Listen to Your Body and Control Your Inner Dialogue
Photo credit: Jamie Geysbeek Photography
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This week Andi and Zach discuss how to listen to your body and control your inner dialogue as a runner.
INTRO
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MAIN TOPIC: Listen to Your Body and Control Your Inner Dialogue
Main Topic: Listen to Your Body and Control Your Inner Dialogue
From the Book, “Do Hard Things” by Steve Magness (an affiliate link through Amazon.)
Second Pillar: Listen to your body
- Pillars of Toughness
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- Pillar 2: Listen to your body
- Emotions/ Feelings
- Name it.
- Doing this gives us a better shot upstream in our evaluation because there is not often much time between the arrival of a feeling and our reaction.
- Pillar 2: Listen to your body
- Internal Dialogue
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- Technique- Use “you, she/her, or your own name” instead of speaking to yourself in first person language.
- Another technique- say the voice you want to listen outloud to give it more power.
- Using second or third person language creates distance between the experience and our emotional response.
- Alain de Botton (author and philosopher), “A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on, and interested in helping us deal with our problems.”
Third Pillar: Respond instead of react
- Signals like pain, discomfort, and threats/challenges
- Often we go from experiencing pain, adversity, or discomfort straight to a freak out.
- We want to train to be like the meditators and sit in the sensation, and evaluate before a response.
- The counterbalance to the amygdala’s pain button is the prefrontal cortex. While the amygdala might trigger anxiety that wrecks our capacity to execute a task, the PFC acts to regulate emotional responses and maintain our performance on the task at hand.
- Burnout- overactive amygdala.
- Often we are not only reacting to the initial stressor (reality) but also the anticipation and lingering reverberations of it. Worse, we then we learn to do this same overactive response the next time we are in a similar situation.
- Creating space
- Creating space between the stressor and our reaction “is a way to disrupt the pattern, to slow down the jump from feeling to freak out.”
- According to Magness, you need two things for a calm conversation:
- #1 Time alone in your head
- #2 Keep your mind steady: Develop the ability to respond instead of react.
- Utilize and practice multiple strategies
WORLD OF RUNNING
World of Running
#1. Shout outs from last week
- John Cody Rische was 3rd in the US 35k Championship walk
- Houston Half- Zouhair Talbi was 5th
- 5th, Zouhair Talbi (USA) – 1:01:08
- 7th, Erika Kemp (USA) – 1:10:14
- 8th, Lindsay Flanagan (USA) – 1:10:35
- Full marathon
- 4th, Parker Stinson (USA) – 2:12:11
#2. 2023 USATF XC Championships
(Source)
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- The top 6 finishers in each race earn a spot on Team USA at the World Cross Country Championships that will be held in Australia on Feb 18th.
- Men’s Race
- Emmanuel Bor won his first USATF Title
- Runs for the US Army
- the live results had a gap of just 0.8 between 3rd and 7th
- *Reid Buchanan was the first one out–possible to still go if someone declines in front
- Unlikely anyone will given the clientele
- Bor, Andrew Colley, Anthony Rotich, Leonard Korir, Sam Chelenga, Dillon Maggard
- (Hillary Bor was 8th)
- Bummer story about E. Bor and WA rule changes for XC to track qualifiers
- Women’s race
- Ednah Kurgat won her first USATF title as well (dominated)
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- The top 6 was decisive early
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- Makenne Morley finished second
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- The rest of top 6: Emily Durgin, Emily Lipari, Weini Kelati, Katie Izzo
- Durgin, Lipari, and Izzo all have the same coach (individually)–Terrence Mahon (coached Ryan Hall, Deena Kastor, whole slew of others since early 2000s)
#3. An inside look at pros’ training
- OAC: Joe Klecker posted workout on Strava:
- 1600: 3:57 (2:02,1:55) 6 guys all at or under 3:57/3:58
- 10 min walk/jog
- 3x2k w/ 1 min rest: 6:12, 6:03, 5:55
- 4×200 28-29
- Was awesome to read the message board speculation…
- What’s happening here?
- Hard mile (timetrial, not 100% effort probably)
- Then some solid steady tempo
- Quick 200s to restimulate
- Why? Agree with the posts about how it is a kind of race sim experience except with some additional work to increase the load on the hard effort day
- How would we do this differently?
- Might instead have them run the TT one day, and additional hard effort work the next day (fartlek or hill work, if it were me)
Bonus: rest is part of thriving
(Source: Canadian Running Mag)
- Coach David Roche: 3-day off rule (when in doubt…)
- “Recognizing what mental, emotional, and work and family stress you are adding to your training load is valuable. So is knowing that even if you scale back training time, your body is always striving to make adaptations to become better at handling stress, both physical and mental.”
- One of the big reasons physiological a stressful life tends to produce injury
- Increased stress can produce inflammation (increased cortisol levels)
- Chronic inflammation often leads to injury, illness and worse
- Rest in terms of both physical breaks and breaks from life stressors
Interested in a training plan and/or coaching? We offer personalized support to help you achieve your goals! KEEP LISTENING
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