Self Talk for Enhanced Ultramarathon Performance with Karim Ramadan | Koopcast Episode 93

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we have a repeat offender in kareem ramadan who is a specialist in sports psychology i had him on the podcast several weeks ago and it was just so good and i got so many great comments on it i just had to bring him back in addition to that kareem and i had this great conversation recently in chamonix france just before the UTMB and ccc events and what i wanted to do with this podcast was try to create this conversation that we had and is natural of a format and it's all about self-talk and how athletes can leverage self-talk for better performance and more importantly how they can structure their self-talk throughout the year just like you would structure any other training program a lot of times we think about mileage and intensity and doing intervals and doing climbing and we structure them throughout the year in a logical fashion but we don't think about some of the sports psychology skills such as self-talk and how we can also organize that in a logical periodized fashion and kareem and i get down to the heart of how to do that in order to make the most out of the out of

those hard-earned miles that you are running and make the most out of the psychology that you can develop to leverage your best performance it was a great conversation i had a lot of fun with it here we go we're going to get right into it here is my conversation with kareem ramadan i think we could start out with like you could satiate my curiosity a little bit because i do want to know more about your coaching practice because it's it's interesting give me give me and the listeners the scope of the types of athletes that you're working with and kind of the context of how you work with them as well all right the majority of the athletes that i work with would be endurance athletes mostly um i do work and actually i would say 95 of my athletes are individual that practice individual sports so team sports we do a bit of work but that would be more in the framework of a conference or a seminar a group discussion but nothing is better than a one-on-one talk i mean it's psychology after all right uh it's important in our field to treat each athlete as a whole individual and their experience is unique now definitely you get a lot of similarities and eventually you find common patterns common thoughts common answers and common behaviors

but it's always unique it's always linked and the athlete would react to past moments that they've been through or they would react to a certain situation all according to what they've passed through through their lives so environmental factors so if an athlete would let's say have a really hard time basic UTMB as an example uh have a really hard time on with weather let's say brutal conditions hard in the middle of a valley some athletes would take it as really normal because they've been raised in areas that's been really hot so their self-talk would be different another athlete that really likes colder climate would really react in a completely different way so their self-talk would be really different even in the same type of environment um so self-talk is something unique it's important for practitioners to have long discussions with the athlete i like to start to with an athlete uh in the beginning with a lot of reflections so let's say they finish a workout and we have a discussion or even before we get to our let's say weekly discussion i like them to reflect on their workout so let's say they use training peaks or final search in the comment box where most coaches would put comments and feedback i like them to spend some time there like two minutes after a workout say okay uh first i like them to rate their rpe

so that i understand also what's going on there i do like to get insight on their physiological data a bit just to try to link things of how they're going try to understand their feelings in relation with the effort that was put in the workout and then here they start to dive in reflections um let's say they would say okay today i woke up feeling nice but the run uh turned out bad because uh it was hot or because i felt just tired in the middle of the run and then i try with time over you know week after week accumulating all these reflections we try to understand how their thoughts are working in a way i try to highlight with the athlete with the help of their reflections and our discussions highlight if we have any chain of reactions i'm going to give you an example from one of my athletes today he's about 12 years old a tennis player um we we highlighted today how this negative chain of reaction starts he gets angry always at a certain point of the game and he just smashes the tennis rack and it's happening you know every other week and then we saw like okay whenever he sees that the other athlete is two points in front of him he gets anxious on the inside this anxiety puts him in a negative situation this critical anxious situation anxiety makes him angry

then he loses accuracy he starts to put more power balls right start to go away from the field here starts negative self-talk that i'm not good he starts to tell himself i'm not good i'm being clumsy and so on so he gets into this negative spiral and his way to exit all this is unleashes anger out so we go back to the beginning of how he perceived and he thought about this two-point difference so in this chain of reaction that's happening we kind of want to cut this chain and to channel it somewhere different and it's no different than a chain of reaction that would happen within the ure's athletes the mind would read how the body is feeling like i'm feeling exhausted if i tell myself like oh shit i'm feeling exhausted i'm taking myself to a negative uh loophole so it's okay to highlight that something is not okay like okay i'm exhausted but then from that point and this is where the work of the sports psychologist or a mental practitioner comes in is to channel this highlight it's very important to say and state the mental and the physical state you're at like i'm not feeling okay okay then what some ads will say okay i'm not feeling okay i'm not good at this i'm exhausted i don't want to do this anymore performance drops so here it's important to negotiate the situation with inner self-talk

