Talk Yourself Up

Practise silencing negative thoughts to run your fastest.

- Alex Hutchinson

If you reach the halfway point of a 5-K race feeling calm, comfortable, and confident that you can maintain your pace to the finish line, then you’re doing it wrong. Physiologically, 5-Ks are short enough to run them faster than your ‘critical pace’, a demarcation that separates relatively comfortable paces that you can sustain for longer than about 30 minutes from faster ones where discomfort rises rapidly. Halfway through the race, if you’re chasing a PB, you should seriously wonder whether you’ll make it to the finish.

Of course, this makes the urge to slow down – just a little, of course – almost irresistible. One of the best ways to fight that urge, it turns out, is to tell yourself that you don’t need to. ‘Motivational self-talk’ is a tool that sports psychologists have used for decades, but in recent years researchers have made new progress in demonstrating its effectiveness for endurance athletes, and in figuring out how it works. Here’s what you need to know.

1 Adjust Your Effort