One bite at a time! “How do you eat an elephant?” is a common saying about how to tackle a large challenge or problem.
An endurance event is often as much a mental challenge as it is physical. The mind is much more likely to give up before the body, this is how our brains have evolved to protect ourselves.
However, our mind will tell ourselves to slow down, stop, or even give up before we’ve reached our physical limits. This can limit reaching our potential and often, once we have stopped or pulled out, we realise we could have carried on.
Much as you would train yourself physically, you can also prepare yourself mentally. I will cover more about this another time.
But once you are in the race there is a technique you can use. This is used by many top athletes and I also use it.
Think of the entire race like the metaphorical elephant. You want to break the race down into bites you can manage. Breaking it down into manageable chunks really works. These chunks can be distances, checkpoints, time, or whatever works best for you.
For example, in an ultra race you might want to use checkpoints. Instead of thinking of the 100km in front of you, just think of the next checkpoint in 15km. 15km is something you’d easily do in a training run. You only need to count down from 15km, 2km to the checkpoint feels very different to 87km to the end of the race. At the next checkpoint it starts again. I did exactly this in my last 100km race and it worked. The further into the race, as it gets harder, the more useful this is.
This can work for much shorter races too. A 5km race is completely different to a 100km ultra but you are on the limit for all 5km and it can be easy to ease off. In this case you could break it down into 1km bites.
You don’t have to wait for a race to practise this (nothing new on race day!). Try it in any training session to start with and then in some of your harder sessions, such as a long run or bike ride.
(No elephants were eaten as part of the research for this article).