Ep #61: Race Day Strategies – Mental Preparation

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey rebels, you are listening to episode number 61 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today’s episode is a follow on to last week’s show about how to have a great race day. This week, I’m going to teach you some very specific techniques to improve your race performance.

And I do have to apologize in advance if you hear a cat meowing in the background because Maddie – I sat down to record, she knocked over my coffee, she trashed everything on my desk, and I had to put her outside of the room because she obviously can’t be trusted and now she’s sitting outside the door crying. So I’m apologizing in advance if you can hear her. She just wants to be part of the fun but she’s a little destructive today so she’s locked out.

Anyway, here’s the other exciting thing that’s going on this week. I am hosting my Rebel Runner Unleashed clients right here in Philly, and we are prepping for their half marathon in New Orleans in February. Now, they are all arriving the day after I record this. Actually, a couple of them are getting here tonight and one of my team members as well, and I am just so excited to see them all and hug them all, and we are going to do so much mental prep work this weekend because a half marathon is really more a challenge to the mind than anything else.

Did you know that? So most people think that if they run the training miles, the race will be easy, but oh my god, 80% at least, of running is mental and the longer the distance you’re going, the more strength you need to build in your mind. So we are going to focus hard on that this weekend and I’m actually going to lead a whole workshop on what we’re talking about in today’s podcast.

So that’s the reason that I wanted to talk about this today is because I thought, you know what, teaching it to my Rebel Runner clients, I want to make sure my podcast listeners get a taste of it as well. Now, this weekend, we’re also going to do some work on running form. We’re going to have lots of fun. Make sure you check out the Not Your Average Runner Instagram because I’m going to be posting a ton of pictures and they will all be there.

And you’ll be listening to this after the retreat is over, but I promise they’ll all be there. You can check them out and just see how crazy fun everything is and how hard they’re working too. So I’m so proud of all of my Rebel Runner clients because they are killing it. They’re killing it.

And if you want to be a Rebel Runner client, if you want to have me train you for the New Orleans or the Seattle half marathon next year, and we’ve tentatively added the Savannah Rock ‘n’ Roll half to the roster on November, still finalizing the plans for that, but if you want to run those races with a group of amazing rebel runners just like you and have me train you for that race and do a huge race-cation, vacation, retreat, around that race, make sure you sign up for a call with my team to talk about it.

You can do it at rebelrunnerunleashed.com or just go to the link in the show notes. All the details are there and there’s a link to sign up for a call with me and my team so that we can see if it’s a good fit for you. And that is rebelrunnerunleashed.com. The link is going to be in the show notes as well because Pavel is always on it. He is the best.

So let’s head over to the warm up for today, and today’s quote is from Bo Bennett, and I’ll be honest, I don’t really know who that is but I want to give credit where credit is due. Here is the quote: “Visualization is daydreaming with a purpose.” Now, it’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today, but I really want to break this down because all of us daydream.

We all let our minds go to places that we’d like to be, and especially last week or two weeks ago, there was this huge lottery jackpot. I think it was like, 1.6 billion dollars. It was literally the biggest jackpot ever in history, and everybody ran out and bought tickets, including yours truly here. Andy bought them too. I bought more than Andy. I guess I’m more optimistic than he is.

But anyway, we all went out, we bought tickets because we started going to that place in our minds of like, if I had 1.6 billion dollars – we actually got really specific. We started doing the math. Okay, if we got 1.6 billion dollars and we took the payout, the lump sum, that would probably be in the neighborhood of 850 million, and okay, we’ll give half of that away to taxes so we’d end up with a lump sum of like, 425 million dollars. What would we do with that?

We literally started like, breaking it down. And I know, one of the first things that came to my mind was like, I’d write a check to Girls on the Run for 10 million dollars, like, right away, that’s one of the first things I’d do. And then I’d buy a Tesla, and then I’d give like, tons of money to my family. I’d invest very heavily in the Not Your Average Runner business. I went right to the place, okay, let’s see, these are the people that I would hire, these are the retreats we would do.

We would do on the road events. If we had unlimited money, there would be so much stuff we would do. So I started making a list and I started visualizing it. I was daydreaming with a purpose, and the purpose was how am I going to spend my 425 million dollars if it lands in my lap.

Now, it didn’t. Probably because I only daydreamed about it for like, about an hour and then I don’t think that’s enough to really manifest that kind of stuff. But you get the picture, right? We were – I was – we were, as a family – I was with my family that weekend. We were kind of talking about how much money we would get, but I really sat down and thought, okay, if I had that much money, what exactly would I do with it?

