Have you ever had a challenging workout coming up and thought “I really don’t want to do this.” Or as you are flying to a race, hoped that your bike won’t make it and you won’t be able to race? Believe it or not, even Olympic gold medalists fight with those thoughts before big workouts and races.
These thoughts, what I call “Reluctance/Avoidance” Thinking (RAT), are far more frequent than you would think among triathletes, even the pros I work with, including Olympic gold medalist and recent World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS) Weihai champion, Lisa Tertsch. They are also decidedly unhelpful if you aspire to go as fast as you can in a triathlon. I’ll explain why shortly.
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Where “Reluctance/Avoidance” Thinking Comes From
Oddly, RAT emerges from an unlikely location in your brain, namely, your primitive brain. RAT arises when your evolved brain (specifically, your pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for future planning and decision making) consciously recognizes that a demanding and painful experience is approaching. Your primitive brain (specifically, your amygdala, which identifies and reacts to potential threats to your survival) receives this message from your evolved brain and instantaneously triggers our survival instinct and, in turn, the fight-or-flight reaction.
When your primitive brain hears from your evolved brain that there is a very difficult workout scheduled in TrainingPeaks or a challenging race today, it perceives that news as an existential threat that requires your survival instinct to wake up and do everything it can to stop it from occurring all together, or to ensure that the discomfort doesn’t reach a level that will end in death.
Your primitive brain accomplishes its primal goal by triggering the reluctance/avoidance thinking that I described above.
How “Reluctance/Avoidance” Thinking Affects You
You might be skeptical that some RAT could have that much influence on your training efforts or race performance. Yet that impact can be dramatic because the survival instinct has been honed, refined and perfected as our brains developed over time. It is really good at reining in anything that it perceives as life threatening.
Psychologically, your motivation declines because when your primitive brain causes you to be wary of the workout, you become less likely to want to give your full effort. You also have negative thoughts, such as “I’m not sure I can even hit my numbers in today’s workout,” which cause you to lose confidence, which is expressed in doubt and uncertainty. Focus also narrows onto the primary threat to your survival which, in this case, is the difficult workout or hard race. This narrow focus prevents you from directing your full attention to giving your best effort.
Your emotions are another powerful means by which your primitive brain causes you to reduce your effort. Worry, fear and despair (plus the trepidation and dread that I already mentioned) arise with RAT to further encourage you to “flee” the approaching painful workout or race by either limiting your effort or, ideally, stopping you from doing the workout or race at all.
Lastly, RAT produces one of two types of physiological changes that further protect you from death by reducing your effort. First, these thoughts and emotions are so threatening that they cause you to experience significant anxiety, in the form of increased heart rate and breathing, as well as muscle tension, all of which prevent you from giving your full effort. Second, the thoughts and emotions associated with RAT cause a physiological letdown, where you are no longer capable of performing with sufficient training in training or races.
The end result is less effort, which translates into less exertion, which means less chance of pain, and, finally, concludes with less of a threat to your survival. An unfortunate consequence of this chain reaction is that you don’t give your best effort in training or give your best performances in races.
What is interesting about RAT is that the reduction in effort caused by the changes I just described can be very subtle. Assuming you are a highly motivated triathlete, you may not even notice the drop in effort in training or races that accompanies RAT. But if your goals are at all high or you are the least bit competitive, that small decline can the difference between a goal achieved and a goal thwarted.
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What to do when you experience “Reluctance/Avoidance” Thinking
Given that the RAT reaction is such a “normal” part of triathlon life, your next question is probably, “What can I do to minimize the impact of or even prevent these unproductive thoughts and emotions?”
It starts with recognizing that your evolved brain gives you the capacity to override your primitive brain’s messages. In other words, you must send a message that contradicts your RAT. I have experimented with many different phrases that would oppose my RAT. I found two key elements that should be a part of whatever message you create and convey to yourself to resist your RAT. First, your primitive brain is telling you that you don’t want to do the workout or race, so you must assert your desire to do it (in an emphatic way). Second, your primitive brain wants you to run away from the workout or race, so you must express your wish to pursue it. With those two criteria in mind, my go-to message that I tell myself is: “I want this. Bring it on!”
At first, you will likely tell yourself this message after you hear those pesky RAT messages inside your head. But you should also build these messages into your pre-workout and pre-race routines. For example, in the lead up to the Paris Olympics, I had Lisa Tertsch, the newly crowned gold medalist in the Mixed Relay, repeat that phrase just before she left her home prior to every workout in the months leading up to her Olympic races. She also said them to herself when she left her hotel room on her way to her pre-Olympic WTCS races in Yokohama and Hamburg. The purpose of this practice was to consistently place a positive and helpful message in her mind before her primitive brain had the chance to produce the RAT. And Tertsch continued this practice on the morning of the Mixed Relay, with the results speaking for themselves.
In a sense, by engaging your evolved brain, you are retraining your mind and body to think and feel in ways that would allow you to at least maintain and, in many cases, increase your efforts in training and on race day.
Jim Taylor, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading authorities on the psychology of endurance sports, as well as an Ironman, two-time USA National Champion, and three-time World Championship medal-winning age-group triathlete. He recently utilized his own “Emotional Training” methods to a three-medal performance at the USAT Multisport National Championships. To learn more, visit: www.drjimtaylor.com
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