Mental Skills for Ultrarunning with Dr. Justin Ross ⎮ KoopCast Episode 14

Good afternoon, good evening, good morning. I hope this episode of the KoopCast is catching you out on a run. Maybe it's catching you on a commute. Maybe you're just trying to distract yourself from work listening to this episode. I've realized over the course of my coaching career that one of the areas that I really need to step my game up in has to do with mental skills and sports psychology. I was originally educated and originally schooled in a physiological model of sports performance, meaning the outcome of any athletic event or running event, cycling event, and things like that had primarily to do with how physically capable the athlete was. And with that being my primary background, one of the things that I neglected over the, especially the first part of my coaching career, is the psychological component or the mental skills component. And that's something that I have worked extremely hard on over the last few years to help to develop those tools that I can bring to the table for my athletes. This episode of the KoopCast is really a reflection of that. I brought Dr. Justin Ross on for this episode, and he has a sports psychology practice that really encompasses a huge swath of different types of athletes. He works

with all four of the major league sports, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey up in the Denver, Colorado area. And that alone would be enough. But in addition to that, he also works with a number of the athletes at the Olympic Training Center across a wide variety of sports. He works with runners and triathletes, and even ultra runners, and even ultra runners who are training for events like the Biggs Backyard. So if that is not a comprehensive, if that is not a comprehensive practice, I really don't know what is. I became familiar with Justin just through his work. And I really came to appreciate how he approached mental skills, mindfulness, and sports psychology. And I think a lot of that is really illustrated through the conversation that we had.

We talk about how awareness and focus and concentration are the three most important mental skills that you can develop to improve your performance. We talked about the role of optimism and the role of having a healthy relationship with the data that you get from your watch. Everybody gets a little bit at OCD about the amount of vert that they get on a particular run or their pace for a particular loop or something like that. We talk about how the meaning that we attach to that data is actually what's really important and not the actual data itself. So hope you guys find this episode of the podcast enlightening. I hope you really take it to heart and each and every day do something to improve your mental skills. And if you do that, you're going to be a better ultra runner and perhaps you might even prevent a DNF from happening. I think that's also a big thing that can, that can happen just by focusing on your mental skills. So without any further ado, here we go. This episode of the KoopCast with Dr.

Justin Ross talking about mental skills and sports psychology. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about what you've got coming up. You're running a couple like pretty big marathons. Yeah. So, uh, Boston in the spring, which will be my third go around at, at that race, uh, which is just a fun weekend. There's so much involvement and a lot going on there. It's so fun to be in the city for that. And then, uh, yeah, I'm going over to Berlin in September and we'll run that. That'll be my first international marathon, which, uh, a couple of buddies and I are working on the world marathon majors. So that'll be my first international. And then I'll have Tokyo and London to go after that in the next few years. I like the fact that you're trying to put it together over several years and not just all do it in one year. That's tough. They're hard to get into. They're really hard to get into. It's a logistical proposition, not a, not a physical one.

Yeah, absolutely. So what's it going to take to get you out on the trails more? You're not the first person to bring this up, right? Uh, I'd love trail running. It's beautiful. It's a great thing. I think just, um, I wish I had more time to dedicate to it and I'm, I wish I would make more commitment to get out there because it's so fun. Dude, that's a nonsense excuse though. Cause you live, I'm looking out of your office window right now at the front range. Like it's not that far away for you to get on some pretty killer trails. It's a true story. Yeah. You're right. I have prioritized. I've prioritized road running in the last few years. Well, in part due to logistical reasons, it's a lot easier for me to put on shoes, get out the front door, be back in an hour with the kids versus, you know, it sounds trivial, but for me, it makes a big difference. Driving half an hour to the trail running, driving back half an hour that, that time. I just, I don't have a lot of, uh, discretionary time at this point to, to do that. So right now my trail running is at a minimum. Um, I get out there a couple of times a year and I think as I get older, as my kids get older, that'll definitely be something I prioritize more. Well, I think part of your, like your time crunch right now is just with your practice, which has kind of been blowing up recently.

And I think the, I think one of the things that the listeners would start to appreciate is just the scope of all of the different types of athletes that you work with within the sports psych and developing mental skills and mindfulness space. So why don't you provide just a broad umbrella for that first? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, um, I graduated with a doctor degree in clinical psychology back in 2007 and we opened this practice called mind body health, basically the same day. And we see a lot of different clients in this practice. So we do have a part of the practice is kind of general mental health, right? People coming in from the community, working on anxiety, depression, life, stress, relationships, those types of things. Um, there's a set of this practice that really works on health and wellness issues. So we help people with chronic pain, chronic stress, chronic disease, adjustment to disease. And we do that work. And then the last population is really working on the sports performance piece, right? Working with athletes, whether that's, um, helping them just live with mental health, live with life, right? Cause the athletes are humans first athletes second, or whether it's working on mental skills or mindfulness training for the purpose of improving performance or connection to sport, um, usually with some type of goal or agenda in mind that they're bringing into the room. And you work with a lot of different types of athletes. We had a conversation before we got on the air about some of the athletes at the training center. And I know

