Psychology for Ultramarathon with Dr. Carla Meijen | KoopCast Episode 171

Trail and ultra runners, what is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the KoopCast. As always, I'm your humble host, Coach Jason Koop. And this episode of the podcast is with an individual who has had a tremendous impact on my coaching career, particularly over the course of the last three or four years. And she's also had a huge influence on my book. You guys can welcome to the podcast today, Carla Mayan, whose book, Endurance, Performance in Sport, Psychological Theory and Interventions. I might have more sticky notes in this book than any other reference material in my entire library. I absolutely love her work.

So I am thrilled to bring her on the podcast today. We start talking initially about what makes endurance sports unique in terms of the psychological tools and the psychological demands that are placed on athletes within that sport. We talk about pressure and how we can turn pressure into something positive and how we can flip that script around and make it a challenge versus a threat. And we talk about how we can manage some of the psychological demands that actually unfold during a race. One of the things that I've come to appreciate very much in my coaching career, especially as of late, is that how we need to practice a lot of these psychological tools in training in order to execute them in a race. And Carla and I go through some practical examples of that throughout the course of the podcast. I love this conversation. I hope you guys do too. I hope you guys take it into context with the other conversations that I've had all in the sports psychology world that I've had over the last several weeks. Because I do think if you take all of these and you wrap them all up into a big learning bundle, so to speak, you'll have both the framework and also practical takeaways that you can put into your training tomorrow. All right, folks. So with that as a backdrop, and before my voice goes away, welcome to the podcast today, Carla Mayen.

Before we started out, this is real, by the way. So you can see your book on the screen right now. I still have all the stupid post-it notes and what you probably can't see as well as all the notes within the post-it notes. But I always thought when I read a book like this, and like there's, I don't know, this book is 220 pages, and there's probably 100 post-it notes in it. It's a pretty good resource when that ratio is one to two. So good job. Good job on putting it together. It was very thorough. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's been quite the journey working on that book. Obviously, you know, getting inputs from so many great researchers. You know, it's been so inspirational working with all of them, collating all that information and putting together and summarizing it at the kind of final chapter.

So it's been a real fun kind of book to put together and work with everyone on. And, you know, along the way, I've learned a lot from that as well. I know. It's funny. Whenever you get other collaborators into the mix and you're in like their wheelhouse, and then you're trying to understand the things that are so detailed within that wheelhouse, it always offers a different perspective. Yes, definitely. And I think what I'm particularly proud of with this book is that we've also had some physiologists contributing to a psychology book. And which is great, because when we think about any kind of type of sports performance, endurance performance, you know, we always need to remember it's, you know, it's psychological, it's physiological, but it's also, you know, physical, tactical, technical, and, you know, the social support network around us. So all these things kind of feed into to endurance performance. And it's nice that we've been able to kind of capture some of that. You know, having Lex Major and Sam McCora write a chapter in that has been, it's been fun to like, you know, get them to adjust some of this physiology speak into psychological terms and making that accessible for a wider audience has been really tremendous.

Well, and that's what I've appreciated, because I've come at coaching and the way that my coaching background was kind of oriented, was definitely more on the physiology side of things. And I think that that's not indifferent from a lot of coaches and a lot of people who end up in the sports science arena, where they have a physiological approach to not only the sport as a whole, but also how we train and coach athletes. And then also, what are the determinants of performance, right? What are the things that are key within the performance, we typically take a physiological lens at that. And one of the things that I've been able to appreciate more and more as my coaching career has kind of gone on is how all of those other elements that you just mentioned, the psychological, the tactical, how we kind of interact within society and within the sport itself, how all of those can get woven into performance as well. And it's made a big impact on my coaching career and just how I approach the sport. So, I'm going to leave a link in the show notes to the book that we were talking about. Just as another side note, I used a lot of that framework in the book that I produced in the psychology tools for ultra runners section specifically, I pulled a lot of that framework and I drew inspiration from that. So, thank you. And I hope that work continues.

I'm glad the book has been of help, definitely. So, let's get into your work a little bit. So, the audience can kind of get to know you. I obviously know you through your work, but a lot of the audience is going to be kind of unfamiliar. Can you explain to the audience who you are and what you do and what your areas of focus are? Yeah, yeah. I'll give you a bit of insight into my journey. So, my current role is I'm an accredited sport and exercise psychologist. I live in London and I'm an associate professor in applied sports psychology at St. Mary's University in London, Twickenham. And I'm also the course lead for our master's in science for the applied sports psychology program. And I guess, I don't know if it's an unconventional route, but I grew up in the Netherlands. So, I did my degree at the University of Amsterdam. When I was maybe 16, 17, I decided sports psychology sounds really cool. You know, I love sports. I love psychology. This is something that sounds really fun and something I want to do, but there were no kind of established roots whatsoever in the Netherlands. There were a couple of sports psychologists, but no kind of pathway directly into becoming one. So, I just, I guess, carved out my own niche. I spent some time in Sweden and learned doing a placement and did a master's in Edinburgh in performance psychology.

Went back to Holland for a few months, worked for a sports psychologist, and then ended up in Staffordshire, which is in the Midlands in the UK between Birmingham and Manchester, where I did a PhD on challenge and threat states under the supervision of Preston Mark Jones, which definitely has influenced a lot of my thinking. I'll get into challenge and threat states later on during the podcast, give you a little bit more of context around that. And then I started my kind of first academic position at the University of Kent, which has an endurance research group. And kind of, you know, my background is basketball. I'm a basketball player by nature. I mean, might surprise you, I definitely didn't enjoy long distance running. I remember kind of, you know, five K's. I was like, dang it, this, this is interesting. I think it's an observation. And so I came at it from a very kind of novice perspective, like very open minded, not necessarily having any kind of preconceptions as to what I would find diving into kind of psychology of endurance performance. So I think I've always kept that kind of real curiosity with me. I've always held that with me. And then I came across something called psyching teams with the late Kate Hayes, introduced, had introduced at the kind of New York marathon and still going strong at the Toronto marathon, I believe, where basically what they do is they provide brief psychological support before, during and after the marathon. And for me, as a kind of an applied practitioner and a researcher

that brought together kind of two passions and kind of seeing it in action, the types of things you read about your research has really fueled that kind of passion in endurance and kind of, you know, inspired editing the book as well on endurance performance. So done some really great work with Alison McCormick, was a PhD student at a time on kind of understanding psychological determinants of endurance performance. And we kind of brought that psyching team concept to the UK, kind of introduced that idea of offering brief mental support at endurance events here, which has been really, really fun. And now I'm at Samaria University. And I've recently finished a book where I've kind of pulled together challenge and threat state endurance performance into the maternity domain. So often, you know, giving birth is compared to a marathon. So I've recently completed a book called Empowered Birth Lessons from Sports Psychology for the Maternity Journey, which is real fun. It's been a real fun book to write where I kind of pulled on all those kind of different things that I learned along the way.

Here's what I've always found fascinating about people that are in your area of expertise. It's the breadth of sports that you have contact with and have experience with. Because in the coaching world, we tend to be in like silos. And I think that this is a detriment, right? We've got our endurance silo. And then sometimes even within the endurance silo, we've got like the marathon silo or the 10k silo or the ultra marathon silo, which is kind of the silo that this podcast is in. But in the sports psychology realm, I'm always impressed by the breadth of sports that many, not all, sports psychologists and people who do like research and application in this area actually work with. I mean, you kind of went through a lot of the team sports, you grew up as a basketball player, right? And then you've had touch points kind of along the way, along all of these different sports. Is there anything before we get into the endurance piece of it? Is there anything that you've kind of found particularly fascinating when looking at all of those very different sports groups as individual athletes and kind of like what they need to bring to the table? I think a lot of that comes back to my PhD on challenge and threat states. So kind of how we approach competition and that whole idea of, you know, we're active human beings, we regulate our behavior. I've definitely come from the kind of social cognitive group where, you know, I strongly believe, you know, in our thoughts influence, you know, our behaviors, our emotions. And, you know, all of that is also impacted by the people around us. So I think that's just one of the kind of key learning points that I always take with me.