because if you're out there in a long event you're on your own even if it's a three kilometer three thousand meter stipple chase you're on your own out there your coach is away you are with your own thoughts you are your own guide so we kind of want to guide those thoughts in a way you know what the first thing that comes to my mind is is every athlete has kind of had a similar experience from a racing perspective where they get to a similar point at any race and sometimes it's the exact same point at the exact same race aid station xyz at this race that i've done for the past you know seven years and that common point whether it's a mile marker or an aid station or whatever becomes this fork in the road as you had as you've described it between where their performance is going okay to where their performance starts to deteriorate and anytime that i've worked with an athlete and we've tried to backtrack what was actually going on the athlete's perspective is is to try to solve that problem from a physiological perspective i need more fluid i need more food i need to pay something differently like some like something physical that's that's going on and normally when i've gone through that that diagnosis that's actually not the case normally there's some there there's

something else that happens they look at their splits and they're two minutes off you know to give your analogy of being two points you know two points behind with the tennis player or or something like that that starts this this chain of reaction and unless the athlete has done a really good job of capturing all of those notes throughout training and also throughout racing it's it's really hard to like pinpoint actually what's what's going on because there is this like milieu of physical and psychological and also environmental factors that start to kind of come into play but the the point that i always try to make is is you try to backtrack that in training first because you have bad patches in training all the time right and it doesn't need to manifest itself into smashing a tennis racket or something like that something that uh uh something that abrupt but athletes get frustrated with training all the time and if you do a really good job of backtracking where those frustration points are and what's going on from the whole setup physical and psychological you're able to to to triage that into into better performance because ultimately you're trying to to choose a different you're trying to choose the different fork in the road right once you actually get once you actually get to that point but you don't know which way you need to turn if you don't if you can't figure out what's going on in the first place

um speaking of figuring out what's going on in the first place um the reason why in the beginning when we start to work with athletes uh we start with the reflections is to explore the organic self-talk it's important for me to know what is this individual organic self-talk what how do they deal with the negatives how do they deal with the positives how do they deal with different and various environments what do they tell themselves these thoughts what kind of images do they trigger because self-talk is the foundation of imagery self-talk is always there so whenever you're thinking of something even if it's verbal it's going to trigger an image and when you're alone out there uh on the trails or especially in road running you can easily have an image because you're not focused on the technical path you can easily imagine something and be out the legs are rolling but your mind you have an image out there so i like to know what sort of images do they get what are they thinking of i like to explore different aspects of their lives not just the athletic what are they thinking about work uh family personal issues perhaps something irrelevant i just want to know how does their mind roam out there when running even before or after a workout so just to know organically what's happening then we explore what is leading to have positive self-talk positive feels because most of us would

easily highlight a negative run like it was so bad and we try to analyze and see what has happened we discuss with the coach or a psychologist and so on but we rarely think of the positive experiences we think about it we embrace it maybe feel happy about it recently you see athlete posting a story on the one of the training went well so we know it went well but in the majority of the time we don't really reflect and think what has triggered this positive feel to me it's one of the fundamentals in my work i want to know what triggered a positive feel because i want us to induce it later when we need it i want us to know what sort of conditions what sort of thoughts were there to explore and to see what strength points do we have in the thoughts of this athlete because let's say from the physiological point of view to make it easy i'm going to compare with physiology because we can easily compare uh you start to work with an athlete you make an assessment and you say okay they got speed they lack endurance so on and when it comes to sports psychology and self-talk in specific i like to do the same i want to know what strength points do they have when it comes to the mind what are the weaknesses and then we we assess to see where are we going to work where do we urgently need to work sometimes you get an athlete a month or i've had even a week before a big event here it's like

