Running and resilience: how a challenge mindset can help reach your goals

Disclaimer: I am not a qualified sport psychologist. I am studying to become one, but this article should not be taken as professional advice. It is merely my interpretation of the literature.

Video by Total Running Productions (1)

Not everyone can run 100 kilometres in 6 hours. Heck, not everyone can run 100 kilometres, period — myself included. But what Jim Walmsley demonstrated some 10 months ago is something far more relevant: the importance of resilience in running. Cutting your shoulder 4 hours into a 6-hour run and still finishing a mere few seconds behind the world record is physically remarkable. Yet, what is even more remarkable is the sheer mental fortitude required to achieve such a feat.

One doesn’t have to be an elite ultramarathoner to appreciate resilience. Even as we work our way up to a 5k, there is merit to improving our resilience, because it will be relevant to our goals every step of the way. Indeed, runners with higher resilience run quicker paces during races than their low-resilience counterparts (2,3). Additionally, increased resilience has the benefit of enhancing our mental health and wellbeing (4).

But what is resilience? There is no universally accepted definition, and it has many names — mental toughness, grit, and hardiness are all related terms (5). In light of this conceptual chaos, Fletcher and Sarkar attempted to clarify psychological resilience, referring to it as our ability to

1. Maintain normal functioning in the face of stressors and adversity, and
2. Rebound back from failure and/or trauma (5).

The important bit here is that resilience is key in our stress response (6). It is what keeps us going despite the physical pain that inevitably kicks in during a long run, and it is what drives us to put on our running shoes when it’s raining, snowing, and freezing, when no one else in their right mind would step out of the house (7,8).

How can we build resilience?

Illustration by Sophie Keresztes

Again, there is no definite answer. Traditional approaches focus on mental skills, like imagery and positive self-talk (9). These of course have their advantages: high-performing runners often report using self-talk and imagery to keep their composure during practice runs and races (10,11). Yet, mental skills are not quite enough. For example, Meijen and colleagues found that although mental skills training reduced the stress runners felt before and during a race, it did not change how effectively they coped with said stress, nor their actual performance (12).

Accordingly, Fletcher and Sarkar suggested that building resilience has not one, but three key components. These are our personal qualities (personality and mental skills), a facilitative environment that balances challenge and support, and a challenge mindset (5). Bearing in mind that these three are meant to work in tandem, as individual runners, changing our environment and applying the systematic principles of pressure training might prove tricky — though certainly not impossible. We can all, however, work towards a challenge mindset.

How can we develop a challenge mindset?

Video by Believe Perform (13)

A challenge — or growth — mindset means that we interpret stressful situations and adversities positively, as opportunities to grow and learn. However, these interpretations vary across situations, so within our mindset, we still evaluate stressors individually. According to the biopsychosocial model of stress (14), for each stressor we encounter, a positive interpretation hinges on two things:

1. Primary appraisal, or whether we think that the situational demands are relevant to our goals, and what their impact on said goals are (e.g., our perceptions of the required effort, uncertainty, and complexity), and
2. Secondary appraisal, or our resources to manage the situation (e.g., skills, knowledge, social support).

Imagine you’re warming up before a race. As you look around, you notice that the folks in your wave look much fitter and quicker than you. You first think about how your wave might affect your pace and performance, and how your race goals might change accordingly — your primary appraisal. After that, you recount what you can do to perform well in your wave. This includes mental and physical strategies, and the support you’ll get from spectators, family, and friends — your secondary appraisal. Based on how these two balance out, you’ll either:

1. Think how great a challenge it will be to run with faster people, and how it might help you post a better time than planned — a challenge appraisal, or
2. Feel threatened, fearing that you might not live up to expectations in such a high-performing wave — a threat appraisal (15).

Why is this important? Because challenge appraisals can improve endurance performance, and running-related emotions and cognitions (16,17,18). Runners with high self-efficacy (belief in their capability to overcome barriers), perceived control, and social support report better ability to cope with stressors and adversity — that is, resilience. This leads to higher motivation and confidence, lower anxiety, and better effort, attention, and decision-making, both before and during runs (19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29).

As mentioned above, appraisals are made separately for every stressor, while our mindset is an aggregate of appraisals. Therefore, a challenge mindset is when we consistently make challenge appraisals over threat appraisals under duress (14).

Other than challenge appraisals, Fletcher and Sarkar proposed that the way we regard our own thoughts and feelings — our meta-cognition and meta-emotion — is equally important in a challenge mindset (5,30). This is because how we interpret our thoughts and feelings feeds back into our appraisals: those who interpret pre-race feelings of anxiety as facilitative, rather than debilitative, tend to have stronger challenge appraisals (31).

As we can see, challenge mindsets are complex but important, contributing not only to our resilience but indirectly, our performance as well. With that in mind, here are a few tips for building a challenge mindset.

Photo by Vladislav Vasnetsov on Pexels (32)

1. Learn your adversities, beliefs, and consequences

To interpret them positively, it’s important to be aware of the adversities and stressors you may face during runs; your corresponding thoughts, emotions, and actions; and their consequences (33). Basically, as well as specific stressors, you should also evaluate your appraisals, and your meta-cognition and meta-emotion. For example, you might find yourself stuck in traffic en route to a race, or you might be nursing a nagging knee pain from a recent run. What would you think and how would you feel in these situations? How would you respond, and how would the scenario pan out? The ability to plan ahead and recognize your response patterns forms the very basis of a challenge mindset. Once you understand your reactions to stressors and adversities, you can start working on recognizing and dealing with negative thought patterns as they occur (33).