And what I said earlier on is like that kind of interaction between, you know, the technical, tactical, physical, physiological, and psychological aspects of performance. I think we just cannot operate in those silos. We cannot just approach an athlete or an individual by just saying, well, actually, you need to change something around your technique. And that will just be the fix for everything. I think we always need to try to understand the whole kind of, you know, all the different areas, whereas at the same time, appreciate our area of expertise and don't step out of our area of expertise. I think it's that balance, you know, we want to understand these other areas, but we don't want to pretend, you know, like, I try to learn about physiology, but I'm not a physiologist. So I'm not by any means trying to like, change or advise on these things. But I want to understand it so that when there's maybe an inkling that there's something there, then I definitely kind of encourage, you know, individuals to have a think about that and maybe speak to a physiologist to speak to, you know, someone about their, their training and so on.

So I guess that's, that's two things that I think are definitely across sports, for sure. I really appreciate that perspective. Because once again, I've always thought that all too often, we, we tend to kind of stay in our own little silos to the detriment of the people that we are working with, because there's a breadth of knowledge that we can draw in from other areas of expertise or other, or other areas of sport. But that being said, this is an endurance audience, and this is an ultra marathon specific audience. And if we don't talk about ultra at some point, like people are going to, you know, fast forward, go to the next, go to the next podcast. So we're going to zero in on endurance. And, and, you know, you kind of mentioned this in some of our back and forth through email in advance. Endurance performance has something like specific about it within the psychological demands that kind of like that kind of constitute performance and how we can kind of deconstruct performance. What is it in particular with endurance that you that is unique with it from a psychological perspective?

Yeah, I think it's helpful to kind of define endurance. We did a systematic review in 2015. And we kind of, you know, obviously had to identify papers and research that were relevant to endurance. So based on Gaston's work, we kind of defined endurance as that continuous whole body dynamic efforts that last for at least 75 seconds or more, obviously, for ultra endurance populations, a lot longer. Yeah. I was like, that's a sprint. What are you talking about? 75 seconds? Come on now. So it's kind of when that aerobic energy system predominates, right? So it's where you can't keep going at a hundred percent effort for, for, you know, a whole ultra events that, you know, that'd be mad. So it's kind of that idea that, you know, that aerobic energy system predominates. And with that come kind of particular psychological demands. So kind of, I guess, through observations as a practitioner and through our research, you know, for example, you know, there are systematic reviews, some of the, the other research that we've done about, you know, interviewing athletes about understanding their psychological demands. I would say there's this kind of four typical psychological demands that when it comes to endurance performance, so there's motivation, kind of the duration time to think the pacing and the pain aspect.

Perfect. So when we think about motivation, you need to pull in the hours, right? You need to put the miles in the bank, but especially when it comes to ultra endurance, you probably won't get to an ultra event without having done any training. There might be the, you know, the odd outlier, you might have the odd outlier, but that's going to hurt, right? Like typically you need to put in some training hours, get some miles in the bank. So it's kind of that motivation to train. So finding the commitment to train that kind of sometimes fighting through the boredom when it comes to some of the longer sessions. It's also the kind of the quality of motivation that we're looking at. So the why, why are you doing this? So when I'm, when I'm talking about quality, I'm talking about things like whether the motivation comes from within. So that's kind of derived from something called self-determination theory or whether it's external motivation. So is it kind of autonomic? So do you got, do you feel you've got a sense of autonomy, control over your motivation?

Are you doing it for reasons such as you're really enjoying it? You're the love of the sport, or is it more for kind of controlled reasons such as, you know, if I don't do this, I feel bad, I feel guilty, or I do this because I just want to place well, or want to show off on Instagram or whatever, you know? So it's that kind of internal versus external kind of type of control. So controlled versus kind of, you know, very much having autonomy over that motivation. So that really high quality autonomous motivation is what tends to keep you going a lot more than a lot of that. It's a lot more sustainable over a longer period of time. So it's always thinking about why am I doing this and finding how you can move towards more of kind of good quality motivations, not just about having a lot of it, but having good quality motivation. And that's helpful because, you know, as a typically as an ultra endurance athlete, there's quite a few sacrifices along the way to make, you know, like you might not spend a lot of time with your family because of, you know, the time it takes to do some of these events or the training. So it's definitely helpful to kind of have clarity around why you're doing it to kind of push through some of those, those sessions. And then there's that duration. It's in the name, endurance, ultra endurance.

There is a lot of time to think. So, you know, you might have a lot of debates and discussions in your, you know, in your brain going on a lot of thoughts. So there might be sometimes quite unhelpful thoughts. There might be some demons that come at play. So how do you kind of manage some of that kind of rumination? So some of the research that we've done is around kind of thoughts around the urge to stop or slow down or even, you know, quit. And in a survey of over a 700 respondents, we found that over 95% of those have experienced those thoughts, maybe even more, but like at least 95% said, yes, I have experienced that kind of urge, you know, those thoughts around the urge to stop or slow down. And so how do you manage those? And then there's the component of pacing. So obviously it's, you can't go full effort. So at some stage you need to pace, make decisions around whether you're going to stop or not stop, but slow down or speed up, taking into consideration the course, the weather conditions. So how do you get to the finish line knowing you've given it your all, you're happy and satisfied with your pacing strategy. I mean, that's a big thing in a lot of ultra events. It's like, how do you do that? How do you manage your pacing plan if you like, and kind of tune into weather conditions and so on. I mean, when you're tired, it's so easy to misnavigate in some of the kind of endurance events. So we did a study on an overnight 16 mile event and, you know, definitely kind of taking the wrong turn happens with some of the participants

who took part in our study on self-talk. And then the other kind of the fourth psychological demands is that kind of volitional nature of pain exposure. So typically when we're thinking about ultra endurance events, there's a component of discomfort or pain, it's going to hurt at some stage. And so why do you do this? Like, you know, it's going to hurt yet you're going and going out and expose yourself to some of that discomfort and pain. So there's definitely something that's kind of a psychological demands of ultra endurance. And we've got two PhD students actually, at the moment, who are looking into some of that kind of pain nature of ultra events or endurance events. I want to, I want to unpack a couple of pieces that you just went over, specifically the duration piece.

We'll kind of start on that because once again, one of the things that makes ultra very unique is that it's easy to say that, okay, it's a long duration event, right? It's beyond a marathon, blah, blah, blah. But some of these things, you know, we're recording this right now and the infamous Barkley marathons are going on. So they're, you know, out there in the middle of Tennessee, trying to do all these things that you just mentioned, navigate, they're trying to negotiate paying, they're trying to pace, they're in a long duration event. They're trying to stay motivated when they're, you know, freezing and they can't read the map and they don't know where to go and things like that. But the duration component specifically within ultra also has variability associated with it. You can have events that are on the order of four or five hours, and then you can have events that are on the order of four or five days or even longer. And I think that this, this, this notion of every that you just mentioned, everybody has the urge to quit at some point, that thought kind of enters their head. And duration is kind of the catalyst for that. Because if you're out there for a certain amount of time, it's just a matter of time, right before things like that kind of enter into your head. I'm wondering if you have any advice to the listeners on how to like manage and negotiate through that specifically in an ultra marathon context, because it is something that is that is quite common. And the people listening can appreciate this because a lot of them will have the experience where they have and I've had this, where they've dropped out of a race. And then five minutes later, they regret the decision.

So something in the moment of what's going on, draws this like opaque veil over the situation where you can't really see what's going on, you can't really evaluate things for what they are. And then once the race stress is removed, and clarity is then, you know, lifted upon the athlete, you're like, ah, shit, I really shouldn't have done that. So what would you say to these athletes that are going to be like negotiating this and their races coming up this season? Yeah, it's an interesting one that you kind of talk about those emotions of kind of regret and guilt. So we asked respondents to kind of, you know, share how they felt when they gave in or when they kind of resisted that urge. And that whole, you know, kind of feeling quite guilty was one that was quite prevalent amongst, you know, those who gave in and kind of that idea of kind of pride was one that was quite prevalent of those who resisted kind of that, that those thoughts around the urge.