an emergency plan i really need to find out what are the main negatives out there and then try to negotiate those negative thoughts a bit so if you've got the situation where you've identified a component or a piece of self-talk that has then triggered a good workout or a good performance you mentioned that you want to be able to leverage that again when the athlete actually needs it because they don't need it i'm in complete agreement with you here you don't you typically don't need this stuff on good days everything just happens you know as it should on good days you make your money right i tell my coaches this all the time you make your money when things are going bad and it's probably the same in your in your scope of practice too i like that grin on your face you make your money when things are going bad because that's how you know that's when athletes really need a lot of help to to turn the ship around how does that process work like if you've identified the types of self and you could go through a practical example if you've identified a like a type of self talk that is efficacious for the athlete to create a good workout or a good performance how do you then go about implementing it when you need to turn the ship around is is it as easy as just say hey listen whenever you're feeling bad i want you to say this to yourself i mean how does how does that actually practically look okay um just to go back it's very correct that most athletes would usually come when they have a really negative experience like most i would say 90 of the athletes come to me and they're

like devastated like we've been trying so hard to do this we think this we think that very few say okay we're in tip-top shape and we want to we just want to keep it that way it's very rare so they come sometimes it's a bit i wouldn't say not too late what's the right it doesn't have to be bad to work on the mind yeah but that's the way everybody's oriented not not every athlete needs to work on the mind sometimes they're organically very very good yeah it's same thing with physiology right same thing with physiology they can almost kind of do anything in training and they'll be okay yeah yeah very similar so to identify uh let's say the good elements leading to a good day definitely after it does require a certain period of reflections and discussions and a lot of exploration and uh trial and error like uh once we try to figure out some things i would ask the athlete like okay try to wake up at 7 a.m because it felt suitable your body feels calm at that time rather than a 9 a.m run so we try to chase these little details like what what did you eat what did you watch the night before who were you with uh were you training with someone or alone i have a lot of athletes that struggle when they train with a specific person they just don't like this other person and it could influence the run or someone that pushes the pace or they enjoy to run with specific person so we go into these details

and we try to induce them in workouts to induce certain fields a lot of athletes ask to induce flow states which is a state that you're rolling effortlessly um you're not thinking much of physical your mind is out you're enjoying to the outmost so to induce this state uh we try to chase the elements that induce it in the first place organically was it the breathing was it the thoughts was it the food or is it the the weather and the surrounding so a good example of self-induced uh flow state is uh i've had this athlete who ran um on his own about 100 kilometers and he felt it was effortless he finished it at ease had no issues whatsoever the moment he finished this ultra run we went into the details of what did he eat before the preparation the weather the country that he was in so and he never got this flow state in his home country he had to travel to the same place to get it he felt something connected beyond the run itself so now okay we know what sort of uh elements this individual needs to induce self-induced flow state um when it comes to competition it's sometimes difficult to induce the perfect elements because they might say okay race starts on a different time what

you like it you might be a morning runner and the event starts at night so here it becomes a bit difficult but what we do is we try as much as we can to collect the goods that you like the pre-race meal a breathing exercise that you like certain habits that you like to do we try to put as much as we can from those so i have athletes that like to be tip-top focused on races the night before an event to be watching something uh race related to be sharp focus on the race and i have another athletes that like to do something completely irrelevant it doesn't suit them to be thinking of race it would raise their anxiety so some athletes like feel ready when they eat pasta some others feel ready when they eat rice so this is the amount of details that i like the athlete to be mentally aware of like i'm doing what i like i'm doing what leads me to a good state okay so what i'm getting from you is is you're trying to set up the entire environment based on previous behaviors in previous patterns in order to kind of like stay out of this negative space in the first place so yeah this is and i've heard i've heard a lot of sports psychologists kind of talk about that that environmental you're looking at the whole environment right training partners time of day what you're eating all these things you're trying to make conducive to