And so this concept of daydreaming with a purpose, especially daydreaming about things that have a much higher likelihood of coming into reality than winning a 1.6-billion-dollar lottery bonus, visualization, I like to call it mental rehearsal or mental practice, is using that natural tendency that we have of daydreaming to actually create results in your life.

And so we’re going to talk all about that today. Do you remember episode 40 with Cassie Parks? So my friend Cassie is – I call her the master manifestor because she is just so good at visualizing the things that she wants in her life and then actually creating them for herself. And honestly, it’s basically the model.

We talk about the CTFAR model and how that – there’s circumstances in our life, we have thoughts about them, our thoughts create feelings, our feelings drive actions, and our actions create our results. So everything comes from your thinking. Every result that you have in your life comes from your thinking.

And so that’s just an extension – visualization is just an extension of that. And so Cassie is amazing at doing that. She actually teaches that to her clients and she’s taught me a lot, and I apply that to my coaching practice by mentally rehearsing running skills and race day. So we’re going to go into that today.

So, what exactly is mental rehearsal? Mental practice, visualization, whatever you want to call it. It is basically practicing something over and over again in your mind to improve your real-world performance. Now, again, on the surface, it sounds like daydreaming. Like, just sitting there and wishing for what you want. But I promise you, it’s actually completely different and it’s a very powerful practice.

Like Bo Bennett said, it’s daydreaming with a purpose. So I’m going to give you an example of a study that I heard about a while ago that sort of blew my mind. So this was a few years ago and don’t ask me for the reference to the study because I can’t find it and if you know what the study reference is, please drop a line to support@notyouraveragerunner.com. Let us know.

But for now, just trust that like, I’ve read about this study. I think it did exist. I know it did exist, and it was done on three groups of piano students or piano players. And all of the subjects in this study were given a small piece of music to play. It was like, a five-fingered drill that they had to – it was like a fingering skill, I guess.

I used to play piano and that’s what they call it when they talk about the skills that you need to play different types of music. They call it fingering. Sounds kind of dirty and inappropriate, but hey, this is an explicitly labeled podcast so you’ll have that.

Anyway, all of the students were given a small piece of music to play, to practice, and the first group was told not to practice it at all. The second group was told to practice it at the piano for two hours every day for like, two weeks. And the third group was told to practice it for the same amount of time each day as the second group but only by visualizing playing the notes in their mind. They were not to touch the piano.

Now, as you might expect, the first group didn’t get any better, and the second group did very well because they practiced for two hours a day for two weeks. But the third group, this is what’s so amazing. Without touching the piano, did almost as well as the second group.

Now, they studied the brain waves and the areas of activation in all three groups and found that the second and third groups had almost the same activity going on. The same parts of the brain were lighting up despite the fact that the third group never laid their hands on the piano for that entire time.

So this is like, amazing news, and I’m going to give you another example. Mental rehearsal, this concept of mental rehearsal is something that professional athletes use all the time. It is part of their daily routine. It’s part of their training. They physically do the training, but they also spend dedicated time vividly imagining the activity that they’re working on improving and just practicing it to engage the parts of their brain that are responsible for that activity.

Now, this practice, we talked about the CTFAR model up above. This practice works really well with mental skills as well. So if you think about the thought model that we use, how your thoughts create your feelings and subsequently drive your actions and your results, the way that you think, all of the thoughts that you have in your head, and we’ve talked about this ad nauseam on this podcast and will continue to do so, but if you’re new to the podcast, go to episode 33 called How to Coach Yourself. I explain it all there.

But the way that you think now is just a result of all the thinking that you’ve done in the past. So beliefs that you believe that you think are hardwired are just there because you’ve thought them so much they feel like second nature. So the good news is because you basically practice thinking that way so much that it becomes second nature, if you want to change your beliefs, you can do that. You just need to actively practice the new beliefs every single day.

And if you remember Shawnna Dancer from episode 51, that’s exactly how she shifted her belief system and got some pretty amazing results. So anyway, how does all of this relate to race day?

Well, mental rehearsal is using the power of your brain to practice a new skill, but it can also be used to practice a series of events like a race. That is just the application of a whole set of skills. So today, I’m going to give you instructions on how to get the most out of your mental rehearsals and then I’ll cover how to apply it to your race day preparations.

First things first, the most important thing is that mental rehearsals need to be done on purpose. It’s not just daydreaming while you’re driving in the car. It’s literally setting aside the time and it doesn’t have to be hours and hours. It can be 15 minutes. It’s more than just imagining the outcome of what you want and hoping that it happens. It’s deliberately and actively going through all the steps of the skill that you’re working on, but you go through them in your mind.