So thinking about how you'd feel afterwards is definitely something to consider at that moment in time. Obviously, there's a whole host of reasons why people might have this thought. Some of those might be reasons that actually, it might be a good idea. When you think about injury, maybe, you know, there might be kind of unhealthy pain, if you like, so bad pain, however you want to label it, that can cause some like real longer term consequences. So I would definitely say when we think about these, you know, kind of the, these thoughts around the urge to stop and slow down, we don't always need, well, let me rephrase this, fighting that isn't always the best solution.

So you definitely want to have a, you know, consideration, I guess it's important to mention is at the outset that yes, you know, there's loads of different psychological strategies that are out there. But at the same time, we also need to look at, is this the best thing to do kind of pushing through that? Or actually, maybe this is the time to say my body's had enough. But having said that, kind of as a disclaimer, if you like, that it's maybe not always healthy to try to resist that thought around the urge. There's different things that you can do. And I'm just going to go back to that interaction between the different components of performance. Sometimes it's because you haven't fueled well enough. So a lot of times, you know, this is more from kind of my experience working with ultra endurance athletes is that nutrition component. So they have underestimated the fueling.

So there's not enough fuel in the body. And that has an influence on our thoughts start to re-minate. We're hungry. Our stomach just doesn't cooperate. And the moment we've had some food, it might feel better. Do you recognize that? Yeah, well, I was just going to ask you. So in your observation, and also within the research, is there a strong link between, and we'll kind of take it both ways, right? Positive associative thoughts and being well fueled, right? Or being fueled and negative thoughts with being under fueled. Can we actually draw that correlation? Like, because we've, I've heard that, right? And I've experienced that. It's like, oh, I feel better after I have a cup of soup or something like that, right? After, after a long ultra. But does the research actually tease that out to be in fact, the case?

That's a good question. I mean, I'm not a nutritionist, so I'm not as well first in the kind of nutrition literature around this. Kind of going back to the psychological strategies that we talked about. One of the things that I often work with on athletes is setting if then plan for these eventualities to happen. So rather than fighting, having forgotten to take whatever fuel you've planned to take, it's actually making sure that you don't forget to take it. So that you're as well fueled, as well prepared as you can throughout. So I guess when we kind of get to, you know, resisting some of those thoughts around the urge to stop or slow down. What I typically work with athletes around is kind of trying to understand what are the critical incidents, if you like, that you've encountered previously where these thoughts have arisen.

So kind of trying to understand and digest a little bit as to what's triggering these thoughts to happen. Is it because you've not paced yourself very well? Is it because you didn't read the weather conditions? Is it because your legs are tired? And maybe it's helpful to slow down a little bit before kind of speeding up? Is it because you haven't eaten well? You haven't drunk well? Is it because you're ruminating a lot? You're thinking too much about, gosh, you know, I still got so many miles or kilometers to go. There's a couple of different tricky hills on this course. I'm not sure I want to do this. Digging into their reasons for doing it, the motivation. How's the training been? So there's a whole bunch of kind of potentially critical situations that they could identify beforehand, and they can start having a plan for those. So that's kind of what If-Than planning is about.

It's about thinking about what could potentially happen and what are some solutions I can put in place to preempt that? So if you know that some of those thoughts are going to arise, what's triggering those thoughts? And what can I do to prepare for those in anticipation? And what I would say is don't wait for these things to happen. So planning is really interesting because I think, you know, having done a bit of research around it, working with athletes around it, one of the things that some of the research suggests is that some participants in like lab studies, they were waiting for the If to happen. And so they were, you know, they didn't have that action plan in place. But if it does work, what it tends to do is tends to reduce that kind of gap that we sometimes have between action and our good intentions. So we have all these good intentions, but don't necessarily put that into action. So already having thought about a plan of how you'll manage that kind of gives you that automatic response. And when you're tired in a moment, it's really hard to think about a plan, right? You're like, well, I've got all these thoughts and, you know, this is rubbish. I feel bad. Like, I don't know what to do. And then maybe the default easy option is then just say, well, let's just give into it. I'll call it a day and, you know, maybe try again next time.

It's interesting. You mentioned that if then planning, because that's actually come up a couple of times in previous podcasts where I've talked to sports psychologists about this, how to plan for how to plan for the unknown and how to plan for things that are kind of going to go awry. I always bring up this example from, um, uh, from an MMA fighter, uh, that I had a lot of respect for when he was fighting his Vitor Belfort. And I remember him being on a podcast with his, uh, uh, psychologist, Michael Gervais, and an exercise that they went through was when they were getting ready for an opponent, he would go through the worst situation that he could possibly imagine himself in with that particular opponent. So if the opponent had a really good, like guillotine choke or something like that, you're in this person's guillotine choke within the last 60 seconds of a round, and they've got you in the perfect position. Like, how do you get, like, how do you get yourself out of that and kind of go through that? If then scenario planning, not just in a normal situation, right. I bonk, I get lost. I, you know, roll my ankle, things like that. Like, like normally happen in trail running, but in an extreme one. And he said, the reason he went through the extreme one is, is because if he can handle that, he can kind of handle anything. And if he's gone through that in his head and he can kind of like problem solve it, you know, in advance, then it get, it kind of gave him the capacity for when whatever permutation of that actually happened during the fight, he's kind of been through the worst of the worst and problem solved that. And then he, it just gave

him some confidence to like, then kind of downgrade almost what he needed to do in real time. I'm not saying that's like the best way to approach it from an ultra marathon perspective, but this like, if then planning that you mentioned has a lot of, you know, excuse the pun has a lot of legs to it because there's a zillion things that can go wrong in an ultra marathon. We can't necessarily predict all of them, but we would be naive to think that it's going to be perfect. Yeah. And I think sometimes what we, what we fall into is that, cause this kind of avoidance motivation, right? Trying to avoid anything of that to happen and kind of stick our head in the sand, um, which is not helpful, uh, because what, what then happens is you don't necessarily feel you got access to all these different psychological techniques that might really help you along the way. So when we think about the, the, then yes, it can be a very practical things like, okay, well, if I get to, you know, if I start to feel really tired and my mind's starting to get all over the place, I'm going to treat myself to, you know, some jelly babies or, you know, like something, something really, you know, have your special treat back. Right. So when these really kind of unhelpful thoughts come at bay, then I've got my little special treat back that I can, I can take from, um, might be, you know, one thing and it's quite a practical action that you can take, but it can also be, you know, the psychological techniques, but such as, you know, self-talk, I know that on your, uh, podcast, you've had some kind of self-talk episodes, it can be like imagery, it can be different types of goal setting. Um, I mean,

we can go through that later in a bit. Um, you know, it can be, you've got a whole bunch of, you know, smiling is a very powerful strategy. Um, can be things like relaxation and breathing, like there's, there's different things that you can train. And that's just the thing that's really important. Like you can't just expect to draw on these psychological strategies if you've never tried them before, you know, it's, it's, it's all good and well to have like a then, but if you've never practiced it, then it's not going to work typically. I mean, it's unlikely it may, but it's the same thing as physical training. I mean, I tell people this all the time within their nutrition strategies. If you're going to take in 300 calories during the race, you better try to take in 300 calories during training or at least close, at least close, make 280, 290, kind of at least get it close. But if you're consistently doing 150 calories an hour in training, and then you decide to bump it up to 300 calories an hour during the race, that's a complete mismatch. You would never do that from a physical standpoint. Like you would let's just say you're training for the mile, right? You're training to run a four minute mile and all you could do was run six minute pace. That's all you did in training. You would never think that it's possible to go and run a four minute mile. If you actually haven't experienced that sort of physiological output at some point during the training process, but yet we don't make that same parallel, that same physical parallel in the nutrition world of my earlier example, but also in the psychology side of things as well. Like how do you expect to deploy these types of strategies that we're going to go through a little bit later if you haven't at least have

some sort of iteration of them during the training process? Yeah. And I think what's really important is like how would you then have the confidence that they work? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think one of the things, and there's a lot of work still left to be done around exam planning or kind of implementation intentions as they're called in literature. It's this, what's the mechanism that underpins it? Why do they work? And I think a lot of that has to do with confidence. So if you already have the confidence that you got a plan in place, it's more accessible to you, but you're also going into the event with more confidence and more self-belief, which is a key thing when it comes to having a challenge approach. So when you approach something as a challenge, kind of that idea of self-efficacy and self-belief is kind of a key ingredient of a resource that you can then kind of develop through some of the psychological strategies.

