How to Train and Race with your Emotions—Not by your Emotions

Harness the power of feelings without letting them overpower you

I came out of the water on Lionel Sanders’ feet. We’d covered the 3k of the swim in just around 40 minutes, or 1:20/100 meters, or pretty much the goal I’d set for my race that day, which was the 2017 ITU Long Distance World Championships, held in Penticton, British Columbia that year. The leader, Josh Amberger, was about five minutes up the road already, a gap both I and Lionel were comfortable with (him because he knew he could close that gap to the front, and me because I knew I’d swam well and good swims usually led to good overall performances). We left transition together and that was the last I saw of Sanders that day (he made it to the front alarmingly quickly), but I found myself in a group of athletes I wouldn’t normally expect to ride with: Jeff Symonds and Joe Gambles among them. We had a 120k ride ahead of us and I felt…calm, an emotion I rarely felt during races. Often I felt that I had to play catchup, that I wasn’t part of the race, that I didn’t belong, a series of fear-based emotions that, more often than not, led me to make mistakes.

Towards the end of the first lap (the race featured 2 laps of roughly 60k each) I got a penalty, the third of my career. It was a penalty for littering, having tossed a bottle at the entrance to an aid station, rather than in the aid station itself. By the letter of the rule, yeah, I was guilty, but it did seem to be a slightly ticky-tack foul. Rather than a stand-down penalty, I rode the penalty tent at the end of the first lap and served my one-minute penalty. Rather than angry I still felt…calm. I joked with the official in the penalty tent. I kept smiling. When my minute was up I thanked the referee and started riding again, that same calmness persisted as I completed the bike leg, and I posted one of my best ever performances on the bike. The run, a three-lap, 30k affair through the streets of downtown Penticton, went about as well as I could have hoped, and I finished the day 12th—one of my best overall performances in a big race from an execution perspective.

I reprise these details today not out of a desire to humblebrag, although I could see that interpretation, dear reader. The point here is to bring forward the times in which we managed our emotions effectively, acknowledging them and letting them exist, but not letting them drive our decision making during an event. As you can see from the picture below, I wasn’t feeling overly excited about racing that particular morning in Penticton. So first of all, let’s talk about where race day feelings come from.

where do race day feelings come from?

Before the race begins, you may feel anxiety and/or excitement. These two emotions, I’d argue, are actually the same thing: something is going to happen, but I don’t know what it is. Anxiety, most would argue, is a pessimistic emotion that imagines that “something” as a negative, and excitement offers the opposite: a positive anticipation. These two feelings are part of the sympathetic nervous system, or fight/flight response. We might suggest that anxiety is more flight and excitement is more fight, but different people will experience them differently. Happily, these two are the easiest to deal with on race day. Both can affect your race adversely, so having some tools in your toolbox before the race begins can help. Anxiety, left unchecked, can put you in the “psyched out” territory, and you may find yourself walking around transition feeling defeated or a little hopeless. I don’t think I can actually do this, might be a script running through your head. In this case, some kind of activation can help: uptempo music, some short quick sprints during your warmup jog, forceful breathing exercises. On the other side of things, both anxiety and excitement can you leave you a little…over the top. If you feel like you’re so excited or anxious that you might be sick, it’s time to get a little space and lie down. Take five deep belly breaths, inhaling for four seconds, holding for seven, and exhaling for eight. Run that pattern at least four times and as many as eight; you will feel yourself returning to a more acceptable level of pre-race arousal.

During the race, many different emotions can swim to the surface, but regardless of what the emotion might be (despair, anger, joy, pride, fear), emotions arrive due to this pattern:

Say that you’re in a race of 100 athletes, and you typically have finished in the top quarter of your field. You come out the water in 50th. That is data. Very few people would argue about where you came out of the water, since it is recorded electronically and posted for the world to see. The judgments you have about that data will differ wildly, depending on what you think you should be able to do (please note the emphasis in that sentence). If you usually come of the water in 5th, the 50th place exit might have you making some strong negative judgments about your performance. From that judgment (”Oh no! I usually swim much “better” than this—I should be farther forward in the field”) you may develop some equally strong feelings about the data: shame, anger, sadness, fear, confusion. You will now look at the rest of the race as “I need to get forward to salvage my “usual” position.” If, however, you usually come out of the water 75th, your judgments about that 50th place position will lead to positive emotions: joy, satisfaction, enthusiasm, excitement.