you're kind of frequently down in my hometown in Colorado Springs. Why don't you give us just a little scope of like the team sports, endurance sports, Olympic level sports, and things like that, just to further paint this picture. Yeah. So, um, it ranges really the way I usually think about it from little league baseball teams. Seriously? Yeah. Yeah. So you'd be amazed like up here in Denver, I think Colorado Springs to, uh, competitive little league baseball is, uh, is, is rampant around here. There, there are little league baseball teams performing on a really high level. Like the ones you'd see on ESPN. Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of that is like helping, helping those kids just deal with a 60, 70 game season or help them deal with emotional management or helping the coach kind of structure, uh, programming to help everybody stay aligned. So all the way down to that, and then all the way up to the professional ranks, right? So working with guys in the big four here, Broncos, Rockies, Avalanche or Nuggets. Um, I love endurance athletes, um, in part because that's what I know best personally in my own athletic career. Uh, so I see a lot of runners, a lot of triathletes focusing on a lot of different disciplines. And again, working on anything from right now, the OTQ is a really big thing. We're in an Olympic year. There's a big push.

There's a big movement for those folks to either make trials or make a squad. Um, and so we're seeing a lot of that right now. Um, there's a lot of kind of recreational everyday athletes who are looking to qualify for Boston or qualify for Kona or, um, you know, run their first ultra or compete on a very high level in an ultra marathon. Um, I have some ultra athletes who are doing some of these unique events. I call them unique events. So big backyard, right? So that's unique amongst the unique, unique amongst the, so yeah, absolutely. So we had an athlete do that last year and, um, we came up with sort of a plan to think about how to structure that mentally because it, it is pushing the bounds of comfort in so many different ways, not just physical, but also mental, but it's a mind fuck type of race too. Absolutely. That's why that's my, that's my colloquial way to describe it. Right. Cause just the structure of the event, the fact that you have a certain amount of time to start the next lap, you can on any one day, you can run the lap well within your physical means, right? But how do you kind of pace it out? And then if you're trying to win, I mean, that's the, that's the most purest sense of head to head competition that you could draw up.

It's like who quits first. That's it. Yeah. It's a last person standing event. And so many factors go into that, right? It's such a unique event. When I first heard about it, I was, uh, I was kind of blown away by what it would take to even think about constructing a plan to survive something like that. Cause it really is a survival plan. I think at that point. Okay. Well, you're absolutely right about that. So let's boil, let's start to boil this down a little bit. What is in, I want you to speak to the listeners that might not be as familiar with mental skills training as you are as a practitioner or somebody coming to you that says, Hey, this is something, this is a part of my game that I want to develop. What is the basic value proposition out there for athletes for working on their mental skills? Yeah. So the, the first step I think with this is recognizing that whether or not you're actively working on mental skills as an athlete, your mind is a huge part of your performance, right? So when you're out there running or training, your mind is active and engaged in the process, regardless of whether or not you're paying attention to it or doing something meaningful about it. So the way I think about it is this is an area that it's already happening.

It's not an additive process. It's one that you can either choose to focus on and take with you and improve, or it's one that may cost you because you haven't developed finely tuned skills to make sure that it's not your mind that's leading to you not finishing or not performing well, that it's like, it's your body, right? So not letting your mind become the reason that you're not performing on an optimal level is a huge part of this process. I like the additive component because that, that's how I view the difference between running and training. So when you're running, you're always, you're always improving some physical part of yourself and mental part of yourself from, from your framework. But as a coach, what we do is we organize that running in a smart, intelligent fashion and create training out of it so that they're, they're getting more bang for their buck. They're improving to a greater extent than they actually are. And I'd say from like, from your context, you would take the same thing from a mental skills approach almost.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, it's organizing a structure, a psychological structure to be implemented alongside the physical training in kind of a periodized way, right? So mental skills, they build upon each other and they need to be structured in a way that you would structure a training plan. You're doing different things at different times with an intended purpose. So where do athletes start? So in training, we start with, you know, what are you training right now? Okay, let's build off of that. What's that equivalent in your world? Do you have an athlete come into you and they want to work on your, on their mental skills? How do you start out with them? And what should athletes that want to take upon a practice like this, what should they do to start? Yeah, it's, it's almost exactly the same as to what you just said about the physical side. It's okay, where are you at? Let's start there. The, the very first skill is awareness, right? So I have a lot of favorite sayings. One of them is we, you cannot change what you are not aware of. And so the very first thing we do is we help athletes become aware of what's happening in their mind before, during, and after training. Just do that for a little period of time for a week, right? For a run, whatever it may be. It's this awareness exercise to get people to become familiar with those thoughts, right? What's happening in their mind? What's happening with their focus? What happens when things are easy on easy days? What happens when things get hard, right? So that people can become much more attuned to that thinking process. Huh? And so after they become aware of what they're doing,

and I actually, I'm going to take some credit for a coach. That's like one of the first steps that I take with any new athlete that is, that we're trying to like work on their mental skills game is just to make them, Hey, how'd you feel during the run? That's one of the reasons I focus on rate of perceived exertion so much as opposed to the metrics and things like that. After they've got this general awareness, are there any like stylized steps that an athlete can take after that to further enhance their game? Yeah, absolutely. Right. And I think the awareness platform really generates what comes next and what comes out of that awareness platform helps steer the program that we try to create together. Right? So, uh, often a lot of athletes, not every athlete, but a lot of athletes, uh, struggle when it gets uncomfortable, right? So this, um, you know, this nagging voice that is haunting them about pain in their body and they're, uh, they're feeling that become really problematic. And so we work on skills to become aware of that or challenge those assumptions or create a new narrative, right?