100%. Okay. So before we get into these strategies, I want to get your take on one other particular piece since you mentioned pacing, right? This is one of these unique components of endurance. And within the ultra marathon world, I think it's particularly unique because we're at such a low intensity level. So normally when we're training and your colleague who we were joking about earlier, I can't get on my podcast because he's too busy or I'm not important enough. Sam Horka has, has expounded upon this a lot that there's this psychological interaction between, or as you're actually going through an activity and, and the, and the term that gets thrown around is the perceived exertion and point interaction. So all it describes is, is when you're doing a task, let's say we're doing an interval or we're doing a run or something like that.

We're constantly evaluating how long that task is, how we feel at the present moment in time and drawing an internal line in our minds between where we're at and where we think we're going to be 10, 15 minutes, two hours, however long the task is from now. And is that line tolerable? Is that extrapolation actually tolerable? So let's say we're doing 10 minute, a 10 minute interval during the five minute point. We think, Oh, can I sustain this for 10 minutes? We draw that line. Is it tolerable? And if it is, we continue on. And if we think it's not tolerable, we modulate our, when we pace our effort appropriately, that works. Okay. In shorter duration, endurance activities, five minute intervals, 10 minute intervals, maybe kind of even a marathon, but we really aren't very good at it. Like the research has kind of teased this out as well. We're not very good at kind of like drawing that line, especially as the duration of the, of the task goes on, on and on and on. And in particular, an ultra marathon where you have like maybe a day, right? You get in four hours into an ultra marathon and you have a whole 20 hours to go or something like that. We're not very good at drawing that internal line and saying, is this effort sustainable throughout the course of however long I'm going to, to, to get out here or however long I'm going to be out here. And I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on how that type of psychological approach towards pacing during a task that is very common in training, but we need to apply something different during a race, how might we go about

preparing for that? Or how does that kind of like complicate this whole pacing interaction that, that ultra runners encounter? Yeah, it definitely does. Doesn't it? I mean, we've, we've done a bit of research many, many years ago, not published around kind of the, this, that self-believe and kind of duration of the event. And that definitely fluctuates according to how long the event is. So like the longer, I think it was with cycling, that was the, the kind of more fluctuation was happening around kind of that self-believe and that self-confidence. Um, another kind of fascinating event that's linked to that is the channel swim. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but in the UK, you know, between, um, Dover and, and Calais in France, it's what's so unique about that is you never know how far you're going to swim. Exactly. Yes. And an ultra is a bit, you know, obviously it's an ultra event, but like an ultra run can be similar to that, you know, the misnavigation or, you know, like the duration isn't always known. Um, and I think if, if we have, uh, this kind of do or die goal or this kind of time-based goal in our mind that causes a lot of potentially unnecessary pressure. Um, and I think that sometimes what's happening is like, we have a time in our minds that we might want to finish this particular event in, or we might have a placing in our minds and that kind of do or die goal, or, you know, which is kind of like that performance, like time-based goal or an outcome finishing type of goal can cause a lot of pressure,

a lot of rumination, a lot of things, thoughts around how far am I off my time goal? Whereas actually in the event itself, it's more about the process goals that you want to focus on. So kind of focusing away from the time and moving towards process goals, like how's my body feeling? How can I, you know, um, you know, you're talking about the ankle twist, you know, um, it's because the attention isn't there, right? How are you placing your foot? It's like, you're not actually, maybe your, your attention is very much inward focused. So sometimes it happens when we're tired, we tend to like focus inwards on our, our body feels and, you know, like, oh gosh, this feels really hard. Uh, when you think about that RP, it was like, oh, well, my RP is about like eight or nine out of 10. And actually we forget to then bring it back to kind of outward focusing. It might be that we're actively distracting ourselves through, you know, singing a song or might be that we're, we're looking at the things around us, or it might actually be, you know, like, let's have a look in the environment. Oh, there's a, you know, a bit of a tree trunk that I need to pay attention to because actually I can trip over that. So it's, it's when we think about, uh, the different ways we can focus our attention is, is really helpful. Um, so set yourself goals. It might be that you set a little alarm on your watch that actually, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through, uh, so typically in kind of sports psychology, we suggested there's four different attentional foci. So you can focus internally, externally, and then broad and,

and kind of narrow, um, and internal there is really focusing kind of inward, how your body feels and that kind of external broad is that kind of, you know, when you're approaching a crossing, you're driving a car, uh, you'd hope that everyone around you has that kind of external broad, um, focus of attention, but it can see everything around and hopefully, you know, you'd have that as well. And then you have the kind of internal, um, broad, so kind of visualizing what's going to happen. Um, maybe thinking about when speed up and slow down, making those decisions. And you have that kind of external narrow kind of focusing on a point straight ahead of you. Um, kind of, you know, that's kind of a very rough overview. And so you can give yourself like a trigger that every so many, either a mile or like minutes, you kind of go through this routine. So you don't get stuck into a particular foci of attention. And that can be quite helpful to, you know, maybe avoid some of those kind of tripping over when you're too much kind of internally focused. Um, and that could help removing your attention from constantly. How long is it left? How many, you know, miles do I got sort of, you know, especially when it's a full day event or a multi-day event, um, it can be quite draining. Um, we've also done some research, um, that recently got published with, um, um, an explorer. So, uh, they crossed Lake Bacchae, um, which is, I think it was at 600 kilometers. So it was like a self-supported crossing, um,

over frozen Lake. And there's a lot of time to think, you know, there's, there's, you don't quite know how long that's going to take. Um, so kind of thinking about having some coping flexibility was a very key outcome of that paper. It's like, you know, sometimes you need to move away from your preferred coping options and be able to draw on some, some other coping options that work better with demands that are there out there at that particular moment in time. I've always thought that the time fixation within ultra marathon and ultra endurance types of events is, is always the, one of the bigger stumbling blocks here. And it's because the environment plays such a big part in it. Like if you're coming up with your time goals for a race, that's going to be in 20 hours. First off, your precision on that is not going to be very good, even in the best situations, just because it's so long. But second, even if there's a small temperature swing during the day of the race that you do, like, how do you, if you, if you're trying to figure that out four weeks in advance, I'm going to run X, Y, Z race in 20 hours. Well, you're basing that off of the environment that you can't predict in the environment alone. That's just one thing.

The environment alone is going to affect those things. And then what that does affect, as you mentioned earlier, is I go through aid station one and I'm either on or off my splits. And then I have some sort of interaction with that. And so I've always thought that the pathway out of that is kind of twofold is one, those time goals until the weather patterns actually clear up, don't come up with them because you don't, you're just guessing let's be honest with ourselves. You're just guessing at that point. But the second one, pair them up with something that's not time related, pair them up with something process oriented, as you, as you had mentioned, so that they somehow marry up with each other and you can at least control the process part of it, right? You might not be able to control the time piece of it because there's a number of different things that can happen, but at least you can control the process piece of it. And it gives you something to anchor on that you can move forward with. Yeah, definitely. And you touched on the second bit of the resources of challenge and threat states there is that kind of notion of perceived control, like understanding what's within your control and not trying to focus on things that are outside of your control, which is, which is super important. So yeah, definitely. I mean, goal setting, you can definitely get yourself in a bit of a rut if you're, you know, focusing on these, you set a do or die goal and that's it. And I know it's an endurance rather than ultra endurance event, but the London Marathon a couple of years ago, it was a very cold winter. So most people trained in kind of quiet, cold weather conditions. And on the day, it was like 20 odd degrees or something. I mean, in London in April, I mean, it's not that common to have such a, you know, I remember standing there, you know, supporting my partner and I was like, with like a tank top on,

it was so warm. And, you know, they had trained in like cold weather conditions and no one had really planned for such a warm day. And what you saw is there's actually like a quite high level of dropout. So at the same time would make, um, get you higher in a percentage rankings than, you know, the year before, the year after purely based because people were not able to, you know, there were so many dropouts because people didn't feel, I guess, comfortable or to kind of abandon that pacing plan that they've set and they practiced. And it didn't really consider the weather conditions. And, you know, you need more water, you need more, you know, you need to adjust. And I had some interesting discussions with some people that were like, well, you know, that was my goal. It was my do or die goal. And I was just going to go for it. And if I wasn't going to go, you know, meet it, then that's it, which is an interesting approach. And, you know, if they were okay with that, fine. But at the same time, is that healthy when, you know, you don't consider some of those, you know, heat stroke can be quite detrimental, you know?

