A Mental Framework That Leads To PRs

Published August 28, 2024

Cross country is underway in my household. My older daughter had her first race of the year on Saturday and my younger daughter started practice on Monday. What a wonderful time of year!

Today, I want to share a powerful way for your athletes to approach their next race. The learning comes from the Mental Skills for High School Runners course.

While you can enroll in the course any time of year I only put the course on sale once a year.

The course is $195 today, but next week you can get it for $95.

“Wow! That’s a significant discount. When is it on sale?”

The course goes on sale Tuesday, September 3, and ends at 11:45 p.m. EDT on Thursday, September 5. If you enroll during that short window, you’ll save $100

The course comes with a 10-day money-back guarantee, with no questions asked (though I’ve yet to have someone ask for a refund). You get lifetime access to the course and the updates that I do each year.

Be on the lookout for an email next Tuesday in which I share stories of how the course has changed programs across the country.

Mental Skills

The first thing we need to cover today is that it’s crucial that you use the term “mental skills” rather than “mental toughness.”

A skill is something you can learn and improve month after month.

Why are mental skills critical? And why do you and your athletes need to make them a focus of training in August when you don’t have any important meets?

The obvious answer is that we need athletes to race to their fitness level. If they’ve put in solid work this summer, they’re ready to race faster this fall than they ever have.

But if coaches and athletes just focus on workouts, they miss a crucial part of the equation – the mental aspect of performance.

That’s why we’re talking about mental skills today – to ensure that a fit athlete runs to their potential (and their mind doesn’t sabotage all the hard work they’ve put in this summer).

“Free Yourself to Perform at Your Capabilities”

I asked Steve Magness, performance coach and author of four books, including the best sellers Peak Performance and Do Hard Things, what “mental skills” means to him.

"I think a lot of times we, we kind of get really technical, but what we're looking at is how can my mental side or psychology help me perform.

And with a high school athlete, the way I look at it is...the physical training in a lot of senses is easy.

You do what your coach tells you, you do the training, and you get better, but the mental side is the soft skills that allow you to fulfill your [potential].

So, it's not necessarily, “Hey, this is going to improve [my time].” It's allowing me to do what I'm capable of.

And if you can develop some of these skills...you're going to get out of your own way and free yourself up to perform at your capabilities.”

I couldn’t agree more – athletes shouldn’t be bogged down with technical mental skills.

Yet athletes do need to hone some skills so they can “get out of their own way” and simply race and learn how to “respond vs. react,” which I talked about in the last newsletter. You can read about this key principle at the end of this email if you missed it last week.

A Great Way to Get to a PR

Steve uses a framework to help athletes lower their anxiety going into both the season and individual races.

We talked about a runner who can run 18:45 for 5k.

Obviously, this runner wants to race faster. Let’s assume the workouts all point towards this athlete soon running a PR.

"Instead of just only focusing on that PR of 18:45 and beating it, thinking about, ‘How can I be more consistent race to race?’

So, if I know I can show up and the worst I'm going to do is 18:45...now that's actually a huge improvement.

Because what you're trying to do is if you show up week after week, then one of those weeks where you feel really good and everything aligns, you're going to say, ‘It’s my day.’

They’re coming through the mile – say at 5:40 – and it feels way better than it ever has.

So, they’re going to keep flowing along. Right?

So, to me, it’s not as much about, ‘I'm going to try and run 18:30 this week or 18:25.’ To me it's put yourself in a position to perform well consistently week over week.”

Raise The Floor

Steve also shares a framework that’s worked well for athletes, which is to “raise the floor” and not worry about the PR.

In this case the floor is 18:45.

After the athlete runs 18:30 or 18:25, then that’s the new floor and the goal isn’t necessarily to run a PR but to run that time again. And as Steve explained above, on the day the athlete is feeling great, they’ll run fast.

There are so many great takeaways from Steve’s two interviews that are part of the Mental Skills for High School Runners Course. As you know, you can save $100 on the course next week.

“My biggest regret was…”

Here’s how Coach McLain helped his athletes race to their potential with the Mental Skills course.

“I purchased Mental Skills for High School Runners midway through our cross country season after some hesitation as to whether it was really necessary in addition to the XC Training System.

But after listening to just one video, I was confident I'd made the right choice.

Our team began implementing many of the breathing and visualization techniques presented in the course just in time for our postseason races.

I firmly believe this played a large role in helping our runners remain calm and poised in their biggest races.

The year before we had runners in tears at the starting line of our district race.

This year those same runners stood at the line with so much more confidence and excitement, and it showed in their performances.

