Again, like I said, I don’t know what to really make of some of these studies. It’s very hard to get people to exert themselves to complete exhaustion for experimental purposes. But the bottom line for me is that we’re severely under-estimating the importance of things like self-control, motivational coaching, psychological preparedness, and other self regulatory neurological tricks — many of them conscious, learned, and even social, depending on other people — if we treat sports as primarily motor and mechanical. Certainly, when you get very close ethnographically to actual athletes, you find that motivation, psychological state, self talk, and these sorts of things are absolutely crucial, but our research agendas and explanatory models don’t always take this into account.

One simple example is pain itself. How we interpret pain has everything to do with how we will respond to it. What may be a pain worth stopping for, a pain that is too worrying or distracting to one person, may not derail another. Or, in one situation, I might overlook a pain that in another will simply be too much to bear. Not only do we find it in the no-holds-barred fighters I worked with; choking techniques, for example, have more psychological effect on novices than physical effect. The first time someone sinks a choke on you, forget it — you want to quit instantly. The more you train, the more you realize that, although it hurts, a particular choke may not be properly applied, so you’re not in any trouble.

Another example is a story I read about a Kenyan cross-country runner in Randall Mayes quirky but really wonderful, The Cybernetics of Kenyan Running: Hurry, Hurry Has No Blessing (Carolina Academic Press, 2005). Kenyan runners are great because so many people think of them as ‘natural’ runners, when the Kenyans are under no such illusions. They work REALLY hard. One of them who was training at an NCAA cross-country team was asked how he dealt with the pain of hard training runs. I’m just recalling off the top of my head, so it’s not a direct quote, but he said something like, running cross-country isn’t painful. Getting drug into the forest when you’re 14, having your foreskin cut off, and getting flogged for three days — that’s painful. The point being that his experience of a very painful initiation rite completely re-contextualized, in a very real physiological sense, his later experience of painful running. The runner probably still dissociated, but he also likely didn’t find painful running so stressful.

Athletes are such a great set of cases to study for this stuff. As our regular readers know, I’m fascinated by the neural dimensions of this. I’ve recently been looking at accounts of the legendary Tarahumara runners from Northern Mexico who would run races over hundreds of miles, some lasting days (like a number of Native American groups in the area), and I’m fascinated by the fact that it was not considered exceptional in these groups. That is, we tend to think of our marathoners as super-humans. The Tarahumara considered it normal to be able to run extremely long distances. That psychological dimension no doubt influenced how they performed in profound ways. Yes, they were turning in slow miles splits, but when you stack a couple of hundred up end-to-end, you’ve got an amazing performance, especially for folks running without real shoes, across rough terrain, with a lousy training diet.

Mechanically, I’ve added more arm-pumping and taken shorter but quicker strides, but I didn’t feel any faster till I noticed my time around the 20th mile mark, when barring injury I would be assured a faster finishing time than in previous years.

Where was my mind for this race?

My eyes were either on the ground when there wasn’t a crowd, straight ahead if there was, and on mile markers.

Mentally, I was focused on running itself — I kept telling myself over and over to just keep moving. I had developed psychological confidence in the idea that shorter, quicker strides would make me run faster. So I kept doing that, even when my thigh muscle kept shouting at me.

A big part of my mental makeup was also keeping the focus on what more I could’ve done as opposed to what I couldn’t do. I didn’t think at all about my limitations, what others were doing, and so I kept one (relatively) fluid pace.

I had actually wanted to dissociate myself by thinking about the idea of “play” through a neuroanthropoloical perspective , but I find that I never got the chance to think about that. I find that I was just concerned about surviving and maintaining my pace.

It’s interesting this term “dissociate” — I guess that implies we already think too much about things when we have to perform. It’s true that I have to detach myself from lots of things I think about, but does that mean I have to not think about anything at all? I did think about something, granted it wasn’t the stuff of intellectual heavyweights. For me, I think going through an endurance race is mostly about having a “one-tract”, i.e. specialized-to-the-task mind and thinking about very simple things. (However, on training runs, I do think about many other things and sometimes I have epiphanies).

I probably did think about too many things in the previous 2 marathons. I looked at all the surroundings, the other runners, I was keeping pace with 2 other runners, I also started to slow up when others started slowing up (around mile 23). Perhaps I would’ve finished faster had I not been as distracted and been keen to my own limitations. This year, I kept the focus simple: what was it that I could do given my experience and ability, and do over and over again? What was it that I could sustain over 26 miles at a reasonable pace.

Its funny the way I remember these marathons now. This year as with last year, I remember one fluid race. There weren’t these “different parts of a journey” as I thought with my very first marathon where I was slogging through the last 5 miles with cramps. I wonder what the meaning of that is.

On a side note, I think that running in rainy weather is actually better, at least for me. In fact I did my longest run (23 miles) through a very large downpour. Never felt any better. Of course until about 20 minutes after I finished where I was shivering heavily for about 5 minutes.