For longer races, one of the things that happens is the ability to channel focus and awareness and concentration can become problematic. So we develop skills around focus and concentration, coming up with strategies for how to play with that in training so that they can then take it into a racing environment. Yeah, that's so true because ultra running has a lot of uncomfortableness associated with it. And I think a lot, like a lot of the ways that that uncomfortableness manifests itself is just in the sheer DNF rate. We never talk about DNF rates in a marathon or even in an iron distance triathlon, maybe a little bit, but they're always associated with like weird things, like really, really weird things. My bike broke, you know, during the bike, I got kicked in the, you know, face and my nose was bleeding during the swim or in a marathon. There were some underlying medical condition or whatever. I can look over the front range, you know, over our shoulders right now to where Leadville, Colorado is, and they have a 50% finish rate at that race. And I've always looked at that as absurd because that race is not that hard. It's not hard. It's a hard race. Don't get me wrong, but it's not hard enough to justify a 50% finish rate. And I think a lot of that can be attributed to people just not wanting to go on any further. They're not comfortable enough being uncomfortable. Do you, do you, now that you've like, you have some framework for ultra running, how, how do athletes kind of work on like that component specifically?

Yeah. So it, you know, like the buzzword in the field right now is mental toughness, right? Like that's what everybody's throwing around. Right. And to me, mental toughness comes down to two components. One is willingness, right? How willing are you to continue despite condition, despite how you're feeling, right? And willingness can be built on based on meaning or purpose of the goal, how important it is to you to see it through, to reach a time, whatever it may be. Willingness can be trained. The, the other part of that equation in my mind is optimism, right? And optimism is so vital, especially when you're not feeling good physically and your mind is starting to take over and starting to, to kind of crap all over the experience. You have to be able to drive back to optimism. And there's a lot of ways that you can train optimism or slice optimism to think about getting, getting to the next aid station, right? Believing that you can just get there, right? And then creating a plan for the next aid station, whatever it may be. So as it comes back to training, those things have to be trained in the physical course of a, of a buildup, right?

Willingness and optimism. But often what happens is people don't have the language for that, or they don't have the structure for that. And so they go out and they go for a three or four hour run and they do all the physical things, but they don't add the mental component to it. So again, going all the way back to awareness, when we start to structure a plan, we start to think about, okay, for each run, you need to be doing something on the mental side. And maybe that's only for five minutes, right? Maybe you just spend five minutes of this run really working on being present or working on self-talk, or maybe you spend an hour, but you're doing something every run with a purpose. Because when you get to that 80 mile mark at Leadville, if your mind is telling you it would be much better for you to just call it a day and you start to listen to that and you don't have any way to push back against that or any incentive to go around it, you're going to listen to that voice. It's funny you mentioned the 80 mile mark at Leadville because I've spent a lot of time just observing the Leadville Trail 100. I've run it, but I've probably spent more time actually observing it. And there is an aid station at mile 75, might be 77 now because they change the course every once in a while. But anyway, around 75, it's called the Outward Bound Aid Station.

And year after year after year, I go there and I spend time from when the leaders come through, which is early in the evening, way before the sun sets, late afternoon, way before the sun sets, all the way to the cutoff, which is early the next morning. And inevitably what happens is, is these groups of people, you can see them off in the distance with their headlamps. They come in in twos and threes and fours and fives, and they all either continue or they all either drop out. And nothing is wrong with them, with either group. They're indistinguishable from one another as they're making their way into the aid station. But once they leave the aid station, either in the cars as when they've dropped out or on foot, that's the only differentiating factor. And I've always thought to myself, there's nothing physical. They've done like 75 miles. It's hard, but there's nothing physically wrong at this point in the game. They have enough time to finish.

They're locomoting just fine. Something, some switch gets turned on or turned off to where they can't continue anymore. And the power of groupthink in that moment too, right? If they're all in it together and they're talking and they're sharing misery, right? There's a great thing. Well, we've changed it, right? We changed it. Misery loves miserable company, right? So that the misery binds together. And if there's this shared group think of, this is really hard. We don't have optimism that it's going to get better or that we're going to be successful and we're unwilling to continue. Game over, right? It becomes a mental shutdown, not a physical shutdown. I always tell whenever I'm counseling crews for athletes that I work with, which is kind of an integral part of my job as a, as a coach. And especially if they're new to the crew game, I tell them that if their runner is in a really bad spot or really low, really low spot, just to lie, tell them they're the, tell them they look great. Tell them they smell great. They're taller. You know, they didn't expect them to be here at this time. Like just do whatever you can and just lie your face off. And a lot of that is an effort to create some sort of optimism for the athlete. Cause the reality is, is they look like shit. You know, they probably have a piss poor attitude, right? Their nutrition is off. They're behind their splits or whatever, but the crew and

the people around them can create that optimistic attitude sometimes falsely, but it works. It gets people out of the chair. Optimism. It's so important. It's vital. And if you have to fabricate it at certain parts of a race to get it done, that's what it takes. Absolutely. Okay. So you're endorsing me lying or you're endorsing me telling crews to lie. I'm endorsing the power of optimism. Get spit there. Actually, the reason I got the, where I got that from was actually in a crew meeting before Leadville. The medical director gave that piece of advice to the entire audience out there. One of my early attempts at that race. Um, and, uh, I've, I've taken that to heart ever since. So I can't take full, full credit for it. Dr. John is longtime medical director for the Leadville trial 100 should take full credit for it. Um, so I want to, we've gone through a couple of different strategies, right? And a lot of it just is revolves around awareness and optimism. I want to pivot to something that I've heard you speak about before and, and you've done so in a way that was, was at least unique to me and made me kind of reframe and re rethink the way that I approach this with my athletes. And that's around anxiety. And the, the typical framework for anxiety with runners revolves around a watch, you know, you're about to do, yeah, right. You've got one.