My biggest regret was not jumping on board before the season started, as I can only imagine where a full season of practice could have gotten our athletes.

The coaches featured in the course are among the best in the sport, so I firmly believe every coach and athlete could benefit from the opportunity to pick their brains on one of the more underrated aspects of distance running.

I've watched several of the interviews multiple times gearing up for another season, and each time I still find myself coming away with insights and bits for reflection as a coach.”

John McLain, St. Vincent High School (MO)

If you want the same results that Coach McClain had with his team, make sure to open your email on Tuesday morning.

Let’s go!

Jay

PS – If you missed the last email about “responding vs. reacting,” here it is.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hello. Cross country has begun here in Colorado with races starting this week and I'm fired up to be watching one on Saturday!

Just like coaches in Colorado you no doubt have kids who have put in a great summer of training.

Now the questions in mid-August are

"Will they be able to race to their fitness level this year?"
"Will they run their best 3-4 races in the last 3-4 meets of the year?"

Today let's talk about the mental part of racing and why it's crucial your athletes learn the mental skills necessary to race to their potential.

Here we go!

Responding Effectively

"Responding vs. reacting” was a key point in a conversation I had with one of the best coaches – at any level - in the country.

John O’Malley, the boy’s coach at Sandburg High School (IL), is the only person to have coached two Footlocker Champions.

On the track a young man would have to run under 4:10 in the 1,600m to crack the top 10 all-time list in his program. Wow!

When I asked him what “mental skills” means in his program - here’s what he said...

“Mental skills in our program are the idea of expanding your window or capacity of effective responses to challenging situations. So just expanding one's zone to respond effectively.

We all have a zone of response and you’re trying to widen the zone where you're more likely to have a better response. A response you'd be proud of and a response that you found was effective.

There's a lot, obviously, that goes into expanding that zone and increasing the likelihood of that positive response.”

Over the next 58 minutes of the interview John shared with me what his team does to widen this zone.

I think it’s worth highlighting what coach O’Malley expects his athletes to do:

Expand their window or capacity of effective responses to challenging situations.

This is what coaches to teach their athletes to do if the athletes are going to race to their potential.

Responding vs. Reacting

“You're not really dying when you're hurting in a long run. ‘I feel terrible’ are thoughts we try to eliminate.

We want to replace them with what we call effective problem solving. Going back to the regulation - the ability to regulate ourselves.

There's a big difference between responding versus reacting.

And that's what we talk about all the time - are you just reacting to that feeling and allowing it to control you? Do you have a response?

The easiest way to kind of get a good response is to preplan it - to know what it's going to feel like.”

And then he reminded me of a crucial part of our sport that we all take for granted.

“We are in the most predictable sport.

In football they don't know the play [the other team has] drawn up. Other athletes would love to be in our predictable situation.

I was talking to the baseball team last year and they're like, ‘Oh yeah - in your sport, you can just try harder and you have a better outcome. That doesn't work for us.’

I said, ‘Yes - isn't that great.’

Even for a sprinter that doesn't work as well. Trying harder in a 100m dash really doesn't work.

We have this huge, awesome opportunity where we have a lot of control over the outcome of our race and it's very predictable. We know it's going to hurt at various points.

We know generally what it's going to feel like. You may not know exactly what your competitors are going to do, but you, you have a ballpark.

Talk to yourself about that beforehand and then be ready for being adaptable. It may look like this, or maybe like this...

If you're having a terrible day - and we all have 'em - how are you getting ready to respond there?"

“Where Can I Get This Information?”

This is just a small bit of what John shared in the Mental Skills for High School Runners course.

John’s interview is one of 14 videos in the course. The course also features guided visualizations you can use with your team.

If you have athletes that are anxious before races, and you’re at a loss for how to help them, this course can help both of you.

One coach who invested in the course said,

“I used material with runners who are definitely struggling mentally, and with runners who seemed fine and didn't even realize that they could improve in this area.”

Another coach said,

“The mental skills course was a game changer for our team this last season.”

Here's how they used the course with their team...

“Every week we would listen to a segment for 25 minutes (teenage max attention span!) and some weeks we would double up for two days. Kids had the option to take notes to keep in a folder and they wrote a ton!

There were so many powerful pieces that moved us.”

The course is for coaches and athletes, with most coaches doing the same thing this coach did – listening to segments of the course throughout the season.

I’ll share more about the course later this month as I know you’re busy with dozens of things as you start the season and the school year.

But now you know that there is a resource you can use this season to help your team be mentally prepared for the championship season...which will be here before you know it.