Psychology of the Final Mile

For the first 7 3/4 laps (48.44 miles) during my Autumn Leaves 50 mile race last Saturday I was completely locked in on only one thing: the lap I was on. That was my goal prior to the race, to focus only on the lap at hand and not to worry about anything else that had happened before or that still awaited me. For more than 10 hours I accomplished this goal, despite numerous opportunities to stray from it. A few quick examples:

Lap 1 was slower than I had projected. If this had been a marathon or another shorter distance race, running an early segment too slow would have mentally thrown me into a state of negativity ("it's just not my day") or into one in which I would try to make it all back up as quickly as possible and and up flaming out later in the race as a result. On Saturday I didn't care that my first lap was slow. I finished the lap, put it behind me, reset myself and started a new lap.

In a marathon, Lap 4 (miles 18.75-25) is where I would normally start to be extremely fatigued, walk more than I should, not want to start running again and quite often start to cramp. During the race though, it wasn't miles 18.75-25, it was simply Lap 4. Nothing more. This was actually my strongest and fastest lap of the entire day.

After completing Lap 6 and meeting my friend K at the aid station I looked at my overall time for the first time all day. I had been going for more than 7 hours. Just looking at that had the potential for disaster, much like the feeling you might get when swimming out into the ocean or a lake and not realizing how far out you are until you turn around. I could have panicked. But I reset myself again, as I had done a half dozen times already that day and started in to a new lap.

I was in a great rhythm all day and my running pace was remarkably consistent from start to finish (though my walking/recovery pace did slow in later laps).

So why then was the last 1.5 miles of the race so much more difficult? What changed?

As best as I can tell, two things happened.

1. I thought about how far I had come. 48.5 miles. Never had I run more than 26.2 miles at one time or 29 miles in one day. I was way out into that lake I mentioned.

2. I thought about how close (relatively) I was to the finish. Not the finish of the lap, but the finish of the race.

These two thoughts caused an almost instant change in my mentality. Instead of the confident, consistent pace I had been running all day, I was now in a struggle to keep moving. It's like I allowed my body to overcome my mind as it realized what it had done and it (my body) fought back by saying, "well if I've done all that, then I'm supposed to be exhausted and sore." And so I was. This was the battle I fought during the final 1/4 lap of the race.

As I wrote in my race recap though, I got to a point just about 1/4 mile from the end where I asked myself, "What do you have left?" At that point my mind took back control over my body and I sprinted to the finish line.

The quote from George S. Patton at the top of this site has been a fixture since I started running and writing here. Read it again now, given the context I've just laid out:

"Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired."

I thought I knew what he meant by that. Now I know.