Well, we've mentioned a couple of these different ways that athletes can help manage some of the demands of event, right? You just mentioned goal setting and goal flexibility, which is the more important part. So adapting your goals to whatever the situation is, whether it's the environment or an unfortunate situation, or you start feeling really good. And your goal is, Hey, listen, I thought I was not going to win this race. And now I'm going to win this race. Like that's a positive reflection of goal of goal flexibility. We mentioned some of the self-talk pieces earlier in mainly more of an imagery setting, but there's a couple of other areas that I want to expand upon. Particularly, you mentioned the link to attention. So being able to switch your foci from, or your focus from internal to external and narrow to broad. Can you paint that picture a little bit better for athletes and how they might be able to go about that during the training process?

Yeah, it's a, it's an interesting one. So I definitely would refer kind of your, your audience to Noel Briggs work as well. So he's at Ulster University. So he's done a lot of great work around kind of the different ways he focused our attentions. And, you know, he talks about active kind of association, associative strategies, kind of involuntary, the associative strategy. So I don't necessarily go into that much detail, but the way I tend to kind of use it with athletes I work with is that I kind of encourage them to understand those, those kind of four different attentional foci. So they're kind of broad external that when you approach a crossing, this is the, the kind of state you want to be in that kind of internal narrow, this is how my body feels, maybe tuning into the effort ratings that you feel experienced at the moment in time, maybe some body tension, which is very relevant when you think about, you know, running. If you're running like this, it costs, it's on a, on a podcast, basically what I was doing there, kind of lifting my shoulders up and having really tight shoulders, you know, like that costs a lot of more, more effort. So kind of tuning into how your body feels, but also kind of thinking about your pacing strategy, tuning in with that is internal, but more of a broad approach. And then that kind of, you know, what's straight ahead of you. So, you know, you might be running in a pack of runners, uh, with the, with the group of others. So kind of seeing where your positioning is so that you're not tripping on someone else's, you know, feet or kind of seeing that, um, you know, maybe there's a bit of a slippery patch, um, and some of the trails. So it's about understanding what goes

into every one of these kind of types of, um, attention, which ones might be relevant for you. And what I encourage athletes to think about is a routine that they can go through all these four different foci of attention. And the reason I'm doing that, uh, with them is because sometimes we get so stuck into thinking in one particular way that, you know, you get that rumination. So a lot of reason why I'm doing this with athletes is to get them out of the rumination mode. So, you know, when we talked about the demand, there's a lot of time to think it's actually, if you have that trigger to get yourself through forcing yourself through those kinds of different four foci of attention that might just get yourself away from some of those thoughts, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, no, a hundred percent because people will always go to the thing or the strategy that they're the most comfortable with. So if they're used to, if they're used to focusing on what, like I'm focusing on my feet, right. Or I'm focusing on the trail in front of me. I'm focusing on my breathing, right. Is a common, is a common one as well. They will always divert to that in times of the most stress. So the time that they're under the most threat, and we're going to get into that in just a second, the time that they're underneath the most stress or the most adversity or the most, or the most kind of threatened they are is when they're going to go to the kind of their most basic or the simplistic or the thing that they identify with the most. And that's sometimes you get lucky that that's the right strategy out of there. But more often than not, you have to have some sort of deliberate action and be able to move outside of where your focused comfort zone is, so to speak.

Exactly. Yeah. So when you're kind of on those high levels of arousal, high levels of pressure, you tend to go to kind of your favorite foci of attention. And as you say, sometimes that's actually what you need. Like maybe it's about tuning into your body and kind of realizing, dang it, like, yeah, the way I'm running now is not really a very efficient stride. So let's change that up a bit. Or, you know, I'm shuffling my feet, like I'm dragging my heel. Oh, actually, okay, well, let's focus on my technique right now. Or, you know, like, I'm feeling I'm actually getting a bit hungry here. My body, you know, feel a bit weak. So yes, it can be, you know, your favorite one might be helpful, but then you might not see that the weather, you know, the wind conditions, if you if you never get that external broad focus, you're never tuning into maybe, you know, you talked about temperature change. You know, you're not noticing the temperature change, you're not noticing that the wind direction has changed. So your pace is off, maybe you're, you're running a lot slower, because, you know, you've got some more headwinds, or that you hadn't anticipated. Or maybe there's this, you know, in Dutch, we say a false flat. So you know, where it looks flat, but it's not quite false plot, it's called. And, you know, like, it's very hard to like tune into that if you never kind of get through those different stages, or kind of foci of attention.

And, you know, there might, you might blow yourself up, because you think, but actually, I should, should be running a lot faster here. And I'm not what's going on. Well, here's something that I think a lot of runners will identify with is, they encounter a problem out on the trail, they feel bad, they screw their nutrition up, their knee hurts or whatever, and they'll plug their headphones in, right? So they're using a dissociative technique to kind of distract themselves from whatever's going on at the time. And I've always contended that in an ultra marathon situation, you need to actually solve that problem, you can't just ignore it. Because the the duration going back to one of our earlier themes, the duration is going to compound that it's highly unlikely that the problems are going to solve themselves. Highly that happens, that happens, like sometimes miraculously, kind of whatever does. But more often than not, you're going to actually have to think about what's going on, come up with a plan of action and actually solve that.

And the dissociation technique, right, that you have ingrained in yourself, because you've trained it, you always listen to music when you're running and things like that, is actually doing you a disservice at the time. And I see it when I crew athletes at aid stations, sometimes with my athletes, but many times with with other athletes, they go into an aid station, and they're a complete mess. And sure enough, they pull their headphones out, and they start talking to their crew, and they have no clue how or what is actually going on and what they can do to actually solve the problem. And they've kind of perpetuated it to a certain extent, by simply ignoring it. So this, this exam, this, this strategy, we're kind of going through of how to change your focus at any one point in time, to the betterment of your performance is actually a really important one, because you can actually achieve the opposite, right? You can actually do yourself some disservice by applying whatever your natural tendency is, to something when in fact, you need a different type of strategy.

Yes, definitely. I mean, there's some research to suggest that if you focus internally all the time, your rate of perceived effort can go up as well, like it feels harder. And the other thing with, but then on the other hand, if you focus too much on kind of dissociative strategies, and forget to tune into your body, you might not realize that maybe you're in pain, or maybe need to slow down. Or, you know, sometimes you have a bit of extra energy. And you know, it can also work the opposite way that actually, you know, I actually feel good today. Let's listen to my body and go with that. So it kind of is both sides of the coin, I guess, it's not just like, oh, this is bad. It can also be the other way. If you forget to tune into how your body feels, you may not be able to adapt because you just are not aware of it. And so yeah, it goes both ways. But it's definitely yeah, solely relying on dissociative strategies. It's probably not going to be very helpful in the long term, because you never really learn to kind of understand how your body feels either.

I think the learning lesson in that is figure out what your patterns are and where your blind spots are, and then work around your blind spots. So that that way, you've got a complete toolkit available to you come race day that you can deploy. And you're not just defaulting to whatever your natural tendency or, or, or your kind of like base state would be. Yeah, exactly. So I guess what you could do as a practical kind of takeaway there is every, I don't know, 15 minutes, have a routine. So where you say, how am I feeling? What do I see around me? What's directly in front of me? What's my next plan for pace? Broad, narrow, internal, external, right? Have some sort of pattern that you can go through.