As I look at my watch and your watch. I know. And I'm going to look at mine. I actually, I actually realized this when I do podcasts, when I look at the time that there's just like a little bit of anxiousness, like creeping up and like, okay, am I going to get to the next question? Is the conversation flowing around? But anyway, let's, let's keep this on running and not on podcasting. Um, you're about to do Boston and everybody there is going to have their watches go off every single mile, the audible beep. And then they're all going to look at it at the same time. Like it's telling them a different piece of information, right? There's a lot of anxiety revolving around just the time splits that we get either in a race or a workout. And I want to know what you have to say about how that actually impacts either their training performance, whether they're thinking about it in a training context or a race performance.

Sure. So, uh, one, it it's so normal for us to do that. We, we all do this. And so I think the starting point is to recognize just what a natural draw it is to metric our running experience. Right. And now with the watches that we have, we can track, I mean, you name it, sneeze rate on a run, you can track everything. It's, it's both amazing and also it can be detrimental. So what I think it can do is I think we attach so much meaning to the numbers. It's not the numbers that really matter. It's the meaning that we associate with those numbers, anything from pace to time to heart rate to power output. I mean, it's ridiculous now. Right. So again, going back to awareness, one of the first things we talk about is what, uh, what meaning are you putting into the numbers and where does that come from? Like, why is that important to you?

Okay. So from there, then you have the ability to maybe give it less power, right? Or to play with how you're metricating your experience. So one of the things when we're talking about marathon, just for ease of a marathon, people have very specific time goals that they're chasing in that race. And they count it down to the mile splits. Now the mind can only really chunk seven to 10 digits of information comfortably before there's an energy cost, right? So think about your phone number, right? Phone numbers are set into three different sets of digits. It's easy to remember. They're not 26 digits for a reason. So what happens if we're trying to pay too much attention to 26 data points along the way, it's creating more emotional and cognitive stress than we really need. We're giving that energy away. So one of the strategies just for a marathon that we often use is rather than thinking about mile, we think about it by time, right? So let's break it down. So a guy like me, I'm running three hour marathons. I have three chunks of time that I have goals for. So the first hour is chunk one. Here's where I want to be on the course. What that does is then I can check my watch periodically throughout the first hour, but I'm not freaking out about if I'm four seconds off on mile one or not, right? I have this ability to have much more space to focus on how my body feels, to tap into flow and to not be caught up in my head about numbers, right? So that I think is the biggest obstacle about numbers is it's a flow robber. If every time we look at our watch-

I love that term, flow robber. Every time we look at our watch, it robs us of flow state. Wow. I'm sorry. I didn't want to cut your train of thought off that, but flow robber. It's a flow robber. Oh, wow. Okay. So keep going. So you get these three chunks of time. Yeah. So, and then it's the same thing. So you get to hour one and then you think about the next chunk and the next chunk. The beautiful thing about that is you can chunk any distance, any length of race in a similar fashion. And the general rule of thumb is the more you're checking your watch or the more data points along the way that you put meaning to, the more it's going to rob you of the ability to just tap into your body and to run really, really well. I've heard so many people in this office come in with race reports and the days that they run the best, they PR are days that either A, they forgot their watch or B, it didn't work because they no longer had a data point to tap into.

All they were focusing on was their body. And we have this amazing ability. If we could tap into our body, figure out that flow state and just go with it, we could be machines. We could do amazing things. Have you done any work with either the Olympic distance triathletes or any of like the time trial cyclists over at the training center? Not down in Colorado Springs, but in other capacities. Because I know a strategy that they often use to point to this, you can kind of cover up the data on your watch is they'll actually put tape over their power meters so that they don't have that input. And for athletes that are completely fixated on the numbers, it's really interesting because some of them react really well to it. Like they can let it go by putting the tape over it because the coaches always want the data afterwards. But other athletes, because they don't have it, it's another source of consternation for them to deal with during the race. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

So how would you advise an athlete to get over that aspect, like get over the aspect of pace? And this is really relevant for a lot of road runners that come onto the trails because they don't have those consistent data inputs that are valid because the trail is undulating and there's no mile markers, you know, every single mile or anything like that. And they just can't wrap their head around not having their, those data points. So how would you like counsel them to just like, let, like let that go? Yeah. So, so two thoughts on that one, right with, within an ultra distance or even a trail run, you could have a flat mile or a downhill mile that resembles like a road pace for a roadie. Right. And so that feels good, but then they hit a really steep uphill section and it's a 20 minute mile and they freak out because I don't run 20 minute miles. That's not the kind of runner that I am, right? They put so much identity into what those splits mean. So again, often the work awareness, let's come back to awareness. What are you telling yourself about what those miles mean?

