Brain Training

I'm not one to believe that there is a single key to success or special recipe for peak performance, but I've always believed that what goes on inside your head is the most important part of your game. Everything you do, swimming, biking, running, breathing, emotion, attitude, stress, etc. is controlled by your brain. Therefore to train your brain is to train everything. Throughout my university athletics career I have been very interested in sport psychology, specifically motivation. I am fascinated by the best. What makes them click, why are they consistently better than the rest, how do I get to their level? From book to book and interview to interview, the story seemed to be the same - hard work wins in the end. But if all of these professional athletes are working the same, wanting to win the same, and are physiologically the same, why isn't everyone winning equally?

I wasn't until I read a book called "Iron War" by Matt Fitzgerald that I started to see an answer that I accepted. The book is about the legendary 1989 Ironman World Championship race between Dave Scott and Mark Allen. I had heard a lot about this race and watched NBC's broadcast of the event, but I never realized what was actually happening on that day as explained by Fitzgerald. The chapter that stuck with me is called Iron Will, and I have read it many times over. In this chapter, a new brain centered model for performance is introduced to explain why these two athletes were so dominant over the rest, and why this race in particular is so significant in the history of endurance sport.

The theory has always been that an athlete's performance will decrease with fatigue due to the consumption of muscle glycogen and build-up of lactic acid. Physiologically, the muscle runs out of energy to burn so it can no longer perform the desired task, whether that be swimming, biking, or running. This theory, however has a few flaws. One study had cyclists perform an endurance test where they were asked to pedal at a threshold power for as long as they could. The cyclists were able to maintain this for an average of 12 minutes before they failed to hold their threshold power and claimed to be completely unable to pedal that hard anymore. Immediately after they failed, they were asked to pedal as hard as they could for 5 seconds. EVERY cyclist was able to output 2-3 times their threshold power for that 5 seconds, even though they had just made the claim that they couldn't possibly pedal at threshold any longer. The study explains this as involuntary quitting, not due to low muscle glycogen (their muscles still had plenty), but because their brains simply told them to stop.

This completely changed how I thought about racing and training. The theory is that when the body is under physical exertion, the body does things such as produce lactate, produce more CO2 and so on. Your brain "reads" your blood chemistry to understand what is happening in the body, and it is very good at trying to prevent you from hurting yourself through overexertion. What the brain does is give you sensations of pain to try to convince you to quit or give up or slow down. The theory behind brain training is understanding this and learning to push your pain tolerance limits. The physiological side is important too, however. The more fit your body becomes, the less pain you perceive for the same amount of exertion.

Learning to train both systems and understanding how to manage the sensations during racing and training has opened new doors in my athletic performance. In the last season I dropped 3 minutes in my 10K run off the bike and dropped an additional 2 minutes in my 1500m swim. I highly recommend giving this book a read if you want to improve your training, and want to read a great story.

Dave Scott and Mark Allen in the 1989 Iron War, Ironman World Championship - Hawaii