The Mind Muscle: When we don’t control our habits, our habits control us.

A lot of the substance that will be discussed here is taken, anecdotally, from my own experience or the experiences of athletes that I have witnessed and absorbed vicariously. The inspiration for the conversation of will power; stems from a lack of its use in my own life as of late. There is a very fine line in endurance sports between letting yourself recover, giving yourself the time off to recover both physiologically and mentally, and letting that respite develop into a new way of living. Ultimately allowing yourself to become softened. The other end of that spectrum however is pushing yourself way too hard, and too much - and finding yourself burnt out from all angles, especially an athletic one. Neither are productive, neither are efficient and I would argue that nobody in sport wants to find themselves at either end of the spectrum, but how do we fix this?

For me, endurance sport has always been a tool that I’ve used to develop an awareness of self; we find ourselves thinking a lot whilst training solo, then, when we are in the deep end of a race this thought process is intensified, we learn a lot about ourselves, we often come away craving that battle with the mind once more and that’s what keeps us hooked, constantly craving that development of self. Now this self awareness isn’t exhausted in training days or race days. In fact it seeps deep into us and gives us a further understanding of ourselves and this is where the relevance creeps in - if we have this deeper awareness of self, we can use this to be our own gauge on where the mind is currently operating from as a broader perspective.

One of the key indicators to me that training, life and motivation is in full flow (because we do need to be in some sort of flow with all of these facets, despite what social media will have you believe about motivation, if you don’t have any, it’ll be hard to train with purpose) is that if I have started a session, I will not let anything interrupt the stimulus. If I drop my bottle on the turbo trainer, I’ll finish the session without drinking unless I can pick it up whilst continuing the session. If I need to go to the toilet when running, I’ll hold it for as long as the session is in duration. If I get stopped at a road crossing when I’m running, I’ll run up and down on the same side of the road until I can cross.

Conversely, if I’m not in full flow, if I’m clutching at straws for a reason to train, then when I’m intra-session all it takes is the smallest opportunity for interruption and I’ll take it. I’ll have a rest, I’ll break, even if it’s for 2 seconds, a minute, 2 minutes. I’ll utilise the excuse to stop. Think about the accumulation of impact here, 2 minutes, across 10 sessions, is 20 minutes worth of missed work or poor, low quality stimulus.

This, in itself, is absolutely catastrophic as an athlete.

When the mind becomes used to stopping, when its weaknesses are validated, we change our brain chemistry into allowing for this behaviour, like any other stimulus in training if this is practiced in a build up to a race, then guess what, when you get the opportunity to stop, or rest, or take a break in a race, you bet you’re going to snatch that opportunity right up.

The magic you’re looking for is in the work that you’re avoiding

Who are you and why do you do this? Because if it isn’t to be the best version of yourself as a person and as an athlete then just down tools, don’t bother. OR change your attitude.

You’ll have people tell you that you need some deep why, a reason -
I don’t have one, my only why has ever been, to be the best I can be.

I lost that recently, for a number of reasons, but the overarching truth is that I lost it. I could have found it again a lot quicker than I did but I let myself wallow and the slope was and is slippy. Before you know it you’re a whole world away from being the athlete you once were and let me tell you, if you haven’t found your why by the time you hit that place, your why will come and sucker punch you and make you wish you’d never forgotten what it was.

So to summarise; you aren’t just training. You’re habit building. The more respect and attention you pay to that, the better you will become not only as an athlete but also as a person. Standards need maintenance, standards are built on habits, repeatable action that keeps you in check. If you build the wrong habits, your standards will slip and you will watch the infrastructure of your life take shape in a way that you don’t want. Choose the right habits, you’ll find yourself achieving things you never thought possible from all angles.

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."