When we think about the parts of a race or a performance that tend to feel the most uncomfortable or challenging, one comes to mind above all others: the stress of the starting line. The hours, minutes, and seconds of the countdown to the gun going off, the whistle blowing, or someone just yelling “go” can be the hardest part of the race to bear for many athletes. More than anything else this is a period of inaction, which runs entirely counter to the mounting frenetic energy of the mind, which is increasingly yelling “Go, go, go!” at us. The stress, discomfort, and, indeed, anxiety, of this period can lead athletes into a lot of counterproductive or even dangerous traps, that at best aren’t helpful, and at worst actually undermine their performance. 

As a coach and a performer myself, I see these mistakes fall into three general categories:

1. Doing Too Much

This is the classic mistake of leaving your race on the trainer or the warmup track, i.e. burning up too much mental and physical energy in overly-complex and overly-demanding warm-up routines and rituals. These can range from the obvious physical trap of just doing to much work before the gun goes off, e.g. running lots of miles and sprints before a marathon, to the mental side of the equation, which might be obsessing over race preparation plans and details–perhaps worrying about the precise timing and use of external products and stimulants, or checking, and rechecking, and then rechecking again things like bib pins, shoelaces, tire pressures, clothing, fuel, hydration, the perfect pump-up playlist, and so on. 

This always comes from the fear and anxiety of not doing enough to prepare, and my favorite example of this is the athletes who start doing “stuff” (strides, sprints, leg swings, stretches, etc.) just because they see someone else doing it, and this feeds the core of their anxiety. 

2. Doing Too Little

This problem is driven by the same fear and anxiety surrounding performance, but in this case it drives the athlete in the opposite direction. This might be the fear of wasting too much energy, or accumulating too much fatigue that will come back to haunt them in the later stages of their race. It can also be borne of a desire to just avoid thinking about and dealing with the uncertainty of the start and their performance in the race overall. This typically manifests as minimal-to-no warmup, little or no plan for pre-race preparedness (e.g. nutrition, hydration, gear/equipment/clothing packing or preparation, etc.). This is arguably a worse strategy of self-sabotage, but make no mistake, it’s coming from the same place (and often times athletes will vacillate between being Do Too Muchers, to Do Too Littlers). 

3. Total Bypass

This is a strategy of total distraction or avoidance of the feelings of anxiety related to the event. It’s very similar to doing too little, in that to avoid feelings of anxiety a performer will also avoid thinking about their preparations for it, and generally show up at the race or the start line a little (or a lot) underprepared. But this avoidance-by-distraction strategy goes beyond simply doing too little, because it involves total retreat from whatever seems to be provoking the anxiety, which can include quitting before the start of the event, or just self-sabotaging enough so that you’ve created a narrative for poor performance. It’s built on the behavioral loop of Trigger-Behavior-Reward, which in this case takes the form of Anxiety-Distraction/Avoidance-Lessened Anxiety. Many well intentioned strategies for coping with pre-race nerves can inadvertently set-up or reinforce this pattern of thinking and behavior. One that comes to mind is athletes that seek to “relax away” their pre-race nerves, which in some cases represents a form of escapism from the anxiety, and as we’ll explore in a later post, actually undermines performance!

All of these strategies are coping mechanisms from the truly uncomfortable experience of the racing heart, tension, dis-ease, butterflies in the stomach, nervous energy that comes in those moments leading to the start of any race or event. We typically call this experience “Anxiety” but it turns out in order to conquer it, we need to start thinking about it in a whole new way, which we’ll explore in the next post.