The second thing we do is we can do like naked runs, right? There's a lot of ways to do that. Either if you have enough discipline, turn your watch on, but just turn it to the time of day, right? Or turn it to a metric that doesn't really mean anything that you're not going to be checking in with. If you can't do that, turn it on, but put it in your pocket. So you don't look at it. The other way is to be playful with it and to change the metric altogether, right? So if you're used to running in miles per hour, turn your watch. So it's kilometers per hour, right? It's going to screw with your equilibrium on what you think you're doing. And rather than playing mental math, most people are like, Oh, the hell with that. I don't know what it means. I don't know what this means, but you still have the data at the end to look at, but the numbers you start to realize like it's not the numbers that matter. It's what you put into them. So, so you're basically saying just change your frame of mind for what they mean.

Yeah. But you have to, again, you have to train it. You have to do something in your training to actively do that. And it's a great concept that I think a lot of people agree with, but when you tell them like, all right, now we're going to go do it. People are like, well, I don't know. I don't want to do that. I can't run without my watch. I can't run without my mile splits telling me to do. Yeah. It's such a big problem in the, in the trail, not a big problem, but a bit like it's for athletes to get over it in the trail running world, particularly if they have like a track and field or a road type of background, it just, it becomes a huge mental block for that initial part of the transition because they have this piece of information that is no longer as useful or reliable as it was in their previous road running or track running life. But yet what it forces, it forces discipline to the body, right? Let the body guide the information, right? Let the rate of perceived effort, let that guide how you tackle that hill or how you tackle that next section, right? It's not about what your dad on your watch is telling you. It's like, it's teaching people to be tapped in to their experience in mind and body.

So here's our other experiment that we can do. We've got two of them already. If you take me up on at least one, we've got the Leadville, uh, uh, Leadville outward bound aid station experiment. We'll go and observe those people this year. The second one is going to be, we're going to stand on power line, that initial first big descent, and we're going to watch how many people check their pace coming down power line because it's a totally useless number, right? Right. And then we can correlate it to success afterwards. I love it, right? We'll track bib numbers and how people did, right? There's, there's comfort in that though too, right? I think like, that's the other way to think about that. There's, there's comfort in being able to check, right? And so often that checking behavior is really, it's providing a way to reduce anxiety. That's how people have to think about it. And the numbers can kind of flip that one way or another, but this, it's a human tendency in the sport to be able to check into, uh, where do I find comfort? Where do I feel like I'm doing what I need to do? Where do I feel like I'm in control of this experience? Have you ever been in a pace group in a major marathon, you know, where they hold the big signs up and it's been the guy who's been the sign of, yeah, a couple of times.

Oh, okay. So you'll, you'll love this frame of reference. So I've done that a few times and I've had athletes do this a few times as well. And we've come to the conclusion that one of the pieces of advice that we give everybody as they're kind of lining up, as they're congregating around, like kind of spinning off their little nervous energy, trying to like create small talk and things like that is we tell them to turn the audible alarm for their watches off. Trust us that we're going to do the job. We're going to get you your three hour marathon or your Boston qualifier, you know, whatever we're, we're kind of pacing it for. And by doing that, by reducing the amount of mental energy that they spend tracking every single mile, I think it's worth like a minute for like a three or three and a half hour marathon. Like, and I try to tell them that in like a tangible way, right? I get like a 50% buy-in to right. I've done it. Yeah. Yeah.

But not a hundred percent. No, definitely not. I trusted this guy completely. Oh, some people look at me like I've sprouted a third head. Like, really, right? Really? Really? You think I'm going to trust you? Like I just met you. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's I I've always, I've done it twice, both for half marathons. And I found it to be such a, it's such a fun experience to guide that, right? Because I know how meaningful hitting numbers, um, it's such a meaningful part of the sport, regardless of distance, right? We put so much meaning into outcome that to be able to guide that for people is, uh, it's a really fun part of being able to give back. I think. Yeah, I, I totally agree. Um, okay, let's, let's kind of get back to ultra running again. I want to continue to like peel back this element of a DNF that a lot of ultra runners experience and it's, it's really common and it is certainly not all physical. Um, I, I personally, as a coach have a hard time, like arming my athletes with the right tools such that they can pull themselves out of, I want to drop out, but I'm not going to, and that's common for, I would say almost everybody in their entire ultra running career has been in this situation. I've been able to personally counsel athletes out of that situation when I've been there and they've sat on chair, I'm going to quit and no, you can't quit. Like I've been, I've been able to do that. But one of the things that I always struggle with

as a coach is to give the athletes their own tools to do that. So how would, how would you do that in my situation, arm an athlete with their own tools such that if they're all by themselves and they have no, no crew, no pacer, no whatever to lean on, get themselves out of that hole. Yeah. So it's a great question, right? I think there are two components to that and it goes all the way back to sort of the base phase or the beginning of the year when we're starting to set our goals. So back in training, back in training. One of the, the more meaningful and purposeful our whys are, the reasons for competing, the more likely we're going to fight for them in the moment of discomfort. And so again, at the very beginning of the year, you know, months before a race, being able to connect to, okay, why are you doing this? Why is this important?

