How do you handle being in so much pain during a race?

Question

Jessie Diggins · Answer

Hey, so how do I handle being in so much pain during a race? This is like the mother of all questions for cross-country, skiing and Endurance Sports. And honestly, honestly, it's really mental because physically your body has its own limits, but your brain has its own idea of what it can do or not do. So the biggest thing is I come up with a mantra and a mental goal Before the Race, well, before the race starts of what am I going to say to myself? When the going gets really hard, What am I going to remind myself of? And usually it will be something like how do I want to feel the Finish? Because when I crossed that Finish Line at the end of the race, I want to be able to honestly look back and know that I could not have given more of myself and I'm the only one who's ever going to know but I'm going to also be my harshest critic, right? And so I want to look back and know without a shadow of a doubt. I left it all out there. I don't have to wonder what if I tried as hard as I could and I did. Back down. I went all in on this especially if it's a relay where my teammates career goals are on the line, not just mine. So that's one thing. And then the other thing I do is in the moment, I try to really break it down to being in the moment. So if your 5K into a 10k race and you're in a lot of pain, I don't worry about how am I going to get through the next 5K? I just think about right here, right now, how fast can I see up this hill? The pace that I think I can sustain and sometimes I literally break Down to 10 seconds. And I just count to ten over and over again because you can do 10 seconds of anything. And then I try to reset and ski the next 10 seconds as well. And efficiently as I can,

Rosie Brennan · Answer

Being in pain is an integral part of cross-country ski racing, but there are things that you can do to work with the pain rather than fight the pain. And I think that's how you can handle a cross-country ski race. It's not about not being in pain, there's nobody that's not in pain but rather than like fearing the pain or pushing it away or trying to make it go away or you know, do something like that. It's about accepting that it's painful and working with that pain and working through it. And that's the mental aspects of racing. That is so fun and it's, you know, it's a game. And everyone has their own strategies for working. Through it, for me, something that I really like to do in a race is just count, I count to ten over and over and over again. And that like allows me to just, you know, except okay, I'm in pain that's cool. And now we're going to see how I can keep moving with good rhythm with good Tempo, how I can use the technique that I've learned picking technique used to focus on and just allowing that pain to come in and knowing that pain means you're pushing hard and So what you want to do in a ski race, if you can push hard to your you're going to race better. And so kind of inviting that pain in not fearing, it being excited to see what. It's what it's going to feel like today as opposed to yesterday or what. It might feel like tomorrow, it's always different. Every race is different and finding how you can work through it and figuring out where that you know that threshold is that's that is tolerable for you and then keep pushing on it because it improves over time. That's why training Works part of it is, of course, to build Your muscles and your lungs and your heart. But the other part of it is is building your brain. So teaching your brain, that that amount of pain is okay, then going back the next day and tapping that again, and be like, okay, maybe I can take a little more and that's a really important aspect of training. It's not just for the body, but it's also for the brain. So, try some different things while you're out training, it's a good way to practice what different things. You tell yourself how you invite the paint in if you're trying to push it away. And that sort of thing. So exploring training and then test it out in the races.

Matt Whitcomb · Answer

Well, the great thing about coaching is that I don't have to race. And so I don't feel pain in races. I only feel excitement and maybe a little bit of stress, but not a ton, but we study pain quite a bit and, and discomfort and there are some some, there's some cool research about. You know why we rub our Shin when we bash it and the idea is that only so many signals can go through the pathways to your brain. Rain. And so if it's filled with just pain, then you feel it, rather acutely. But if you rub it in fill those Pathways with rubbing sensation, then you can only feel so much of the pain and I think racing is similar. If you can focus on your Technique you don't have the capacity to focus exclusively on the pain. You're going to feel uncomfortable in races for sure. But I know one of our great athletes Jessie Diggins. She will. Sometimes you can almost audibly hear her accounting as she goes by you in a race. You know, one, two, three, just just distracting herself from the discomfort and I find that incredibly inspiring. Some people look at the next tree to get to and around the next Corner. Anything to distract you from that pain because if you just focus internally on that discomfort, it's going to eat you. Thanks.

Holly Brooks · Answer

Okay, so this is a really good question. How do you handle being in so much pain during races and you know someone who works on the mental side of performance, I talk to people about this a lot and I have what I call the governor Theory and if you don't know what a governor is on a car you know the speedometer often will say the car can go 130 miles per hour but you know if you really tap out your car and the gas pedal it won't go over 90. And there is some form of the car in that instance, wanting to protect itself. Well, I believe that our brains have the same thing and if we are fearing the pain, we have either a conscious or subconscious kind of fear about the pain and our body is actually going to shut us down when really, we could go a lot faster. So I think it's really important to kind of Reframe that pain and talk about how it's safe pain about how its temporary pain because all of a sudden if we're not scared of it then you know our body will let us go there and I think a lot of us are a lot faster than we think. So if we can get over this hurdle of being afraid of the pain and know that it's the feeling we're supposed to have, and that it's okay. And that it means we're working. Hard, right? And this is what we achieve through intervals and practice and racing. We get used to that feeling. So there isn't so much fear around it. Because if there's fear, whether it's conscious or subconscious, I think our bodies and our brains will shut us down when really, we haven't even come close to tapping our capacity. So I hope that helps and thanks for the question.

JC Schoonmaker · Answer

How do you handle being in so much pain during a race for me? I like to handle pain by just embracing it because I know that that pain is not going to go away. So once you accept that it's there and it's going to be with you for the rest of that race. I think you're going to do a lot better if you can just embrace it and really fight through the race with the pain. Another great way is to make sure that you're also focusing on technique during the race. So I like to have certain specific. Cues during a race that all kind of think of over and over in my head and it's kind of helps take your mind off the pain a little bit, but I think it also is ensuring that you're still racing to the best of your ability. Even though you're going through pain and at the end of the day if you can embrace the pain and ski with good technique, I think that's going to set you up for success.

Gus Schumacher · Answer

How do I handle the race pain? Honestly, just the drive to beat, people helps me fight that pain and I've had a lot of practice with it with a lot of racing and training helps to. But yeah, the race pain is a little bit of a different beast and I think it really helps just focus on erasing as fast as you can and beating people. It's hard, Eagle, you can't escape it. But the the more you want to win a race, the more that raised pain becomes secondary tertiary of an issue.

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"How do you handle being in so much pain during a race?"