But play around with it, which in deciding which one you're going to finish with, I would say that kind of that pacing bit is probably a wise one to finish with. Yeah, 100%. So everybody take note of that, bring all those tools into the into the toolkit. I want to I want to pivot a little bit and talk about pressure. I think this dovetails really, really interestingly with a podcast I did a couple of weeks ago with Johan Kegelars. And we talked about a paper that he had that he had written called pressure makes diamonds all about pressure training. And we were trying to make some analogies from more like stick and ball and team sports, somebody trying to hit, you know, a free throw at the end of the game. It's March madness going on. And in the US right now, so I'll bring a basketball analogy into the mix. So somebody trying to hit a free throw at the end of the game. And we're trying to make those types of analogies into the into the endurance world. But I think this other framework that that you've presented where we can view things as either a threat or a challenge might be a little bit of a better construct in an endurance application. So can you go over that construction a little bit and then how we might how how athletes put pressure on our pressure on ourselves, and how that actually manifests out there, either in training or in a race? Yeah, so when we think about challenging threat state, so the kind of theory that we propose is called the theory of challenging threat states and athletes, it's about kind of demands and resources. So in essence, what happens is if your demands outweigh the resources, you'd

experience a negative state, which is called a threat. But if you've got more resources than demands, you'd experience something called a challenge state. So the whole idea is that, you know, when we're feeling under pressure, these these might be demands and demands are often things like, you know, you care about it. So it's a motivated performance situation. But there's some kind of uncertainty in terms of the outcome, you care about it. So, you know, it's meaningful to you. But yeah, that outcome isn't quite, quite known. So, you know, maybe did the time or the, you know, where you'd be placing and so on, or whether you'll finish or not. So but you really care about it. So it's a kind of motivated performance situation, there's lots of different things that can go in those demands. And, you know, competition in its nature, you know, tends to have all those demands kind of inherent to it. Totally. Yeah. And then we have those resources. So what are the types of things that can feed into that kind of side of the scale? So you've got demands on one side of the scale and kind of resources on the other side. And those are things that I've mentioned previously, things like self belief, so self efficacy, perceived control, and kind of approach motivation. So seeing something where you want to maybe better yourself rather than kind of avoid dropping out. So an avoidance motivation is kind of the idea of sticking your head in the sand, whereas approach is kind of hitting the race head on, I think it's a nice analogy to think about. So together, if you've got high self efficacy, and I can kind of go through that in a bit more if you like, high perceived control,

or high sense of perceived control, and that kind of approach motivation together, that will then benefit those kind of resources to tip that balance in favor of a challenge state. So those resources then outweigh those demands, leading to a challenge. And that's quite interesting, because it's also something that the research finds, if we're in a challenge state that comes with kind of a psychophysiological response. So what happens is that a challenge state is associated with a cardiovascular reactivity kind of response where our blood flow, so cardiac output tends to increase as the amount of blood that flows through our body per minute, but also has to do with vascular resistance. So kind of a blood vessels open up, so that blood flows through the body more easily, if you like, more fresh oxygen and all of that. So it's very simplistic kind of overview of that, whereas in a threat state, what happens? So if those demands outweigh the resources, you don't necessarily feel you've got a lot of self-belief, you don't feel that you've got a lot of control of a situation, and you've got more of that avoidance, sticking your head in the sand type of approach, then what typically happens is that, yes, that you still have that kind of, obviously, blood flowing through your body, but maybe not as much. And what happens to that vascular resistance is those blood vessels kind of narrow, so your body has to work harder to pump all that blood through the body. So you can see that from a physiological kind of bodily perspective, it's not necessarily as helpful to be in a threat state compared to a challenge state.

And then the whole idea is that some of those psychological techniques that we talked about can help feed into those resources. So, you know, how can you, for example, use self-talk to promote your self-belief? So when we think about self-efficacy, things like previous performance accomplishments go in there. So you may be able to use imagery as a way to kind of recall some kind of successful experiences you've had in the past. I mean, as human beings, we're very good in tuning into the negatives rather than the positives. So what's fascinating about self-efficacy is that one bad experience dampens or kind of forts our self-belief, like reduces it a lot more than one positive experience. So we need to do a lot more work kind of building up our self-efficacy than, you know, one negative experience can kind of reduce the self-efficacy quite quickly. So it's really important to kind of think about how we can draw on our previous performance accomplishments, you know, use things like imagery or self-talk. You've done this before in the past, you can do this again type of thing. You know, for caries' experiences, seeing people in our kind of direct environment, kind of similar ability, have done well, you know, kind of drawing on those things like verbal persuasion, things you say to yourself, but also RP. So what we found in some of our research on self-efficacy is that kind of seeing yourself get better. So, you know, reflecting on how hard it feels, that kind of arousal level, RP level, seeing that that gets easier as you do more training can

really inform some of that confidence as well. You say, well, actually, my RP level, this ultra event is actually a little bit lower than it was the first time I did this. So I feel more confident because I know that my body can manage this. So that's an example of, you know, like self-efficacy, but also perceived control. It's about understanding what's within your control, what's outside of your control. And weather conditions are typically one of those that are necessarily within your control, like they can change, especially during an ultra event, you know, over the course of a day. But what can you control? Can you control your footwear? Can you control like the clothes you're bringing with you? You know, what is it that you can then bring within your control? And then things like goal setting are very helpful to align with that things, you know, we talked about goal flexibility.

One of the things that I often talk about with athletes is that, okay, well, we can't always get away from this do or die goal, right? People love to have a time-based goal. So how can you bring in something like a gold goal? Everything is going great on the day. This is like my dream perfect goal. But actually, there's a lot of things that are outside of my control at the moment. Let's go to my happy goal. This is kind of a goal I'd be okay with like a silver goal. What's what kind of my bare minimum goal is like, okay, let's finish this. You're bringing the demand side of the equation back down, right? And I think that that's a fascinating construct because, you know, once again, kind of making the parallel to the physiological world, we want to make sure that from a physiological standpoint, we have the physical capacity to respond to the demand that we're asking our body to be placed on, right? So I've mentioned, I use the analogy of the four minute mile earlier, right? If we want to run a four minute mile, we better be able to do it in training. We have to be able to induce that sort of physical demand in order to have that that goal. Here, you're presenting this construct of the demands versus the resources. And we can we can alter either side of that equation to bring it into equilibrium.

We can either bring the demand side of the or the pressure side down a little bit, hey, instead of running this race in 24 hours, I'm going to give myself 26 hours to do it, right? I'm reducing the pressure. Or we can and or we can increase the capacity, right? We can increase our resources to handle that type of that that type of demand or that or that type of stress. And mainly, we're doing that through the techniques that we have have gone through. Am I internalizing that correctly that it's this kind of equation that we're trying to ultimately balance on on both sides? Well, it's kind of a balance. And ideally, what you want to make sure is that the resources outweigh the demands that you have more capacity. Yeah, you want to make sure that the balance is tipped in favor of the resources and not the demands. And I think we can't always change the demands. So our recommendation is to focus on kind of upping your resources as much as you can. So kind of drawing on those psychological techniques to kind of give yourself a sense of perceived control, give yourself that approach motivation, and give yourself a self belief. And yes, there is capacity in a really like the kind of link you made to, you know, that goal flexibility, enabling you to adjust those demands. So then you can use some of those psychological technique techniques to help balance some of those demands, I suppose, which is definitely helpful in those contexts.

Okay, I want to I want to pivot to kind of our final, actually, it's not gonna be our final area, because I'm going to give you a chance to plug your new book. And we're gonna talk about maternity, since we're talking about ultra marathon endeavors in their in their obscure analogies. So that might not be so obscure. But one of the areas of interest that kind of caught my eye is this is this concept of using reflection as an opportunity for growth. And we use it. We use a tool called training peaks, which you're probably familiar with. And the longtime listeners is podcast will will probably remember this rant. For years, I hope Dirk and their engineering team is listening to this or somebody from their engineering team is listening to this, particularly Dirk Freel, their COO right now. But for years, I have lobbied them to flip the order that I see the workout completion. So every time an athlete uploads a workout, and they put in their post activity comments, I get an email. And the order of that email is what they call the hero metrics first.

So we can define that as whatever we want to, but normally, it's time duration, elevation gain, elevation loss, pace, you know, heart rate, kind of the metrics that you pull off your GPS watch. And then the post activity comments second in that order that in the order is important. For years, I have lobbied them for the capability of flipping that because I want the post activity comments first. How did everything go? And then I kind of want the data second. That's my personal kind of new orientation, not so new, but that's my personal orientation. And a big reason for that is, is I want the athlete to reflect on what they have done. How did this feel? Not only to give me input on, Hey, I feel lousy or I don't feel lousy, but also what sort of meaning did they apply to the workout outside of the, well, they ran five minute pace on this, or this climb felt good, or kind of the, the kind of the physiological or the verbal manifestations of their physiology, essentially kind of beyond that.

