Why We Compete
An In-depth Look at the Psychology of Endurance Racing
By Scott Schumaker

Adventure Sports Magazine, Sept. 2004


Considering that the human body tries to avoid pain, why do endurance athletes seek exertion’s burn? Is there such a thing as post-traumatic adventure racing disorder? What about the so-called “runner’s high?” How can you tell if your athleticism has crossed over into unhealthy obsession? Can you improve your mental game? If the often-quoted observation that sports are 90 percent mental but only 10 percent physical is true, then addressing these questions is imperative to improving your performance.     

For many, the answers to a few of these issues may lead to an unsettling though ultimately rewarding journey of self-exploration. The first step:  answer the most basic but often the most difficult question – what motivates you to compete in the first place?

“No one does anything from a single motive.”
    – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet (1772-1834)

Sam hit that one on the head. And, like bank vaults, everyone’s combination of motives is unique.

In general, we are compelled by instinct and culture to compete. “We are competitive creatures,” says Dr. Jim Taylor, a sports psychologist of 20 years and an Ironman finisher. We’re probably wired into this because there were limited resources when we were cave people, and we needed to compete for those resources. Now we can just go to Safeway. We don’t need to kill [our food]. But we’ve transferred some of those instincts into other areas.”

Some people compete for the corner office. Others choose sports.

This may sound like bongo-beating beatnik talk, but our capitalistic, Western approach to life also heightens our competitiveness. This isn’t to say that non-capitalist societies lack the competitive gene, as anyone who has competed against an athlete from a communist society will tell you. Yet, unlike the more communal tenets of communism, the drive to compete and be better than person X is a major cog of our culture, one engrained in us from birth.

Bruce Gottlieb, a clinical social worker who also has 20 years of experience working with world-class athletes, says, “Capitalism is all about doing better than and getting more than. It’s extremely competitive. I have to make more money than you. I have to have more toys than you. I have to be better than you in every sense.”

Sports are the perfect environment in which to “be better than you.” The benefit, of course, is that you will improve physically and mentally while trying to be better than your competitors, and the top athletes will challenge the known limits of human performance.

The problem arises when athletes base self-worth on their performance, as compared to other athletes’.

“This is a huge problem for high-end athletes,” Gottlieb says.

“What happens, for example, as you get older? If you don’t perform the way you used to, does that mean you’re no good? No. It means you’re as good as you are right now. Unfortunately, we frequently define ourselves not by who we are, but by what we do and how well we do it, which takes us back to the capitalist system.”

Terri Schneider, a veteran adventure racer pursuing a masters in sports psychology and co-writing Triathlete’s Guide to Mental Training (due out in spring 2005) with Dr. Taylor, says, “In our competitive society, there’s really no way to get away from it. It’s really quite ugly. And, as an athlete, if you evolve to a point where you can focus only on yourself, then you’re bucking the whole system. I don’t know many athletes who really get to that place.”
        
"Beware of the Dark Side. Anger. Fear. Aggression. The dark side of the Force are they.”
    – Yoda, Jedi Master, The Empire Strikes Back

Beyond general motivations, it’s extremely important for an athlete to deduce what his or her driving motivator is on a personal level. “There are no simple answers,” Dr. Gottlieb says, “and it’s all a matter of finding out what it is for you and how you are going to maximize this event for yourself.”

Dr. Taylor calls positive or internal motivators the light side. Negative, reactive or external motivations, including those Yoda mentioned, are the dark side.

On the light side, you might compete because you relish using a talent you possess, or because you find challenges stimulate you and provide deeper meaning to your life, or you like to set and achieve goals. Competing might also improve your self-esteem, provide enjoyable social interaction or it might simply be fun. (Side note: roughly 70 percent of kids who get into sports because they’re fun stop playing around the age of 13. “That’s when it starts to ‘matter,’” says Dr. Taylor.)

Schneider says, “I look at it in three different ways – physically, mentally, and emotionally. I happen to be someone who enjoys, and is nurtured by, continuing to redefine who I am in those areas.” Schneider adds, however, that her motivations weren’t always so positive, especially when she was a pro triathlete finishing in the top five at the Hawaii Ironman. “As a pro triathlete, I felt the pressure of external motivations much more. It was all about money and sponsorship and winning. Those are goods things, but ultimately I realized that I’d have better performances when I focused on myself. I have no control over the other factors – the weather or the girl running next to me. I can still use her as secondary motivation, but ultimately it comes back to internal factors being the driving forces, and what satisfy me.”

Schneider highlights an important point about dark side motivators. “Negative reasons shouldn’t be viewed as ‘this is bad,’” says Gottlieb. “If it’s really working for you, dang, what a healthy way to keep yourself afloat.” The catch is, you’d probably be a better athlete if positive motivators were your primary driving force. Singling out and addressing dark side motivators, which because of their very personal nature may be uncomfortable and difficult, is critical.

