-Matt Fitzgerald
Race is like a Fire-walk¶
- Hard physical limits do exist, but no athlete ever reaches them because the purely psychological limit of perceived effort tolerance is always encountered first.
- Brain itself becomes fatigued during prolonged exercise and the brain fatigue in turn increases perceived effort.
- While no athlete ever reaches his absolute physical limit in a race, some athletes get closer to their personal limit than others do.
Their advantage lies 'Not in having more to give, but rather in being able to give more of what they have.'
- Endurance performance is a species of self-regulation, or the process by which organisms control their internal states and behaviour in the pursuit of their goals. <- A psychological perspective.
- Underdeveloped coping skills cause an athlete to struggle in some way. The experience of struggle provokes an adaptive response from the athlete. This response gives rise, sooner or later, to a more effective coping skill.
Endurance racing is a test of you as a person on top of a test of you as an athlete.
- Out of the runners/athletes, those who had personal gains/interests associated as motivation to the race were less likely to quit.
- Everyone faces similar challenges, what differs is the intention they brought to the experience.
- To engage the full power of your mind to increase the amount of effort you are able to give and to enhance what you get out of your best effort, you will build mental fitness more quickly.
Brace Yourself¶
- Anticipatory Regulation
- It is an internal sense of appropriateness of one's pace from moment to moment.
- It has the first and final say in determines whether an athlete chooses to speed up, hold steady or slow down.
- Perception of effort - feeling of activity in the brain that stimulates muscle work, but not the feeling of muscle work itself.
- Intensity of Muscle movement commands can be measured through Movement-related cortical potential (MRCP).
Perceived effort is related to brain activity, not muscle activity.
- Thus, perceived effort is subjective, maximal is thus subject to change by circumstance.
- Perceived Effort has two layers
- How the athlete feels
- How the athlete feels about how he feels.
- When an athlete feel worse than expected during a race, they tend to develop a bad attitude about their discomfort and as a result the slow down even more than they need to.
- Compared to suppression; acceptance reduces the unpleasantness of pain without reducing the pain itself.
- "Brace yourself" -> The attitude of acceptance towards an impending disagreeable experience.
- No matter however gifted an athlete may be, she must always brace for the worst to race her best.
Time is on your side¶
Hope had not amounted for anything than a setup for crushing disappointment. - Humans cannot sustain maximum intensity exercise longer than about 30 seconds; without exceeding the highest level of perceived effort they can tolerate. - One of the most important and valuable coping skills in endurance sports is the ability to interpret the perceptions that influence pacing decisions in a performance maximising way. - The amount of effort an athlete puts into a race is influenced by his perception of the attainability of his goal. The same time goal that enhances performance when it is perceived as a target constrains performance when it is perceived as a limit.
The art of Letting Go¶
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