Everything we do in life is preceded by a private, mental conversation. In the weeks before a marathon, for example, your thoughts could represent competing ways of pacing the race, e.g., start fast or slow. Your thinking always decides the issue.
You could be relatively unaware of your internal conversation, or its importance to life decisions. Nonetheless, on marathon day, your performance depends on the voices you will have employed to consider possible lines of race behavior. These “voices” are distinct from one another, but they aren’t separate personalities. They are merely ways of articulating the pros and cons of important pending issues.
This article describes several voices common to the racing game. Each voice contributes attitudinal perspective, emotional texture, and intellectual depth to race related decisions. Are you listening to your internal conversation?
Ambition. Your ambition resides in your heart’s desire. Whatever you want most drives your behavior leading up to race day. Ambition is the basis for a winning race experience. Without ambition you wouldn’t know whether you’ve been victorious. Lots of people give up marathoning for want of adequate ambition. But when ambition becomes obsession, negative results are inevitable. Yet, ambition is not the villain. Rather, failure derives from deluded thinking and irrational means of achieving your goals.
Experience. Some athletes are sufficiently grounded in their racing tempo to pace themselves by feeling. They’ve practiced race pace extensively during hard tempo workouts, time trials, and races, so they can project themselves into a very hard racing effort without crashing. Inexperienced athletes who haven’t done their homework are apt to ignore their actual racing capacity in favor of wishful thinking. They have a finish time in mind with a matching pacing plan and they persuade themselves they can execute the plan when the quiet voice of caution says they’re being delusional.
“You could be relatively unaware of your internal conversation, or its importance to life decisions. Nonetheless, on marathon day, your performance depends on the voices you will have employed to consider possible lines of race behavior.”
Caution. Where caution tells you to hold back, delusion throws your fate to the wind. Caution waits for the moment of decision in every race, needing ample energy and legitimate competition before giving the green light to charge ahead. Caution is afraid of pain, finding it disagreeable and unnecessary to a winning effort. But when obsession dominates decision-making, caution cannot get a word in edgewise. None-theless, your body knows what’s coming and will protest vehemently. If obsessive ambition threatens your physical well-being, your body may have to rely on sabotage.
Sabotage. This voice gives you an excuse for not doing something harmful, unrealistic, or well beyond your comfort zone. Thus, you do something “accidentally on purpose” to destroy your chances of achieving your heart’s desire. When the coach says, “You didn’t have to break a leg to get out of doing the race,” you laugh uproariously. Sabotage usually operates at an unconscious level. By contrast, the voice of wisdom knows how to provide a win-win solution to a seemingly intractable problem that’s arisen among conflicting voices in the racing conversation.