And so I wanted to get your take on that. Like, how can we use feedback on a workout or on a training phase or anything like that? How, how can we use that type of reflection to actually grow as better athletes? Yeah. I think it's an excellent kind of observation that a lot of times we're tuned into the very kind of, let's call it objective, label it objective data. Um, but often we don't even have kind of a different goals that we set for a session. You know, you might have time-based goals, but you don't necessarily have like a goal for the different aspects of performance. So kind of going back to the very start of the podcast, when it talks about, you know, the maybe tuning into the people around you, maybe a goal you set is I'm going to smile because actually, you know, from research, smiling helps to reduce the effort. So it might be that actually, I'm going to use smiling as a, as a, as a goal for this session, but often the goals don't go very much beyond this is the time, you know, this is my splits. I hit my splits. Yeah, exactly.

And, and that's kind of, you know, or, you know, like even on technique, like this, this session, I'm going to really focus on, um, my stride or my, you know, like tuning into whether I feel I'm running strong or, you know, whether I'm dragging my heel or, uh, kind of observing when this will happen, you know, like you talked about nutrition, practicing that nutrition in like training, like you would do in a race. Um, so I think it comes down to not just reflection, but that whole idea of self-regulated learning. So, um, it's that kind of forethought, that planning phase, um, where you kind of tune into, you know, what's maybe my self-belief levels at the moment, self-efficacy, how am I feeling? What's going to be my plan for this, this session? Then it's also the action.

So the inaction kind of considerations, how's it going? And then it's the reflection. So, okay, comparing that, how did it go? What's going to be my goal for the next session? And that's often, you know, reflection is not something that's on the forefront of a lot of people's minds, but it's actually what's where that's where growth is happening is in that reflection phase. And one of the observations I I've, I've made over the years is that people don't like to reflect because we tend to tune into our negative experiences more so than a positive experience. So I think as a coach and as like training peaks, there's a real responsibility to encourage reflection, not just on what didn't go so well, but actually how satisfied was I with this session? What was the goal I set for this session? How did I do? What went well? What's the room for improvement? So I think that's a really simple, like reflection sheet that they connect to something like training peaks, where I think a lot of people would benefit greatly from that because you also want to instill confidence, right? You don't just want to be like, well, this didn't go very well. Well, that was a rubbish session, but actually, you know, okay, let's reflect on this.

Okay. Well, this went really well. This didn't go so well. So why don't I set a goal on how to facilitate that in the next session? What can I do? And immediately after that session, I really start thinking about what you might do next can be, can be really helpful. Um, without kind of, I guess the one thing is with training peaks, what can sometimes happen is we're so observed by the metrics that our quality of motivation drops. So instead of kind of that intrinsic enjoying factor, it's, it's dragged into this like external controls and we're feeling controlled by training peaks rather than actually focusing what we enjoy about it. I need to improve my CTL. That's what I always hear. Yeah. And I want to boost about this on Strava or Instagram or whatever. I want to share my training peaks output, you know, like you just become controlled by those types of things. And actually, you know, your, your reflection is a very personal thing. And maybe your reflection was that, you know, your goal for that session was to really focus on your technique.

And, you know, as, as a result, your, your output may be dropped down because you were so focused on your technique that maybe your numbers don't reflect kind of, you know, the, the success or the satisfaction of that goal, um, which we can cut up, we can get cut up with like sadly sometimes. So I think that, that kind of self-regulated learning cycle can be really powerful. So what's the plan, your forethought, what's the kind of, you know, what's happening in action and how do you reflect on that and how does that feed into kind of your next self-regulation cycle of planning action and, you know, planning performance reflection, that's maybe a nice way of kind of thinking about it. Plan, perform, reflect. I really liked that framework. What I've, what my, in my experience, I've had to really ease athletes into it. And I don't know whether it's my own shortcoming because this is not my area of kind of like upbringing as a coach or, and, or the athletes not being used to giving that type of feedback. Cause normally what I just default to in the post activity comments, at least initially, like when I first get an athlete brand new, Hey, brand spanking new, we've all done all the intake and everything is just put something in there, put something like put something in the post activity comments. I don't care what they are. Just put something in there. The sky was blue, right? I felt good, like really simple things. And then building that whole circle, that whole framework that you just mentioned from that, I've always found it just, it just feels to me or just has always seemed to me

that it's a, it's a harder feedback loop to build than sometimes we describe because people aren't kind of like, they're, they're not used to, they're used to just going and doing the workout and looking at how many miles they ran, right? They're looking at, at the objective data versus trying to bring this stuff into, into a feedback loop. So what I've tried to do to kind of combat that is to make it as simple as possible first and then build off of it. Just like any other skill, we don't have to have the perfect feedback loop right from the get go. Yeah. A hundred percent. I think, yeah, as you said, I, I've not always find it easy. Um, and you know, I'm a sports psychologist and it's supposed to be my job, right? Doing this with, with athletes working on the reflection, but it's developing that awareness. And I think it's really about developing that awareness of the different skills that go into that performance and maybe initially kind of making them set and say, okay, let's pick a technical skill for this session. What's your technical goal? And then kind of just breaking it down. Um, I think sometimes it's quite nice to bring in that social component as well. Uh, so let's bring a social, uh, goal for this session. So maybe the goal is that you're going to engage for the people around you. Um, or, you know, maybe smile at someone you, you know, you come across and sometimes people really like to chat to other people. So maybe, you know, like your goal is to at least say hi to three people today, you know, like, and then just evaluate. It's really basic, simple stuff. Yeah. Um, but it's kind of building up that awareness of the different types of goals that you

can set. Um, because I think often people only think about goals as said earlier on in terms of time splits, you know, those types of things, but there's so much more to it and kind of building your, your database of that will then help you when you're getting into events and you're saying, Oh, actually I want to focus on the process. Well, I don't even know what that is because I've never really practiced it. I only ever focused on my splits. So how am I supposed to then understand how to focus on my, um, you know, on my breathing or, you know, those types of things. So, or on shifting my attention. So, you know, a goal could be that for a particular session, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try out different ways that I can shift my attention and then, you know, how well did I go? So I think what I've developed for, for some athletes is just a very simple feedback sheet.

So there's some rating skills in there. So just the rating is sometimes easy. So, you know, what was your goal? How happy were you at your session from a technical, psychological, physiological, you know, um, physical and, and kind of, uh, there's a tactical perspective. And, you know, if they are unhappy with that, but the focus wasn't on that, then that's okay. Um, so they can bring that with them and then you can kind of analyze that a little bit or chat about it. It's quite a nice kind of tool to start the conversation. Um, but it's hard to, you need to definitely, I wouldn't do that in the first session necessarily, because some, some athletes are just not that open to it to start off with. So it's just building that up slowly. It's like any other skill, right? You got to start where you're at and then you got to build from there. It's just like the physical toolkit that we put a lot of emphasis on. You got to start where, where your fitness is at right now. You can't start anywhere else. You got to meet the athlete where, where, where, where they're at, as we always say in coaching, and then you can kind of build things from there. It's the same thing on the psychological side. You got to meet them where they're at and then you got to build, but it's so powerful. I mean, it's so regulated learning. Once, once you get it, um, it really works, uh, really well because then you set more guided goals for training sessions. You get more out of training sessions, even if your goal is just to enjoy it. You know, today my goal is to just have a fun training session. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. A hundred percent.