What are you trying to prove to yourself? What's on this path of self-discovery? What do you hope to find satisfaction in, in this event? And you have to come back to this even every couple of weeks in training, right? You hit a hard patch in training, things aren't going well, you're not feeling good, you're tired, whatever, to be able to come back to that. Why to be very, very clear about it. The more clear you make it with the more, with more angles on it, with more component parts, the more likely you're going to draw that up when it's uncomfortable at mile 75 or 80, the more willing you're going to be able to fight for it. The other idea, and this comes from an athlete, not from me, but he, he had this great idea, right? He's like, no matter what happens, I'm going to, I'm not going to quit in the chair. I'm going to quit on the field. If it comes to that, I'm not making the decision to quit while I'm in a chair. I'm going to quit while I'm out on the course. And so he made that this really deep embedded idea for, for running a really long distance, right? I'm not going to make that decision at an aid station when I'm in the chair. If, if I'm hurting, if I'm uncomfortable, I'm not doing it there. I'm going to get back out on the course and maybe I'm a hundred feet away from the aid station. Maybe I'm a mile down, but that's where I'm going to make that decision.

So that's part of it too, is if you can convince yourself now in advance of a race that you don't make the decision sitting down at an aid station, it has to be made out on the course. It may prop you up and get you moving again. Right. And once you get moving again, right, you're like, okay, I can do this. There's that optimism. I can do this. I'm going to be okay. I can make it to the next waypoint. You start to segment, um, the series of a distance again, regardless of what that distance is. You know, it's so funny. You mentioned that I did this, uh, I did this race last summer called the Tour de Giont. It's like a 300 kilometer, huge mountain race over in, uh, over in Italy. Sorry, 200 kilometer. No, it's like a fish story. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger every time. It's a 200 mile, like 300, 306 kilometers or something like that. Anyway, huge race over in, over in Italy. It takes like, took me like four days to actually do it.

Uh, my wife was my crew and I told her before we left that I'm not quitting. I don't care what's going on unless I've got a bone sticking out or, you know, there's some like, you know, really serious medical condition. I'm not quitting. And her only job was to get me out of every aid station. Like I just boiled it down to something that simple. Yeah. I think that's it. Right. Because you know, once you get moving again, if you've developed the right skills physically and mentally through movement, you're going to be able to pick those back up. It's in the chair that the chair provides comfort. Again, one of the biggest things for endurance athletes is this is sort of a, it's a, it's a purposeful challenge to put ourselves in an uncomfortable position.

And the mind is going to want to pull you back to comfort. And that becomes this fine line throughout the, throughout the race. When you sit down, it starts to index on all these, oh, it feels so good. I could just stay here for another minute or another hour. Maybe I should just stay here and just not finish. Oh man. Well, so you mentioned mental toughness earlier. Like one of the strategies that I use with my athletes, but I realized it has a lot of limitations is just to make the training hard and just to get them literally and proverbially be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And so the, like the physical, the physicality of having hard training and having them remember that throughout the training process is a big part of what they can then therefore kind of take out on the race course. But the issue that I have in ultra running using that type of, um, using that type of strategy is that the race always presents a much more marked physical effort than anything you can ever create in training. And that's something that's unique to ultra running. Like if you have a 5,000 meter runner or a 10,000 meter runner, even Olympic distance triathlete, even a marathoner, you can get pretty close in training. Like the elite, you know, uh, marathoners, they'll do 22 miles in training. You know, they're comfortable, uncomfortable for 22 miles.

You can't do that in ultra running. And I'm wondering how else you could set that situation up for, for trying to get an athlete as tough as possible, realizing there's still going to be this big gap from what you can create in training to what they're actually going to experience during the race. Yeah. So the skills translate, right? Mental skills in training need to translate to race day. And so structuring hard training programs is really important. Part a part B needs to be, what are the mental skills that you're working on during this tough set, this tough week, this tough run, right? To make sure that you're developing those and you're getting really good at using those so that you can translate that to, um, you know, to the race that you're about to take on. The other is, I think working on more of a cumulative effect that leads to this mental review, right? So being able to look over the course of training, right? The cliche saying, trust your training. And I'm always like, well, what are you trusting? Like, that doesn't make sense to me. You have to be able to be very specific about the things that you take away as trust principles that you carry then into a race.

So I think about as an athlete, there's three things we can always focus on in terms of building trust. This has to be embedded into a training program. So part one is what do you trust from this current cycle, right? You're focused on this race. What are the things that you trust to be true about this current block of your training, right? Both physically, but also mentally, what are you developing? Part two is you broaden that a little bit. What do you trust to be true about yourself as an athlete across time, across seasons, even across disciplines? What have you endured? What have you been through? What do you know you're able to do, especially on that mental side, right? Are you able to face adversity and push through it? Can you trust that, right? That's part two. And then part three, you broaden even bigger still. And it's like, what do you trust to be true about yourself as a human being, right? We've all been through adversity. We've all faced hardships. There are really important kernels of belief about our identities that are going to help us recognize that we're pretty strong.

