Have you ever had a challenging workout coming up and you had thoughts like “This is going to be soooo hard!” or “I REALLY don’t want to do this!” (both said with trepidation and dread). Or you’re driving to a race and a thought pops into your head out of nowhere, “Maybe I’ll get a flat tire and won’t make it to the race on time?” Or you’re flying to a race and this thought comes out totally uninvited, “Maybe my bike won’t make it and I won’t be able to race” (both said with a combination of hope and relief)? If you’re like most triathletes, your answer to my questions is an emphatic “yes!” And I confess that, even with what I do for a living, I have these same thoughts too!
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. They are also decidedly unhelpful if you aspire to go as fast as you can in a triathlon. I’ll explain why shortly.
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 corte, which responsible for future planning and decision making) consciously recognizes that a demanding and painful experience is approaching. Your primitive brain (specifically, your amygdala which acts as a filter the sole purpose of which is the identify and react 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.
Now, please allow me to digress briefly to give you some additional background information. Our primitive brain doesn’t like any sort of discomfort or pain. Why? Because, beginning 250,000,000 years ago, when early forms of life crawled out of the primordial muck up to the Serengeti 250,000 years ago, when we first officially became human beings (Home Sapiens), if we experienced pain, death was likely soon to follow. Moreover, your primitive brain doesn’t know the difference between pain so many eons ago when, yes, physical death was likely and the pain you experience as you pursue your triathlon goals.
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 at least 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 over those 250,000,000 years. It is really, really good at reining in anything that it perceives as life threatening.
Psychologically, your motivation declines because when your primitive brain causes you to think something like, “I’m so not psyched for this 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 #s in today’s workout,” which cause you to lose confidence as 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 produce 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. And unfortunate, and unintended, 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.
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!” (said emphatically).
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 Lisa 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. Gosh, by saying (and believing), “I want this. Bring it on!,” how could you not want to go out and absolutely crush your next workout or race?
