Last week Training Peaks hosted a webinar by Carrie Cheadle: Developing Mental Toughness. My goal for this year is to learn to push beyond my perceived limits. To go fast and take chances. A big part of achieving that goal will be to develop my mental toughness.
Carrie detailed the four qualities that mentally strong athletes have:
- Commitment
- Focus
- Resilience
- Attitude
For each of these qualities she gave us tools that we can use in training to develop these traits along with tools that we can use on race day to call upon these traits.
My big takeaways from her presentation were:
- Mentally tough individuals are not born. It takes work!
- Just like you can’t expect to PR a 5K after not running for 3 months you can’t expect to be mentally strong if you don’t train for it.
- Learn to change obstacles to opportunities. You choose how to define the challenge in front of you, then learn to find your way around that obstacle.
- Use failure as feedback. You can choose to let failure feed your feelings of confidence or doubt. You choose.
- Embrace the struggle because it is a part of the journey! Competing isn’t easy but we don’t do this because it is easy.
If you are interested you can listen to the entire webinar here:
Carrie also did a webinar earlier on the Psychology of Suffering that I really want to listen to. I’m afraid of the pain and I need to learn to embrace it more!
If you want to learn more you can also visit Carrie’s website, plus you can sign up to get mental skills training tips via e-mail.
What do you do to work on your mental toughness? Is this a quality that you try to work on regularly?
This is exactly what I needed! Mental toughness is what I am totally struggling with right now and I never thought about it that it’s an area to train.
Jen recently posted…Ragnar So Cal Recap
Definitely going to listen to that!
When I was swimming, I had a great coach who spent a lot of time teaching us how to be mentally tough – it’s something that’s stayed with me for years. I was big into the “pain is weakness leaving the body” during the hard workout sets.
Ange recently posted…Motivate Me Monday 4/13 & #sexysmartstrong
YES!! That’s exactly what I was working on at this weekends race!!
Amanda – RunToTheFinish recently posted…How to run a PR on a bad day?