Sometimes it is the most simple, the most simplistic approach. Um, okay. Hard pivot. Cause I know this is something you're super interested in. You mentioned it from the onset, you're about to release a book about pregnancy and is it specifically with endurance athletes or all athletes? No, all athletes. So basically it's, it's kind of more like a popular science book. Um, so it's, it's not, so obviously I draw on a lot of kind of my knowledge, uh, having done a lot of work in endurance performance and as an applied practitioner and as a, as a mom who's given birth, um, three years ago. Um, so in essence, I, um, during kind of my pregnancy, you know, people were talking about, Oh, it's like a marathon and all of that. And I was like, why is there nothing out there on like how you can draw on, you know, your experiences from sport, from a psychological perspective. So I, I was doing a little bit digging and there's basically no resources out there. Whereas we know that there's so many women in sports who, you know, have learned a great deal from being in sports. Um, so how can you use those strengths that you've built up and especially psychological strengths, you know, you learned how to set goals, be flexible within goals, using self-talk imagery, breathing, you know, all these different psychological techniques that, you know, we've honed over the years we've developed and strengthened. And a lot of times we just don't remember to translate what we've learned from one domain to another. And so when I gave birth, I drew on,

well, I had to basically draw on every single bit of kind of psychological techniques that I've developed. Um, it was a, it was a bit of a marathon journey over like three days. So I definitely needed to draw on all that strength, like goal setting, chunking was a big thing, you know, was, was being told you've got three hours to go. Um, so three more hours of contractions. Bloody hell, that's a long time. So we did some chunking, calculated how many contractions, you know, like perceived exertion, endpoint interaction. Like we were talking about earlier, you got the whole basket. Yeah. It was amazing how many synergies there are. Um, and so basically what I did, I thought there's something here. I wrote a big proposal, uh, got a publisher who found it really interesting. And I, um, so basically it's kind of a sports psychology book where I go through the different sports psychology techniques. Um, I talk about challenge and threat states, but I've also interviewed, um, someone like Chrissy Wellington, um, you know, Ironman triathlete, um, who, uh, was talking about her, you know, experience of giving birth and kind of drew on her examples, uh, some other kinds of Olympians as well as recreational athletes.

So people from all kind of sport levels, you know, can resonate with the idea that we can learn from our experience in sports and kind of draw from what we've already got, like rather than trying to learn something that's entirely new, like what, what do you already have in our toolkit? How can we strengthen that and train for, you know, giving birth, like you would train for a marathon, um, you know, really empower yourself through developing these different skills is, is in essence what I'm trying to achieve, um, with the book. So, you know, I'm talking about, uh, goal setting imagery, uh, talking about, uh, attention, social support. So how to draw on your social support network. And then I also talk about kind of the period after, so kind of, you know, bringing it home that kind of, you know, how do you make sense of all these experiences? And I kind of draw on, um, how you can do decompression. So it's obviously kind of a, a massive influx of emotions, which, you know, when you finish an ultra marathon, you, you tend to have that kind of, so what, like trying to make sense of everything. Um, so kind of drawing on, um, a kind of, um, concept introduced by the English Institute of Sport, where they have a very structured debrief process now in place, uh, to kind of process that emotional rollercoaster, where they kind of have a hot debrief, a time zero, where they process the emotion and have kind of a process, a performance debrief. So also talk about that in the last chapter. Um, so yeah, it's been a really interesting, fascinating book to write and kind of, you know, listen to these, these stories, um, of kind of inspirational women giving birth and how they've used

their sports experiences to, to help them, uh, has been really insightful. It's almost like they feed off of each other, right? So the experience in sport, which normally comes first, right? Normally you're an athlete and then you go through pregnancy and go through childbirth and then you return to your sport or most people return or many people return, return to the sport. It's almost like they, they feed off of each other with all of those techniques, but we're just coming to appreciate, and this is probably what you're getting at with your book. We're go, we're coming to appreciate more and more what the synergies actually are. Exactly. And how can you learn and not feel, yeah. Oh, well, I guess you, you know, might feel overwhelmed, but like actually realize you've got a lot more than you think you have, you're probably a lot stronger, uh, in terms of, you know, the experiences that you've built from, you know, being an athlete, being active in sports and, you know, you've probably pushed through some difficult times in your sport, navigated difficult circumstances.

So how did you do that? How were you successful doing that? And, you know, hopefully through kind of outlining the different strategies in sport, people can recognize that, but also, um, during their kind of, you know, pregnancy can learn to maybe get better at some of those or thought about, Oh, that's actually something that can be quite useful. I'm going to practice that, um, and see how I can then apply it. And normally that's the case. I mean, normally the women who go through childbirth, they come back to the sport, whether they're recreational or professional or whatever. And, and, and most of the time they're actually better after, after childbirth, there's actually a really good study. I pulled up where we're talking in, uh, medicines, uh, science sports exercise, uh, the effective pregnancy and 42 elite to world-class runners on training and performance outcomes. I'll leave the link in the show notes to that where they track them before and after childbirth and the majority of them actually improve their performance after that experience.

Yeah. So it's also like, how do you then use those experiences back into your sport? So there's, yeah, it's been, it's been a fascinating book to write. Like it's been, it's been a joy to, to like listen to all these inspirational stories of the different women I've interviewed as well. So I hope people enjoy it and learn a thing or two from reading it. When is it coming out or is it already out? It's, uh, published on the 12th of June. So, um, it's, it's due out shortly. So you're in the waiting phase right now. It's going through its last editing process and yes. So it's been announced now, so I'll, I'll send you the link. So it's, um, it's ready for order. Will you, will you come back on when it comes out? Put you on the spot? Oh, I'd love to. Okay. Sweet. We'll talk about it and we'll do a whole episode about it. I think it's absolutely, uh, uh, fascinating. I'll leave a link in the show notes to where you can pre-order the books is available for pre-order.

Yes. Yes. Secure books. Yes. I'll send you a link. Awesome. This has been great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm glad I got you booked for another episode. At the very end of it, I'm glad I could cajole you into it. I had a lot of fun. Uh, where can people learn more about you and your work? Not only the book, but, uh, what you all, all the other things that you're involved in. Um, so I've got a website, Carla.mayan.com. Um, and I'm on Instagram on Carla sports psychology. I think it's Carla sports psychology. That's really bad, isn't it? I don't even know my Twitter, my Instagram handle. Um, but yeah, it's Carla sports psychology. Um, so my website's Carla mayan.com, uh, Insta Carla sports psychology and Twitter is Carla Mayan. You can also find me on the St. Mary's university website. LinkedIn also there. There you go. Carla, thanks for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate your work. Like I said, it's been a huge inspiration to me personally. It's something that, uh, that, that I draw a lot of my practice from, but I also know a lot of coaches that are in the field as well that are both directly direct colleagues of mine and also people who I just come into contact and work with that have very much appreciated your work. So thank you for everything that you've done. And thank you for coming on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. It was a fun to talk about and you definitely post some really good questions that make me think a bit more. We'll have, we'll have a follow up, whatever you figure out the answers to them. How's that?

All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Carla for coming on the podcast today. All of the links to the things that we talked about are in the show notes. You guys can just check them in the description within Apple podcast or whatever podcasting platform that you, uh, that you, that you use. Appreciate you guys being patient with the release of this podcast. Those of you that follow me on social media realize that I lost my voice for several days for several days and I'm just now getting over it. It's actually really difficult for me to carry on a conversation for more than just a couple of minutes and I start to actually lose it again, but the podcast will go on hopefully uninterrupted as long as I can get some sort of consistency back with it. So thank you guys for thinking of me and all of your notes of support. Finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, I am thrilled to announce the release of my new research newsletter, Research Essentials for Ultra Running. This was just released this week. I'm going to leave a link to it in the show notes and I am absolutely thrilled with the end product and actually how it came out.

Every single month, me and my research team, we're going to review three to five different papers within the ultra marathon sphere. We're going to break them down. We're going to dissect them. We're going to call out their strengths and weaknesses and we put it all together in a wonderfully illustrated package in plain English that everybody can absolutely understand and take away from. We present it in practical, pragmatic terms with no hype around it. We are not trying to overblow the research in any way, shape or form. We're presenting it for what it is. The first edition of that is out and we cover a range of topics, including how antioxidant supplementation may or may not influence exercise induced muscle damage. We look at the sleep and nutritional habits of ultra runners. And finally, we look at how a high dose of vitamin D supplementation may affect markers of race day inflammation. This is available now. You can go to my website, jasoncoop.com, or you can check out the links and the show notes. I hope you all subscribe.

It is a banger. We have a ton of good content lined up for this newsletter in the future. It's coming out every month, folks. First one has just dropped now. I appreciate you guys' support on this. That is it for today, folks. And as always, we will see you out on the trails.