And it’s a very good complement to the physical active training as well. Now, it does work best if you can dedicate the time to it when you have no other distractions. So like I said before, this isn’t like, kind of randomly thinking about it when you’re driving in your car. And you can totally do that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but true mental rehearsal to get the most out of it, you need to dedicate a little bit of time to it.

So for example, if you’re working on increasing your cadence, your foot stride turnover, you might want to take 15 minutes of quiet time before you go out to run, sit down, make sure you’re going to have no distractions, make sure it’s quiet, close your eyes, visualize yourself taking more steps per minute. Create that vivid scenario in your mind.

What does it feel like in your body if you’re doing that? What are the muscles that are getting more activated? Imagine in detail, maybe the route you’re taking while you’re doing this practice. Create the experience in your brain even as you’re just sitting in a chair with your eyes closed. Imagine you’re running tall, your shoulders are relaxed, your elbows are slightly bent, you’re taking short, quick steps, just like we talked about in episode 11, we talked about running form.

You could even use a metronome to count out the cadence that you want to use. And so have the metronome ticking away while you’re doing your imagination, and then visualize your feet hitting the ground with each click of the metronome.

You can do this at night too before you go to sleep, which sort of has that added bonus of giving it to your brain to process while you’re sleeping. You can do it twice a day. It’s basically like additional training that you’re doing. It’s just that you’re not physically outside doing it, but your brain doesn’t really know the difference. Brains are – for as smart as they are, they’re pretty stupid.

So that’s my suggestion, like, either right before you go running or at night before you go to sleep are I think, the times where you’re going to get the most out of it. But you can do it any other time of the day when you can safely tune out from what’s around you, close your eyes, focus inward on that mental practice.

And then just remember that the practice needs to be detailed, almost like you’re watching a movie of what is happening. So imagine you’re at a movie and Andy just went to see Halloween last night and so I’m recording this on November 1st. He went to see Halloween, the movie, on Halloween, by himself, which terrifies me. So I was like, thinking about him last night, how like, when you watch a scary movie during the daytime and there’s all this other distraction around, you really can’t get into it.

But when you’re in that dark room, especially if you’re all by yourself and the entire focus you have is consumed by what’s in front of you, the movie screen, the theatre has surround sound, maybe if you’re in one of those theatres that has like, speakers in the chairs themselves, like, you get completely consumed by what’s right there in front of you.

And your mental practice should feel that way, except not scary like Halloween. Although, I love Jamie Lee Curtis. I love that she keeps coming back to do these movies and everything but like, oh my god, so scary. Anyway, so your mental practice should feel like you are just completely consumed. You’re in that experience as much as you can be.

And you want to make sure that you’re experiencing all aspect of the activity in your mind. The more detailed, the better. So the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings, like, everything that’s going to be part of it, make sure that it’s super detailed because the more those areas of your brain are activated, the faster the results that you’ll get.

Now, you might think I’m crazy saying that you can just think your way to improving your running, but it is legit. You need to practice in the real world too, but adding this mental practice to your day will absolutely benefit you. And seriously, this is like – we’re talking Tiger Woods level stuff. He does this. All kinds of athletes do this. I can’t think of the names of any other athletes right now, but I promise that they do it.

Anyway, if nothing else, you get some quiet meditative time out of it. But the more you can practice, the better. Daily is awesome. Multiple times a day are even more awesome. But even if you do this once a week, you will get some benefits from it.

Now, let’s move on to applying this concept to race day. Now, there’s two parts to this. The first is you’re going to take some time and come up with the script of your event. So basically, everything you want to think and feel and do from maybe the night before right through crossing the finish line the next day. And I don’t mean a preparation checklist. I want you to think of it, again, like a movie script for how your race went.

Then, after you write your script, you’re going to practice it as much as possible using the techniques we talked about earlier, and I’m going to walk you through what that looks like. Here’s the thing though, if it’s a really long script, you might want to pick different parts to practice on different days. You could make a schedule.

On Monday, I practice the night before, on Tuesday, I practice the morning of, on Wednesday, I practice the race itself. But we’re going to talk about that, like, what needs to go in your script right now. So to write your script, I want you to carve out 15 to 20 minutes of time and you really – this isn’t something you’ll do every day. You’re just going to do it once and then maybe refine it over time as you get closer to your race.

