HOW NOT TO LET LIFE'S EMOTIONAL DEMAND HIJACK YOUR TRAINING GOALS.
Updated: Jun 22, 2022
“Once, we believed that the body was a machine, and the secret to optimal performance came from the muscles, the lungs, the heart. Then, we were told that it’s all in our head, and we just need to push through the pain. The truth is that “the brain and the body are fundamentally intertwined” “Alex Hutchinson in www.theverge.com
This week my sister was diagnosed with cancer. Even writing those words still seems surreal. I felt like I have been punched in the stomach and I’m still reeling from it. My sister and I are very close so this information has been all consuming, pervading my mind all the time. Swimming has been the place where I go for clarity of thinking. Letting my mind wander and figure out solutions while I follow the black line. But my mind couldn’t work its way around this problem. My goggles filled with tears and the choking wasn’t from inhaling water. Where I had found solace, I now found pain.
As my mind took over, it dragged my body down with it. Each length became increasingly difficult. My arms became heavy as lead and swimming was just a slog. Everything hurt!
Although cathartic in expressing my feelings here, the point is how our state of mind can affect our body and our training. But life happens; we experience shocks, times when life is more demanding and challenging, we can’t change it. BUT we can change how we deal with it.
A mantra of mine has always been “it's mind over matter” and “the mind is stronger than the body.” This experience has provided me with the opportunity to unpack these sayings and share my insights with you here. My mind had fallen to pieces, so what now?
As an endurance athlete, the mind plays a huge part in getting you through not only training, but the final goal itself. But what happens when the mind highjacks the body?
Have you ever reflected on why you have had a bad or tough training session? Where was your mind? Was it in a negative place?
Overcoming anxiety, fighting the urge to give up when the body is hurting, and fatigue is extreme - you may have already had the experience of these “dark” times. How did you overcome them? What did you tell yourself to make your mind stronger than your body, to push on and through to the other side?
The mere fact that you completed the event or training session and came out the “other side” of these thoughts, gives you depth of experience. It’s this experience that you can tap into so that when you go there again you know you can get through it. You have now banked the experience of having controlled your mind so as not to compromise your bodies performance and therefore can draw on it again. But HOW did you do it?
As I continued to swim, slowly processing the information and the implications, tossing out the word SAD as a completely inadequate three letter word that can’t possibly describe how I felt, I hung onto the words I had recently read in a blog post “Trust the Process” (June 26, 2019) by Emma France, multiple English Channel swimmer and coach.
Emma talks about “the process” being all the little steps you take to get the outcome you want. She talks about not focusing on the outcome but rather the tasks at hand to get you there. I want to take this thinking a step further: establishing a process at a time when you are in a good head space, can take the mental and therefore also physical, pressure off, when you are having challenging emotional times. To be able to “trust the process” shifts the burden externally and frees the mind of the downward spiral that drags the body with it. It helps to disengage emotions from the physical effects it has on the body.
As an endurance athlete we can build processes into our lives so that when life, emotions, demands, fears etc become challenging, our training becomes automatic and our minds wont highjack our efforts to reach our sporting goals. This could be as simple as establishing regular training days and times so that it becomes an automatic process to get up early on those days and get out there. Getting your kit ready the night before so that it becomes an automatic process to put it on. Having a training plan to follow so that when you get to the pool you just follow the process. And even just putting one arm in front of the other, trusting the well-established process of swimming.
No decisions are needed at a time when the mind is vulnerable (I’m too sad, tired, upset, angry to train). The process is in place already and by following the process the mind and its emotions, can’t hijack the desired outcome, i.e. a good, productive training session and a step towards your long-term sporting goal.
So, to trust the process, established by many medical professionals, on my sister’s road to treatment and that she will come out the other side, made me feel lighter and more in control. I was able to disengage emotion/mind from body. By “trusting the process” I freed my mind from my body and allowed it to perform unhindered. The result, a good solid, productive training session and one more tiny step towards my ultimate sporting goal.
So perhaps it’s not “mind over matter,” but rather “trust the process when the mind is overcome by matter”!
“process” – a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”
“trust the process” - sticking to a well-grounded methodology to accomplish a long-term goal”