We're pretty capable. We're meant to face hardships and adversity. And we all have different ways of getting through that. Race is a very specific type of adversity and challenge. But being able to focus on those three elements really helps us navigate it in a disciplined, effective way so that we're not just out there feeling kind of lost mentally or emotionally. It's interesting that you mentioned that because part of that trust in your training process, as a coach, I use the calendar and the data to anchor that. So when a race is coming up, part of the framework that I use very frequently is taking the athlete through the entirety of training, not just the last month or the last week, but the last six months or maybe even the last two years and demonstrating with data and dialogue where they were at at one point and then where they're at now and what those differences are. And most of the time, nine out of 10 times, they're positive differences. We can focus on lactate threshold pace or the amount of climbing that you're able to tolerate or some big, huge training block if you want to use the big zoom out lens. What's the analog for that training, you know, that training data that the athlete gets from their GPS watch? What's the analog for that in your world?

Yeah, it's qualitative, right? You can't quantify or metric psychological development, right? I'm sure somebody is trying to figure that out right now. It'll be on your watch in two years, right? But right now it's qualitative. And again, this is why it's so important to do this alongside your physical training. So what I advise a lot of coaches on is, you know, once a quarter, just an easy way to slice it. Once a quarter, as you're going through a review with an athlete, you do this little write up, this little dialogue. What were the mental skills that have really worked well for you right now, right? If it's base training, like, okay, you've gotten really good at becoming aware of your thoughts, right? You become really good at generating the ability to shift your focus as you need, right? If it's harder block, right? Oh, you've gotten really good at these mental fitness, these mental toughness skills. Remember these types of thoughts that are really working well for you. So again, as you're able to do that review, you then have it in volume and in all kinds of metric ways, but then you have it in the qualitative. And if you can have it written down, having the athlete write it down, they can see it. And then there's a timestamp like, oh yeah, July of 2017 was really, really hard. I was doing a lot of volume and a lot of vert and, oh, but here's what I developed in my mind. I remember that now. That's what you want to get to. You want to have athletes be able to access what they've learned, right? In a very meaningful way. I like that. You talked about kind of the core of mental training being awareness. And on the

physical training side, one of the things that we focus on are kind of almost like a hierarchy of needs. Like you need to run first, you need to run a lot of miles, and then you can incorporate some sort of intensity type of training. And then maybe you might have like a recovery adjunct or a nutritional intervention or an altitude camp or things like that. But you shouldn't do it in the opposite framework. You shouldn't focus on the advanced training things before you have the base training things. Can you run through a really quick, this is the most important mental skill to develop first. This is the second most important. And here are the advanced ones that we're working on at the very like tip of the spear. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's it's I like that framework. I use that framework a lot, right? It's a pyramid that builds, right? The base of the pyramid is really three things. It's awareness, focus and concentration. And if you think about them as sort of an aperture on a camera, right awareness is this general broad awareness. What are you feeling? What are you noticing?

Can you bring awareness to movement to the world around you to your thoughts to your body? Can you be generally aware of what's happening? Focus is one click down. So focus is can you generate focus to something that's a little bit more specific, right? Can you focus just on how your body feels in movement? Can you focus just on what you see on the trail in a kind of a general but specific way? Concentration, you pare down even further. And concentration is this ability to really hold one thing in mind at a time, right? So I'm really focusing on just moving from point A, my body, to that tree or that landmark. And I'm just going to really focus on the flow of movement between here and there. Those three skills are really important to develop. So that's at the base, right? Right above that sort of the middle of the pyramid, if we're just going to take it in three slices, is general cognitive narrative, right? So this is what are the thoughts and beliefs you have about who you are as a person, who you are as an athlete, that you bring into training, right? And that's, again, before, during, and after training. How are you thinking about your run? What are you thinking about during your run? What's happening there, right? At the top of the pyramid are then one I call cognitive appraisal. So cognitive appraisal is, what are you saying specifically about what you're feeling in your body? So if you're noticing that your leg is tight or sore, and the message is my leg is tight or sore, it's very different than this is destroying me, I need to stop, right? And so being aware of those

very specific cognitive appraisal messages of what's happening in our body, and being able to tweak that or change that or be very specific about that's important. And then so too, this is like the mental toughness skill, right? Willingness and optimism. And they all work together, all three, and there's plenty of others, but those are the general ones. All three can be incorporated into a physical training block, and really need to be if athletes want to reach their optimal level of performance. You know, it's interesting when you went through all of that, the things at the top of the pyramid, the things that are like the hardest that you should work on last. Just in my observation, you could tell me if you have the same observation working with athletes. Those are the things that athletes mess up the most and the easiest. And I think it might go to point, it just might point out that they're the hardest to develop.

They are hard to develop. And yet, again, the beautiful thing about them is they're already occurring in your training, right? When you're out there and it's hard, your mind is doing something. It's evaluating, it's critiquing. You might as well be aware of it and then learn how to make that your own. Learn how to make it your friend, not your enemy, so that it can help you, not harm you, especially when it's mile 80 of Leadville. Well, and athletes' minds are super busy. I actually got a comment on Twitter to ask you about this. And a lot of times our minds are busy and it can be a positive thing. It's kind of distracting us from the environment. But at other points, it can be a negative thing because we're not focused on the task at hand. We're not being mindful about our environment and how we really feel and things like that. Why don't you give the listeners some commentary on how to balance that?

