"Could I go faster?" is worth testing with a thought experiment. Take my mind, put it in your body, and send it out to race. Same legs, same lungs, same fitness as you have right now.
I would probably post a quicker time than you.
Now take my coach Gaz, put his mind in my body, and send that out. He would very likely beat what I could do with it. Same body. Different driver.
BLUF: the mind is not a fixed setting you were issued at birth. It is trainable, and almost nobody has finished training it. Including me.
This follows on from the last piece, which made the case that discomfort tolerance is trained alongside fitness. This one is about what that trained mind actually does differently on the day.
What the trained mind does
It is not grit, or wanting it more, or any of the other things that get printed on a t-shirt. It is a set of specific, learnable behaviours.
- It paces on evidence, not on feel alone. Early in a race everything feels easy, and the untrained response is to bank time. The trained response is to hold the plan, because it knows how the last third feels.
- It does not catastrophise. Feeling rough at 30km is information, not a verdict. Bad patches pass, and someone who has been through a few knows that. Someone who has not assumes the day is over.
- It narrows when things get hard. Rather than thinking about the whole distance remaining, it shrinks the task. This lamppost. This lap. This rep.
- It talks to itself on purpose. Which sounds soft until you look at what it does to performance.
- It knows which signals to act on. This is the important one. Discomfort gets absorbed. Genuine warning signs get respected. That judgement is experience, not toughness.
The self-talk bit is not soft
Of all the mental skills, this is the one people are most sceptical about, and it has some of the clearest evidence behind it.
In controlled studies, motivational self-talk has increased time to exhaustion by roughly 18%, from about 637 seconds to 751 seconds. And here is the telling part: perceived exertion at the same point in the effort dropped from 7.3 to 6.4 out of 10.
The work did not get easier. It stopped feeling as hard. Which, going back to the last article, is the thing that governs when you slow down.
There is even a wrinkle in how you phrase it. Second-person self-talk ("you can hold this") appears to outperform first-person ("I can hold this") by a small but consistent margin. Talking to yourself as though you were coaching someone else works slightly better than talking as yourself.
Try this: pick two or three phrases before the race, not during it. Something you would actually say. Then use them at the point you know it will get hard.
Why I still have a coach
I coach people for a living, and I have a coach. That is not a marketing line, it is the whole point of the thought experiment.
Gaz sees what I cannot see from the inside. He knows when I am talking myself out of a session, when a plan needs adjusting versus when I just do not fancy it, and when my read on my own fatigue is wrong. Left to my own devices I make worse decisions, and I make them with total confidence.
So, what that means is: the ceiling is not your fitness, and it is not fixed. It moves when someone helps you see the bit you are blind to.
The same caveat, because it matters
None of this is an argument for pushing through everything.
The trained mind is not the one that ignores the most. It is the one that reads the situation most accurately. Absorbing discomfort and overriding genuine warning signs are opposite skills, and confusing them is how people end up injured, ill or flat for months.
Getting faster by being braver about discomfort is real. Getting hurt by ignoring pain is just getting hurt.
How to start
Here's what to do:
- Rehearse the hard bit. Decide in advance where the race will hurt and what you will do when it does. A plan made calmly beats one made at 30km.
- Practise it in training, not just on race day. The last two reps of a hard session are where this skill is actually built.
- Write down what your head says when it gets hard. Most of us run the same script every time. You cannot change it until you have seen it.
- Anchor effort to a number. The RPE scale gives you something objective when perception is running hot, and it is the same scale the research uses.
- Have a pacing plan you trust. The Race Pace Planner gives you splits to hold, which is exactly what stops the early-race enthusiasm costing you later. For a specific event, our race guides model it against the real course.
The bottom line
Your body is almost certainly capable of more than it delivered last time out. The gap is not usually fitness, it is the driver.
The good news is that the driver improves. Mine has, and it still has plenty of room, which is exactly why I have someone in my corner too.
Accountability is the bridge between motivation and discipline.
If you want someone helping you see your own blind spots, don't sit on it, let me know.