For example: are you using athletics as a way to manage your “baggage?” Are you, in essence, running or biking away from something? “These people think they’re going to find peace, happiness and contentment in endurance sports or the finish line,” Dr. Taylor says. “But nothing is ever good enough because they never find what they’re looking for. They overtrain. They don’t recover. They start with a 10K and end up at Ultraman. Endurance sports become their life and identity.” In other words, what began as a mild, healthy way to avoid a psychological issue turns into an unhealthy obsession. 

Or maybe you’re pushing yourself farther and harder because you feel you won’t be loved, valued or respected by family or peers if you don’t perform well. “I see performance-based acceptance a lot in endurance athletes,” Gottlieb says.

In both scenarios, he says, “athletes are repeating a process that may actually have a pathological component attached to it. They’ll get a great deal of satisfaction out of their performance, but it’s not going to fix the underlying problem. Eventually they’ll hit an impasse, and then the underlying issue will generate problems.”

Addressing those issues, painful though they may be, should make you a better athlete, and may have the fringe benefit of straightening out other areas of your life, too. “Patterns people have in their lives are played out in their sports. Athletics, businesses and general life are all metaphors for each other,” Dr. Gottlieb says. In other words, a positive change in one area of your life can help instigate positive changes in all areas of your life.   

So, what motivates you to compete?



The Brain, the Body and the Pain
Bringing on the Burn and Keeping It in Check

Pain. To reach the highest athletic potential, competitors must be willing inject exertion’s toxic burn into their body, and then ignore it like an annoying houseguest overstaying a welcome. As athletes know first hand and as sports psychologist Dr. Jim Taylor says, “there’s no way to improve without pain because improvement is about pushing your limits, and to push your limits you have to get out of your comfort zone.”

Once the pain injection begins, an athlete’s mind and body go through at least two instinctual responses that have evolved from the primal need for self-preservation. The first, and perhaps more surprising, is to change the body’s perceived degree of pain. Wendy Sternberg, an associate professor of psychology at Haverford College, has found that athletic competition provokes what the science community calls stress-induced analgesia, in which the body experiences a reduction in pain sensitivity.

For instance, one of her studies showed that athletes could submerge their hand in ice water significantly longer immediately after competition. Sternberg reasons, “I think this evolved from the basic fight or flight response, where if you couldn’t run away from a predator because [of the pain] of a broken ankle, you couldn’t pass your genes on.” In an interesting twist, Sternberg has found that women can experience this analgesic response simply by running solo on a treadmill, whereas men are more likely to produce it during head-to-head competition, even if that competition is only playing video games. While this might help explain why more men than women are transfixed by Mortal Combat, Sternberg can’t say exactly why the difference exists in the first place.

If the body experiences stress-analgesia during competition though, then why does, say, racing up the face of Haleakala at the Xterra World Championship still hurt? Because the analgesic response can only mask the pain to a certain level. Sternberg says, “There’s always an interplay between incoming pain signals and the descending inhibitory [analgesic] signals, and when the incoming pain is stronger you feel the pain.”

Once the pain erupts, the second primal response – your brain telling you to stop what you’re doing – kicks in. Dr. Taylor says, “Another basic instinct is to avoid pain altogether, because pain is associated with injury or death. If we’re injured or die we can’t gain self-preservation. We all experience this instinctive protection mechanism, such as late in a race when we’re really hurting.” And, the athlete that can ignore the brain’s demands to stop racing so hard then enters what Neal Henderson, Coordinator of Sports Science at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine and a former pro triathlete, calls “The Pain Cave.” He says, “The Pain Cave is the point where you make a personal commitment in your race to do whatever it takes to go as fast as you can; to disregard the messages telling you to stop. Once you enter, it’s an enveloping thing where everything else ceases to exist. You have a singular focus and you are able to push through those normally limiting messages.”

It’s not easy to stay in the cave, and how long you can remain there has to do with your mental toughness (see “How Tough are You,” Page 30), or what the science world calls “hardiness.” Taylor says that while it’s been demonstrated that people are born with different levels of hardiness, each person’s level can be fine-tuned and enhanced. Some of the better known ways include practicing relaxation techniques, training in inclement conditions, visualization (see Page 31), and fine tuning your “I can do this” positive thinking.

Positive thinking, by the way, shouldn’t be limited to just saying things like, “I’m going to win this race,” or “I’m going to PR.” Studies have shown that positive emotions, regardless of the origin, will lessen the pain. For example: think about getting good grades in school or your favorite pet or even, according to a study led by pain medicine doctor Peter Staats at John Hopkins University, sexual fantasies. He found that participants who conjured up a sexual fantasy while their hand was in ice water could keep that hand submerged twice as long as their untitillated counterparts. “You may get bored while running a 26-mile race thinking about one positive thing, like ‘I can win,’” he says. “But [fantasy] broadens your topics.” A-hem, undoubtedly.

Just don’t let your brain wander too far. You’ve got a race to focus on and, after all, there is value to be gained in the pain you are trying to lessen. Dr. Taylor says, “The fact is that part of the satisfaction of doing endurance sports is suffering. Ultimately, the greatest obstacle is ourselves. If we can overcome ourselves and the elements then wow, that’s a huge source of satisfaction.”

 
 
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