2. Recognize and accept negative thoughts

No matter how strong a challenge mindset you’ve developed, there will be times when negative thoughts rear their head. This is why knowing your stressors and responses is important: it helps you recognise thinking traps. According to Burns, there are 10 thinking traps, some of which may look familiar if you’ve dabbled in the mental health literature (34):

1. Mindreading (thinking that others see you negatively)
2. Catastrophizing (exaggerating the negative effects of a small setback)
3. All-or-nothing or black-or-white thinking (viewing all mistakes as failures)
4. Emotional reasoning (making negative conclusions based on your feelings, not reality)
5. Labelling (devaluing yourself because of a negative occurrence)
6. Mental filtering (focusing on the negative, twisting positive events into negative ones)
7. Ignoring/discounting positive events, information, and feedback
8. Overgeneralization (thinking that one negative event will cause further negative events)
9. Personalization (taking sole responsibility for a negative event that’s out of your control)
10. Must/should thinking

Going back to our examples, while stuck in traffic, you might think you’ll be late for registration, then won’t be able to race, and then, your entire weekend will be ruined — an example of overgeneralization. With the nagging pain, you might start berating yourself for messing up your preparation and think that you’re a failure because you couldn’t manage your injury properly — a case of labelling.

Once you notice a thinking trap, you can then apply strategies to change it, which I’ll cover shortly. Before I do, however, I would like to emphasize the ‘accept’ portion of this tip. Even if you know all the strategies in the world, sometimes, negative thoughts still win out — no technique is an impenetrable shield (5). That’s why it’s important to learn to accept negative thought patterns and indeed, failure. According to Jamieson and colleagues, accepting stress regardless of outcome may make the situation itself a resource within our secondary appraisals (14). Similarly, Yeager and Dweck suggested that viewing stress as enhancing, succeed or not, directly enhances resilience (35).

3. Deal with negative thoughts

Many frameworks for countering negative thought patterns have been proposed in the realms of performance psychology (33), clinical psychology (36), and education (35), with considerable overlap. Particularly relevant to us is that of Fletcher and Sarkar, who outlined five strategies for high-performing athletes (5):

• Stop: Say or think ‘Stop!’, or designate a physical action to disrupt your thought process. You may follow this technique up with another, but it can be useful in reducing self-doubt by itself as well (37).
• Verbalize: Traditionally, verbalizing means discussing your negative thoughts with someone and seeking reassurance. If you prefer running alone, this might not be possible — but you can talk it out loud instead, or jot it down after your run (11,38). Either way, verbalizations can significantly reduce the impact of negative thought patterns during runs (39).
• Park: Parking is when you stuff negative thoughts into the back of your mind, so you can return to them after your run. Parking can also reduce self-doubt (35), and dissociative techniques, like distractions or focusing on the environment, can improve endurance (40).
• Challenge: This technique is about examining the assumptions of thinking traps. Some call it ‘maintaining perspective’ or ‘thinking objectively,’ but the point is always to convince yourself that thinking traps are just that — traps (41). For example, if you catastrophize after a slower split, think about how your time fits into your usual pacing pattern. Alternatively, think about the consequences. Does a worse-than-usual pace really reflect your capability, or is there something else, like having had a bad night’s sleep?
• Replace: Substitute your thoughts with something more encouraging. In the slow pace example, you could focus on completing the run without looking at the time, encouraging yourself to push the next section, or segmenting the run into smaller distances — techniques that experienced marathon runners commonly report using during runs (42).

Illustration by Sophie Keresztes

Some words of caution

There is no magic pill. Stressful situations can and do occur in everyone’s lives, but we have to assess our own needs, strengths, and weaknesses, and tailor strategies in kind, which Meijen and colleagues emphasized specifically in the context of preparing for long-distance running events (43). Accordingly, the tips above are by no means set in stone; the road to a challenge mindset is paved differently for every individual.

Second, as I’ve alluded to, a challenge mindset is merely a part of resilience. Fletcher and Sarkar also emphasize the role of personal qualities and a facilitative environment (5), but that’s not all there is either. For example, your motivation affects your stress response, which is contingent on the satisfaction of your psychological needs according to Self-Determination Theory (44,45). Furthermore, resilience is only a part of the performance puzzle. In mastering your technique and improving your PB, deliberate practice is just as important (46,47,48).

Finally, resilience in one context doesn’t automatically transfer to others. You may well be a resilient runner, and that may be residually evident in other walks of your life (35), but resilience is the most potent when developed with a specific purpose in mind (5).

The takeaway? Having a challenge mindset is important to develop psychological resilience, which in turn enhances performance and mental health. However, there is no ‘optimal’ way to go about building one, so if you apply any strategies I’ve mentioned, make sure they match your goals and needs.

Illustration by Sophie Keresztes

The reference list for this article can be found here.

Have you used any of these strategies? If so, let me know by using the hashtag #RunForResilience on any social media platform — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, all welcome! If you’d like to share your resilience story, you can also contact me on Twitter or Instagram!