him in on the wall like it has in the past. What happened? In addition to changing his training on the wall, Bex’s new coach, Zoe Sayetta, is equally focused on training his mental and emotional game. Today’s newsletter is inspired by a talk she recently gave to the team parents on how she’s training the team’s mental game. As I listened, I took notes as a parent AND as a run coach AND as a runner!
Like Bex, I also get nervous before a goal race. Zoe is teaching Bex to normalize being nervous, especially before a competition. When I heard this, it was a major light bulb moment! Of course I’m nervous before a goal race - my nerves are a manifestation of the depth of how much we care about our running. Once we normalize nervousness, we then have to learn: Nervousness does not represent a threat. However, in most of our brains, nervousness is perceived as a threat and, as such, a cascade of hard-wired responses follow feeling nervous. Until we divorce nervousness from the threat response, our brain will continue to respond in the same old ways that don’t serve us in low-stakes situations, like a race. When we know how we’re hard wired to respond to a situation at hand, we can craft a response that disrupts this cycle in a healthy, smart, sustainable way. (For my Marvel fans, I call this “disrupting your Dormammu loop.”)
Remember, your nervous system responses have a direct impact on how your brain responds and reacts to the situation at hand. Think of your nervous system as an elaborate call and response system. The brain is hardwired to send different responses to the various systems in your body when it detects a situation. If you are nervous before a race and lack tools to work with those feelings, your brain will send certain signals to your body that can impact how you perform.
Soooooo …. This is all great to know. But how do we - on a practical level - shift our relationship to performance-induced nerves?
A great aspect of our running practice: it’s a low to no-stakes environment to create tangible and practical strategies to deal with nerves. We can practice these strategies when we are training so we’re confident AND competent when we enter the corrals on race day.
We have to ensure our strategies are sticky for our brains. Each of our nervous systems are as unique as our fingerprints. What works for me may not work for you. For example, if you’re triggered by flight/flight when you get nervous, you may go out too fast in a race. If you’re more of a freeze and hide person, if the start of a race is chaotic, you may shut down and not be able to perform at all because you detect the chaos as a threat. Know thyself and use that as the foundation for your nerve-busting blueprint.
Bring the bigger stuff - like how and why you’re wired in this way and the feelings that go with that - to therapy. Untangling the cat’s cradle of your backstory is the job of a great mental health therapist. (Please remember while running has therapeutic qualities, it is NOT a substitute for therapy.)
Be kind to yourself. Your nervous system responses are NOT conscious! They are complicated and have been crafted by your brain, over many years, to respond to your life situations. I often elicit self-kindness from my runners by asking how long they have been running. I then translate that to a human age. For example, if you’ve been running five years, your running is in kindergarten and is learning to tie their shoes. Would you talk to a five year old who is learning to tie their shoes in the same tone of voice you’re talking to yourself about your running? Give that a think.
Pause before we head out the door for a run. This is from the yoga teacher part of my brain - and I see it work all the time at the beginning of my yoga classes. When we collectively pause and take three deep breaths before class begins, it’s amazing how it shifts and gathers the energy in the room. Can you take three deep breaths before you leave for your run? This is a chance to take stock of where your thinking brain, body brain and heart brain are that day. Correlate your effort to where you are at the beginning of the run, not where you want to end the run.
Take inventory of what you can control that day - and let the other stuff go. Zoe calls the “Circle of Control” with the kids. Last year, many of you will remember I called it “our variables and controllables.” Name what you can control (getting out the door for a run) and acknowledge what’s out of your control (the weather). There’s a lot in our running practice that’s out of our control - and for those of us who are perfectionist, Type A, this is a super hard thing for our actually change part of our brain to register. When Zoe said “perfectionism hinders the growth of confidence” in her presentation, I was like, OMG THAT’S ME. It’s critical that we separate growth from perfectionism in our heads, especially if we are a striver, an achiever, have been a “good girl” our whole lives and that’s how we have received praise and recognition. A big part of this journey away from perfectionism: internalizing that Circle of Control.
Breathe! Once again, I’m putting on my yoga teacher hat. Your breath is your nervous system’s GPS. Practice noticing your breath on your run. Is it jagged like a broken mirror? Is it smooth like just zambonied ice? Is it bumpy like an ATV going up a mountain? Where are you breathing? In your chest, your belly, your sides, your back? Do you even know if you are breathing or not? Are you holding your breath? Simply notice the quality of your breath - there’s no need to DO anything with these observations. Making the observations is the action your brain needs. And this leads me into our last strategy ….
Become skilled at the practice of noticing. The power of noticing is HUGE as it is an immediate reset button for your brain. Because all of your brains are different, you need different ways to notice. What works for your brain? My visual learners, what visual landmarks can you notice on your run, like trees or boats? My Type A folks, maybe counting dogs and lampposts works for you. I’m a words and crossword puzzle person, so I like to keep a running list of all the states I see on the license plates on the parked cars on my run.
Some of these suggestions will work for you, and I encourage you to come up with others that are specific and resonate for YOUR brain. We know that learning new ways of being in the world is hard - and uncomfortable. It’s hard to be a beginner as an adult, it’s challenging to take risks, it’s challenging to be honest with ourselves. Many of us don’t operate in a world that celebrates honest effort - in our adult-ness, we are often rewarded for what we are good at, versus the process of mastery and longevity. The more we create positive and balanced experiences around all aspects of our running - including our mental skills prep - the more enjoyable it will be and the more we’ll want to do it!