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I played a lot of sports when I was younger. From about the age of 11 on, I was doing about nine to twelve hours of aerobic exercise a week. Initially this was swimming, but I transitioned to running in high school, and then later took up cycling to complete the triathlon trifecta. I still do all three of these sports, am very glad that they were such a large part of my formative years, and frankly, I would like to get back to the kind of hours that I was putting in a few years ago: dedicating yourself to sport is one of the most meaningful things you can do in today’s society. These sports have taught me many things: patience, discipline, fortitude, and even kindness. They continue to cultivate these virtues even today, and will probably always be part of my life.
However not everything that sport inoculated in me was positive. Every coach I had, from middle school swim club onward, was drawn to a conception of mental toughness, or “grit” that made it difficult to understand where improvements came from, or to have a healthy relationship with competition in general. When races went poorly, poor training, physical conditions, or distractions were never at fault. Rather, I was made to feel that there was something defective in my brain or character. That I was, to quote Severus Snape, a weak person. Not only is this position a philosophically bankrupt form of the worst kind of Cartesian mind-body dualism, it also fails to offer any actual avenue to improvement. Willing yourself not to slow down doesn’t actually work when you’ve completely overshot your sustainable threshold pace ten minutes into a thirty minute race.
So how does one actually improve mental toughness in racing? There are a couple strategies. The first is to simply not put yourself in a situation where you need to be mentally tough. This means starting out a more intelligent pace that will lead to a slower accumulation of exhaustion and allow you to finish the race without having to rely on mental toughness. This was the real issue for myself and many of my teammates in college: we overestimated our fitness, went out too fast and had to rely on “grit” and “toughness” which couldn’t make up for the extra accumulated muscle fatigue from overshooting our capacity.
The second solution is to recognize that mental toughness is trained in much the same way as physical toughness: by doing training sessions that are physiologically, and psychologically challenging, and progressing these over time. By targeted exposure to the kind of pain that you would be likely to experience in a race, that pain becomes both physically, and mentally easier to deal with. You can push yourself more because it “feels” easier to do so because you’ve practiced it. And that practice looks a lot like the kind of training you are already doing to prepare for the race physically.
However, the two things aren’t exactly identical, or there wouldn’t be such an “epidemic” of mental weakness on high school and college cross country teams. The key distinction, I think comes from how we would break up intense training sessions, or workouts, as they are colloquially referred to.
In college, we ran an 8k (5 miles) on grass about every other weekend. Our weekly Tuesday night workout was about this same distance, but split up into intervals anywhere from 400m to 2 miles. The longer repeats tended to be much faster, but with more rest proportionally. We sometimes did even longer and slower intervals on non-race Saturdays, but these were never close to the 8k distance. Physically, these intervals made a lot of sense: they allowed us to get in the kind of stimulus (neuromuscular and metabolic) that was essential for improvement in the 8k but without the toll on the body that running a full 8k all-out every Tuesday would have required. Psychologically, it was a different story. My best 8k time was around 25 minutes, but the longest of these intervals was only around 10, providing very little opportunity to learn how to cope with the mentally taxing final 5 minutes of the race. There was also little opportunity for progression week to week: the total length of the workout didn’t get any longer from week to week, and neither did the average interval length.
Contrast this to how my current Tuesday workouts are structured. I would start the season with just a simple 10 minutes and my target half-marathon pace. The next week I would progress in total volume to 3 x 5 minutes, but compensate for the increased intensity by making the workout psychologically easier by splitting up the 15 minutes into intervals. But the next week I would progress psychologically by doing 2 x 7.5 minutes instead, as the longer intervals are harder mentally. And so on and so forth until I got to about an hour of work at half-marathon pace, which would be sufficient mental preparation for that kind of race.
The real problem with our team at MIT (where I went to school) was not lack of character, confidence, or belief in oneself, but poor training. Mental strength in racing does not come from some inner reservoir of “will” but from treating the brain as a muscle that needs to be developed in the same was as one’s body through the principles of overload and progression.
I think this has some implications for other areas of my life as well. If I'm giving a presentation at work about my research, I’m going to be much more confident in my work if I’ve spent the time to carefully collect data it and think through the details of the experimental design. If I doubt my own work, bullshitting can only conceal so much of that from the audience. With Spanish, conversations with natives and my reading ability get better when I spend time in the language. If I haven’t read all week, of course my speaking ability is going to suffer. There is no substitute for putting in the time, bro: this idea of willing things to be so through sheer “grit” and “determination” cannot die fast enough. Confidence comes from competence, there are no shortcuts.
(Mods not sure if this is better suited to Wellness Wednesday, but thought it was relevant to culture war because of mind-body dualism, grit talk).
Physiologically as well, surely! Pretty common approach with cycling sweet spot intervals, as you doubtless know.
People tell themselves whatever they have to on order to get through the work, but I tend to think that most "mental toughness" is 1) a reasonable degree of general preparation for the event and 2) being honest with yourself and choosing to do something that you actually want to do in the first place.
