By Vance Russell
The road racing season is over and it’s time to take stock of your season, analyze what will make it better next year and determine what kind of training regimen you want to undertake. How well you prepare yourself mentally is equally important if you want to take your racing to the next level.
While running track and cross-country in college, I was fortunate to have a coach who knew how to prepare his athletes both mentally and physically. One of his mantras was Positive Mental Attitude, or PMA. My coach’s constant repetition of this acronym and his own positive attitude for life and running became instilled in his athletes who often performed better than expected. It is through PMA that you can improve your racing performance without training harder, perhaps training less!
For the big races, such as Norcal/Nevada districts, it’s crucial to simultaneously peak physically and mentally. I generally begin to think about the race well in advance, picturing the course, strategy, and who I will be competing against. Since I usually get fairly worked up about a big race, I’ll get my best night’s sleep two nights before and not worry about quality of sleep the night before. The night before the race I will visualize the entire race day, including warming up and other mundane activities. I recommend doing this for every race. If you’re not into the new age yogi mental rehearsal thing, at least go over the course in your mind and imagine yourself doing well during the race.
I was recently awed by a video of Billy Mills during the 1964 Olympic 10,000 track finals. Mills knew he had to run a time one minute faster than he had ever run to win the race and was virtually unknown. On the last lap he was boxed and elbowed by the world champion going down the back straightway. Although he was in striking distance to win with 300 meters, the boxing made him nearly give up and accept the bronze medal. However, a few meters later he dug in and passed the second place runner and realized he would win. With about 10 meters to go he passed the first runner and won the race, running his personal best by over one minute. Officials and reporters had to check his number with the program since they didn’t know who he was. Mills later said he knew he would win from the start-PMA!
PMA will help you do the same. Not only will it help you place higher, but when you do have a bad day or make a mistake, PMA will allow you to learn from your mistakes and do better the next time. Not only is PMA the lesson from Billy Mills, but the other lesson is don’t give up. For instance, don’t get in the habit of telling yourself you're are out of it and sit up near the end. Unless it’s dangerous, always sprint through at the end and beyond the finish line. I may be in a minority opinion about this, but getting 9th instead of 11th in a sprint is better for me any day and it could mean the mental difference between placing 1st or 2nd in a later race.
After the race, evaluate your performance. Talk to other riders, especially those that did well and ask them what they did, for example when they attacked or what lines they took. Write your evaluation as pluses and deltas (what you would change) in your training log for future reference.
Each of these actions, visualization, finishing hard and post race evaluation, are little things you can do to improve your PMA for each race. Improvement will also require long-term development of PMA which I will explore in a future article.