The point here, by acknowledging that our emotions can be different based on perspective, is to bring forward the truth that WE are the ones who create our emotional realities, not the surrounding facts or data of our situations. We are not trying to silence or invalidate the emotions, but instead see them for what they are: products of what we expected versus what we got. Much in the same way that you are not the sum of your thoughts, you are also not the sum of your feelings. Strong athletes race alongside their thoughts and emotions, but they don’t let those thoughts and emotions derail the months or years of hard work they’ve put in training for that particular event.

the emotional athlete

I was called an “emotional athlete” often in my career, and although that statement wasn’t meant pejoratively, I think the connotation was “you’re a good athlete who lets his thoughts and feelings get in his way while racing,” and that was certainly true. We’ve heard a million times before that true professionals make the hard stuff look easy, and one of the things they make look easy is how calm they appear while doing very difficult things. I think it’s this placid appearance that gives rise to all sorts of sporting clichés like “cold-blooded,” or “ice in her veins,” but as soon as athletes are interviewed after a great result they are very often anything but taciturn. You hear athletes saying things like “I really didn’t think I’d be able to hold on!” or “So-and-so just kept coming and I was terrified!” Our idols are more like us than we believe, but they have reached a place of co-existing with their emotions. You can often recognize athletes who have let their emotions get the better of them on race day: they make excuses, they talk to spectators and officials, they point to the adversity they experienced like a flat or a GI issue, and sadly this emotional laboring only serves to take focus and energy away from the task at hand. On my worst days as an athlete, I followed the same pattern, directing the excuses and frustration inward, and after a bad race I usually felt bad about myself for days, weeks, months, and years. Feeling bad about yourself is NOT one of the goals we set when we picked up endurance sports, so while it’s OK to every now and then have a meltdown on course (it happens to everyone), our goal should be to figure out what those great athletes do on race day that allows them to see their emotions, honor them, and then use them positively to achieve the best result they can achieve.

Setting aside the “shoulds”

How many times have you said something like the following statements to yourself on race day?

• “Dammit! I should have swam better!”

• “I should be able to ride with this group—what is happening!”

• “I should be able to run 6:40/mile for this race but I just can’t get my legs going—I am not good at this.”

I think that when self-talk like this is present, the athlete is feeling fear. All of our training sets us up to have a potential outcome when we race, but it is easy to think that our training ensures a potential outcome. Sorry to trot out another cliché, but finding out what happens on race day is WHY WE PARTICIPATE IN SPORT. The whole attraction of sport is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. The protagonist (in this case, us) doesn’t always win. Sometimes terrible story lines occur. So when things don’t go according to the plot we have in our brains, which is usually some combination of Star Wars and, like, Forrest Gump, our brains and hearts begin to freak out a little: “This isn’t the story I planned for!” Fear is the emotion we feel when we anticipate that something we care about may be taken away, and if your self-talk is shot through with “shoulds,” you could be holding too tightly to your identity as an athlete. The truth is there are absolutely no guarantees on race day, and the concept of “should” is a fantasy. So let’s go back to our equation and come up with a better plan.

Remember that Data → Judgments about that data → Feelings/Emotions. The “shoulds,” or what I’ll call identity threats, come up when we make judgments about the data. Those judgments lead to feelings of fear, inadequacy, and frustration with self, none of which are helpful emotions during racing. You may see, sometimes, an athlete converting that fear into anger and fueling a brief surge through the heat of that emotion, but anger is a short fuse, and once spent, you may discover that you have made a bad situation worse by expending too much energy. Remember that triathlon is an energy management game, and getting distracted by anger and then swimming, cycling, or running too hard—even for short amounts of time—can lead to total failure: a DNF.

So what do we do? Treat those feelings of fear, inadequacy, and frustration as coming from outside yourself, rather than from inside yourself. Imagine those judgments as coming from a somewhat chatty but annoying training partner. Practice, during training sessions that are not going according to your plan, talking to that training partner. You can tell them that their feedback isn’t welcome right now, you never solicited it from them, and you appreciate them trying to help but that you have other things to focus on at the moment. Squashing your emotions, ignoring them, or stuffing them away will only make them bigger, but if you acknowledge how you’re feeling you may find those judgments quieting and, eventually, not affecting your race or your training session.

COnclusion

I wish I knew exactly what circumstances led me to have such an even-keeled performance that day in Penticton. I certainly felt a high amount of anxiety on race morning, and my memories of the swim are a violent and haggard affair, where I doggedly hung on to the 1:20/100m group. I had trained very hard that summer, leading to the highest level of fitness I’d ever maintained, and having the ability to express my fitness certainly helped quiet my emotions. When I got my penalty I was angry for a few moments, but then I remember feeling calm and thinking “This is fine—I’ve got this. Everyone else will deal with something similar today, and I can only express the fitness I have. I can’t express anyone else’s fitness, surely.” To this day it remains the performance I’m most proud of, even as it has faded from everyone else’s memory, which is the way things are meant to go: remember that racing is for us, not for anyone else, and anything extrinsic that comes to us through racing and training is simply a reflection of how well we are able to honor our intrinsic motivations.