Yes! I'm in the middle of the SST progression. Just did 3 x 20 min last week, planning on doing 2 x 30 min tomorrow.
In complete agreement!
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This is like Whiplash. Did he become great because he was abused and pushed to it or did he accomplish it on his own?
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My suspicion is that school sports are run entirely in the format most suitable for the school / teachers, not for the students.
Or, to put it another way, it’s fucking bollocks. Why, why would you have a system of training where the teachers and fast boys race ahead then rest while the unfit ones catch up? Setting off again before the slow boys who need it have a chance to rest? It’s practically guaranteed to make sure that the slowest overtrain and hate sports forever after. We could do so much better if we accepted that training has to be based on individual conditioning.
Replace "sports" with "mathematics" and you'll see that it's the same issue, just "solved" using the opposite approach right now.
If you (that's an "audience you") think that teachers should just fail those who aren't good at math and have them repeat the year, why shouldn't the PT teacher just do the same?
School mathematics and school PE are rationalised differently. Mathematics (and English, and other subjects) come with an understanding like "you must know at least this much to be ready to be released into adult society", with grades tracking how close to the bar you are; sports instead are justified by "you must have done this much for your own good", with grades just serving as a way to incentivise those who never would voluntarily do enough sports otherwise to fill the quota.
In a setting where sports actually is "taught" for the purpose of everyone clearing a minimum bar (military training?), it seems absolutely conceivable that failing would be addressed by being held back.
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I’m not sure I follow your point exactly. You’re saying that those who are bad at maths are just shoved back a year to fail for the same reason as before? If so, that’s definitely unfortunate. Streaming seems obviously required in both cases, and personal attention to the degree that’s possible.
I went to an expensive school which took maths very seriously and absolutely had the resources to take PE seriously too. Unfit children like myself should have been removed to a separate group to build an aerobic baseline, but the school just didn’t really care.
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Maths classes were, at least in my school, split by ability, while PE classes were not, at all. Even if you did that, PE classes are also divided by gender, so there would be a wider range of ability in them than in similar sized maths classes. I don't really think it's the same problem at all.
I remember in high school that 'making the cut' for any sports team got you out of PE, so the most athletic kids weren't in PE classes.
Now I also remember a lot of PE classes along the lines of 'run four(?) laps around the track and you're done after that' so students ran at their own pace.
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Are you certain there wasn't some form of de facto splitting into higher and lower performance PE classes? How it worked back at my highschool was that there were multiple tiers of phys ed offered, and on paper the most advanced course was intended for senior students, but in actuality any sports team members and anyone who just wanted to participate was in this more demanding "just train with the football team and their coaches" tier as soon as they wanted to be.
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Not always. I went to private school up until 8th grade, then public high school, both in Fairfax County, VA. All my P.E. classes were co-ed.
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Yes, but that takes work. For work to be done consistently, there must be some form of accountability.
There is no accountability for bad outcomes for teachers and schools, so that work is not done.
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I'm enormously pro grit. But I'm reminded of this clip where David Mitchell talks about being a very timid boy, and all the talk that attempts to keep boys from being totally retarded and breaking every bone in their body just caused him to be paralyzed with fright. He probably needed more encouragement to take risk, even if similar encouragement would have resulted in the deaths of several of his classmates had they got it.
I hear loud and clear, you don't think you needed to be yelled at to "try harder". I'll even take your word for it. Maybe, at an elite level, a trainer should know they aren't dealing with some sort of amateur here, and leave the "grit" talk to the people teaching walk ins at a community center.
As someone who once upon a time taught walk ins at a community center, I sincerely doubt anyone has an honest assessment of how deep they can dig. Most people might go 10% effort before even the experience of being slightly winded makes them go "Man, I should take a break". They need an insane hobo screaming at them to keep going.
That reminds me of this Radio Lab episode about this guy who, for whatever reason, found an insane hobo who used to be in the military to scream at him and not let him stop until he'd done insane things, like 1000 push ups or some bullshit. Said it was a fitness revolution for him, personally. Dude, I donno, NPR is weird sometimes. I spent 15 minutes trying to find the episode and gave up, but it was in the first few years of Radio Lab.
Sounds like the same story as this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9I_u4oZqF8c
I think thats the guy! Awesome, thanks.
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I'm not saying that grit isn't real. Heck I'm reminded of this cycling study where they had people do some max power efforts, a longer VO2 max effort, and then the same max power efforts. Most people had around the same max power the second time around, meaning they weren't able to push themselves effectively on the VO2 max stuff. Rather, I'm saying that the way that you sustainably develop grit looks a lot like the kind of training that you should be doing anyway, and much less like just being yelled at by a guy that you're not trying hard enough. There is nothing that has made me want to quit a sport more than my coach telling me I wasn't trying in the middle of a race where subjectively I was burning all cylinders.
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