Yeah. This is the reason that awareness is the most important skill, is to be aware of what's happening so that you can almost look at it and observe it from just a little bit of a distance. So he's like floating above yourself. Yeah, a little bit. So you could be like, oh, wow, I'm really distracted today. I'm really thinking about everything I have going on in this other part of my life, right? To be able to be aware of that then generates the ability to do something about it. But often without that awareness, we're running and we're caught up in distraction and we get done with our run and we're like, wow, what did I just do? I'm not even really sure where I was or how I performed or what that was about. Don't get me wrong. There's some beauty in being able to do that in the sport too, right? It can become this ability to detach and distract. But being aware of what's happening so that you have agency over doing something specifically when you need to, when it's really important, that's what it's ultimately all about. Oh man, that's so cool. Okay. So let's leave, let's leave everybody listening right now with one thing that they can do either right now, if they're listening to it on their run, which would be a distraction technique, right? That'd be a distraction technique if they have got earphones in now or tomorrow, the next day, their next long run, like what's the one thing that they can do to like take to the bank to like start this journey on working on their mental skills? Yeah. So first step is just give yourself a little grade right now on what you're doing and how you're doing in the mental fitness department. Are you working on this at all?

Are you not, right? Are you working on specific skills? Are there areas you think you could improve upon? What are they, right? So again, it starts with generating that awareness, right? The second thing I would do is it's a skill called priming, right? So priming is this idea that we give ourself some type of psychological recognition or idea prior to an event that kind of sets us up for how that's going to go. And so when it comes to physical training, I think there's a couple ways you can prime it. So one is you prime, okay, what are you about to do? So you just kind of go through the basics like, oh, I have a one hour run today for ease of example, right? Part two is why is that important, right? So connect again, back to the why, the bigger concept of what you're doing in this training block. Oh, this is an aerobic run. It's for volume, right? And then the third thing you prime is what is the mental skill or how are you planning to show up in that run? And it could just be for five minutes, but it gives you that reminder of like, okay, for five minutes, I'm going to focus on this awareness, focus, concentration idea. I'm going to see how it goes, right? Just for five minutes, that's it. And then I'm going to, you know, go about my other business. So what you're doing is you're really setting yourself up to develop a platform for integrating these skills into your physical training. And you do this, this quick little priming exercise you do as you're putting your shoes on. Again, you don't have to do it an hour in advance. It doesn't take anything more than a little bit of cognitive load and effort prior to getting out the door.

God, you know, what's so funny about that is like, I can't tell you how many athletes, like if I go and I do a run with them, we get out the door, we punch our watches and be like, hey, what are you doing today? And they'll have no idea. I'm supposed to do 90 minutes. I'm supposed to do these intervals. Some of them have to check their phone, their training calendars on their phone. I got to check. I'm like, how are you so absent that we're already into the run and you don't know what you're supposed to accomplish today? Right, right. It's like back to the fundamentals. Fundamentals. Yeah. They're so important. That's awesome, man. All right, man, we're going to let you go. You got to go back to your wife and kids. Busy life. Oh, man, busy. You are busy, man. Where can people find you? Yeah. So website is drjustinross.com. So easy to find me there. I did just launch a, it's called Unlock Your Athletic Potential. It's a course on Insight Timer meditation app.

You can find that on my website. There's a link there. Instagram, same handle, drjustinross. And then I mean, Strava, right? Everybody's got to see the metrics of my runs, right? Look me up on there. I'm on Strava too. Nice, man. Well, I appreciate it. Appreciate your time. I also appreciate what you do for athletes. Anybody that can take athletes to a new level, I always appreciate what they do. And you've got a really special practice here. So it's awesome. Yeah, man. Thank you. I appreciate you saying that. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, Justin. Yeah. Thanks for having me. And we're going to go hit the incline up next time you're done. Yeah, let's do it. I love it. All right, man. We'll do it. We'll do it. Okay. All right. And there we have it. There you go. I hope you guys got something on your run. If you were on a run right now, you could have literally taken some of that stuff and applied it in the middle of the run as you were going along right then and right there. How practical is that? If you weren't on a run, you're about to go out for a run. Hey, you have some tools now that you can take out on the trails with you each and every day. I do firmly believe that sports performance now, especially when we're talking about ultramarathon performance, there is a psycho-biological model of this performance. And it's just as much on the mental side as it is on the physical side. And those two things have to integrate in order for you to really attain your peak performance and your potential.

Thanks a lot to Dr. Justin Ross for coming on this episode of the KoopCast. Really appreciate his insights. And as always, I appreciate what he does for athletes. He's made a really big impact, I know, on the athletes that he has worked with. And if you guys really like this podcast, go ahead, go on over to iTunes. You can hit the subscribe button there or give it a five-star review, or you could do both, I guess. It really doesn't take that much time and it helps the podcast out a lot. If you think coaching is something right for you, go ahead and hit us up at trainright.com. Got a number of great coaches. You guys heard them on some earlier episodes of the podcast. We'd love to see you out on the trails. We'd love to see you achieve your goals for the year. Everybody's ramping up right now. You guys are getting ready for some big races this summer. I know you are. If you're listening to this podcast, you undoubtedly care about the results that you're going to get this summer and the process that it takes to achieve those results. So hit us up on the website or you can hit me up on social media and I can direct you to one of our absolutely fantastic coaches. Thanks a lot for listening again, you guys. Appreciate you all. And as always, we will see you on the trails.