But you’re going to grab some pen and paper or grab your laptop and then write out the story of your race. And there’s going to be a PDF of this exercise that you can grab at my website. So right now you can just listen. So I want you to start with the night before and how will you prepare your equipment? Where will you put it? Will it be on the chair next to your bed? Will it be in the closet? Will you wear it overnight? Where will you put your equipment? How will you prepare it? What are you going to take with you? What are you going to do the night before your race? What meals, what activities, what is your bedtime routine?

Where will you be? Will you be at home in your own bed? Will you be in a hotel? Will you be at a friend’s house? What time will you set your alarm? Then moving on to the next morning, what are the activities you’re going to do? Be very specific. For example, you might get up, brush your teeth, wash your face, get dressed, make and drink your coffee, have your bathroom routine, take a selfie, pack the car, eat your breakfast, grab your go bag and get in the car and leave.

So be specific about all of those details, and how do you think you’re going to feel through all of this? The night before, the morning of, will you be nervous, excited, anxious? Allow yourself to experience those emotions ahead of time.

Now, when you get to the race, where are you going to park? Where’s the race start? You’ll already have figured that out, but I want you to visualize yourself parking your car, grabbing your bag, pinning on your bib number and so forth. Imagine what the weather is like. And you could even go to the trouble of doing all the possibilities. Like, imagine – write it out as if it’s raining, write it out as if it’s really hot, write it out as if it’s a gorgeous, perfect day for running. Imagine all the possibilities.

Imagine and write out what you’re going to do while you’re waiting for the start. And remember, what we’re doing right now is writing the script, so you’re literally either writing all of this down or typing it out as if it’s the scrip of the movie that happened that is describing your race day.

So what will you do while you’re waiting for the race to start? Will you talk to friends? Hit up the porta potties? Maybe take some moments to yourself, maybe do some dynamic stretching. Where will you position yourself in your corral? Are you going to be at the front, the side, the back? Where is that going to be?

Do you have ear buds? Are you starting your Garmin or your Runkeeper? Are you kicking up your playlist? And then I want you to imagine crossing the starting line. So put yourself in the place of being very relaxed. Excited but relaxed, doing your intervals exactly the way you practiced. Other people are all around you, you’re just doing your thing. This is really, really important for you to imagine what it’s going to be like when you cross the start line because your body is going to want to send all this adrenaline through and hype you up and want you to run as far as possible, and you’ve trained with intervals.

So I want you to imagine yourself just trusting your training, being relaxed, cross the start line, start your intervals, and not really being concerned with what other people around you are doing. Imagine yourself effortless running the first mile, seeing that first mile marker, high-fiving spectators, grabbing some water.

Write out the things you want to think about during each mile. Maybe you’re going to give yourself a question to think about for each mile of the race, whatever it is. Pick several moments during the race, maybe specific places on the course and imagine going through them. And do this in detail. If you know where family members are going to be, like, oh, I know my brother is going to be waiting at mile six, which is exactly what happened for me.

My first half marathon in Philadelphia, a lot of my family members came down. Actually, my whole family came down to cheer me on, and I knew exactly what corner they were going to be on. I knew they were going to be at mile 6.5 and so I visualized like, what am I going to do? They’re going to be standing over here so I’m going to get over to the right side of the street, I’m going to be ready to high-five them, I’m going to hug them.

Like, imagine that. Imagine the landmarks you’re going to see. What will you think and feel when you see those landmarks? What are some of the thoughts you want to have? And write them out ahead of time. For example, you might think, “I’m so proud of myself for doing this. I can do anything I want to,” or, “Good job, you are killing it,” or, “This is hard and that makes it even more worth doing.”

Write out the thoughts that you want to be thinking during the race and then during your mental rehearsal, you’ll practice thinking them. Imagine the last mile of the race. What will you be saying to yourself? How will you feel?

And you will feel tired. That’s fine. Plan ahead. Just plan ahead and be like, yeah, I know I’m going to be tired. I’m finishing the last mile, I’m exhausted, I’m excited, I’m ready to finish, I can’t wait to see my family at the end. Imagine crossing the finish line, smiling for the camera. Maybe you do a little jump in the air or if you’re like me and you’re goofy, you always do a thumbs up and you kind of look a little silly and goofy, but it’s your traditional move.

So what are you going to do as you cross the finish line? Is your family going to be there? Who’s going to be there for you to hug at the end? Or maybe you’re doing this race by yourself and if you listen to the next episode where I’m going to interview Melissa Casey, who’s a marathon woman extraordinaire, she does races by herself. And so her visualization doesn’t involve family members. It involves a whole different routine.

Imagine getting your medal, eating something, stretching, celebrating, and throughout the entire script that you’re writing, what will you see? What will you hear? What will you smell? What will you feel? All of that. Be as detailed as you can, especially about those last few miles and the finish line because that is really when you’re going to need the mental rehearsal to kick in.

So write that whole script, 15 to 20 minutes, or you can take longer if you want to. And again, I’ve got a PDF for you on the website with a bunch of prompts to help you create this script. And then the second part is to practice. So your practice each time is going to start with reading through your script, and eventually, you’ll have it pretty much memorized.

But in the beginning, you’re going to need to read it and then so read through your script for maybe three minutes, five minutes or whatever, then close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting in the audience watching that movie that you just read the script of. Watching the movie about your race. Imagine yourself in the movie, imagine yourself playing the lead. You are the hero of this story.

Experience the day ahead of time and give yourself 15 minutes or so, or more if you want, to really live that script in your mind, and do this every day. You can – I mean, you don’t have to. I think it’s powerful to do it every day. Maybe in the beginning when you’re first starting your training you do it once or twice a week, but as your race gets closer, you’re going to visualize it every single day.

Read through the script and then experience it by closing your eyes and visualizing it happening step by step. And you can start this practice weeks or months ahead of your race. And as you get closer to race day, you might start refining your script and adding more detail as you learn more about the course, as you find maybe more friends that are doing the race. You can add more and more detail.

This is actually part of the practice. So the script that you write at first is your starting point and then you keep refining it and refining it. You might find you want to adjust some of the things that you’re visualizing on race day because you’re like, oh, you know what, it makes more sense for me to do it this way, and so that’s what you’ll do. It’s your practice, it’s your script, if your movie of your race day, and when something doesn’t feel quite right, you can just change it and start practicing.

The goal is though, to keep putting yourself in the moments of that race. And like I said before, if you have a really long script, if it’s really detailed, maybe you break it up over three or four days and you practice different sections of the race on different days and just keep rotating through it.

Okay, I really, really hope you try this. So I want you to let me know. You can email support@notyouraveragerunner.com. Let us know if this is something you tried, if it worked for you, if you love it, if you hate it, we want to hear all of it. And you can also put some comments in the Facebook group. Let us know.

Okay rebels, we are heading into the cool down, which means, of course, it is time for my latest obsession. Now, one of the activities we’re going to do at the Rebel Runner retreat, which starts in two days – one day. Starts tomorrow. My gosh, my brain is just gone this week. I’ve been having so much fun prepping.

Anyway, one of the activities we are going to do at the Rebel Runner retreat tomorrow is to create vision boards. Now, we’re literally going to sit down with magazines, scissors, and Mod Podge and wine and dessert, of course, and create these boards. I guess you call them canvases that have pictures and quotes of what we’d like to see happen in our lives in the future.

Now, I’ve got like, a hundred magazines stacked up and ready to go. We are going to have some fun. And I’m going to take a lot of pictures and share them on the Not Your Average Runner Instagram, of course, so make sure you scroll through and check it out.

But anyway, if you’re not big on craft projects, did you know that you can create a vision board electronically? And that’s my latest obsession. So there’s this app out there that I love, that will create a vision board for you and then you can make it the wallpaper on your computer or your phone or your tablet, or you can even print it out and hang it up or cut it out and put it on a canvas and then add some embellishments.

So the app is actually the Jack Canfield Vision Board app. And Jack Canfield’s really, really big with visualization, and it’s free, and it’s super easy. I’ve used it a bunch of times. So you take pictures and screenshots of things that you want to have happen in your life, things that you want to achieve. You put them in the app, you can arrange them however you want, you can put a background, and then you can add text and whatever you want really. It’s so freaking cool.

So it’s a free app. I think it’s for both iPhone and Android. I want you to go check it out and let me know how you like it because vision boards are pretty amazing, and if you are unfamiliar with them, first of all, just Google vision board. They’re so cool. But they are super powerful because what they do is they make you think through actively what you want for your life.

It’s very similar to the mental rehearsal. It’s daydreaming on purpose, deciding this is what I absolutely want to create for myself and you can do a vision board for your race, you can do a vision board for future races that you want to do, you can do it for just really anything that you want in your life. And I think the app has a bunch of instructions for how to really make it work for you.

So again, it’s the Jack Canfield Vision Board app. There will be a link to that in the show notes. Go check it out, let me know how you like it. Alright rebels, that is it for this week. Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/61 and I’ll be back in a couple days with the fabulous Melissa Casey and you get to hear all about her marathon adventures. Talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.