the training session and the and kind of the athlete as a whole my thought always goes to overload and adaptation though because that's my that's my background right it's more of a physiological construct and when i hear this we're trying to create this utopian environment for the athlete the thing that that my mind drifts towards is reality isn't like that and they need to be able to cope with stressful and unideal environments just as they need to be able to know how to set up the environment to thrive you know i'm wondering how like how you balance that because they do seem and the listeners are probably you know thinking about this in their heads right now those do seem it kind of like polar opposite types of of construct where there are times where i want an athlete to be able to work out and to perform in an unideal or a hostile type of environment right just so they can learn that they can get over whatever they need to they need they need to get over that's almost on the polar opposite of we want to wake up at the perfect time every day and have rice instead of pasta and like create this like you know like i said this utopian environment so i'm wondering like what your thoughts are on that kind of like bifurcation of of strategies that you see out there a lot in practice with coaches and with athletes it is a thin line to make a certain balance it's important to do both it's important to be aware of what

suits you most but also it's important every now and then to do something uncomfortable to train at an hour that you dislike to train with someone that you dislike because in competition if you're a competitive athlete you're going to be racing sometimes with people that are going to push the effort from the beginning you kind of want to stick with them it's it's a lot of elements but to challenge ourselves with environmental factors or uh mental factors i like to do it consciously with the athlete like to tell them okay we're gonna do this to feel uncomfortable and to see how to deal with it but every now and then like once a week once every two weeks because for the amateur athlete they they they want to enjoy the activity so you kind of want them to collect things that allow them to enjoy but for an intermediate level athlete actually more than the elite because the elite already has been through a lot the intermediate athlete needs to be more conscious about those and to know okay this element or this situation makes me uncomfortable we're gonna have to do it every now and then to adapt more uh some of the athletes that i worked with and get amazed by how much they deal well with the uncomfortable are professional alpinists they deal with brutal environments in their case it's very hard to put something that suits you very well in in alpinism you might end up climbing 20 days sorry 20 hours

straight sometimes staying in the tent and not climbing for four or five days so in that case we really need to highlight what suits them or something that brings them comfort uh it could be a comfort meal like a little candy bar that they keep with for emerging situations or i've had this case of this athlete that took with him on his expedition a sample of his favorite perfume it just made him feel fresh on let's say summer day he felt fresh i mean two months without shower uh it really made him feel nice so collecting these little things in such extreme cases it's a very important practice so here here's here's what i think is really important from that from that example right there is the amount of adversity training we'll call it that we'll put the we'll put that in a bucket right where you're intentionally asking or athletes are intentionally asking of themselves to go out into a harsh unideal environment and go in training and go and compete the amount that you're asking the athletes to do that in training is somewhat proportional to what they need to experience during in the field of competition or kind of during a task so your alpinists need to do it more than your endurance athletes who they're still they're still competing in harsh environments but not as harsh as an alpinism type of environment and my personal coaching ratio is about one to five meaning when we're when i'm looking at

organizing an athlete's schedule and things come up they don't sleep really well for a couple days in a row or the weather is crap for a few days in a row one out of every every five of those instances or maybe two out of every five of those instances i'm telling them just to suck it up just suck it up get it done you need some adversity training we'll it's not going to be the perfect training day out there you'll kind of get it done the other three or four out of five times i'm reorganizing it to to suit a more ideal outcome for the particular workout or for the particular phase and that's because i know during race day you know unless they're doing something kind of off the charts from an fkt perspective or we know they're going to be in a really challenging environment it's not going to be so off the wall that they're going to have to have a super honed skill set and that from that perspective it depends on the level of the athlete that's true too yeah if again if it's an elite athlete it's easier to get them to you know tell them get the job done uh an amateur it depends on the character in that case on the organic character of what you have initially but i think it's the most challenging with sub elite and intermediate athletes because if you put too much of those they might end up disliking so we see sometimes a lot of times sorry especially with younger athletes sub elite and you feel like okay they're gonna have a bright future

this is it training becomes challenging lifestyle become more structured and then you stop seeing them they vanish from the sport because they stop they stop liking what they're doing it's because we're challenging them too much so here it depends i get cases of athletes that are mentally depleted simply because it has been so much challenging for them and so much structure so here okay we discuss with the coach like okay we kind of want a different strategy we kind of want something that suits what they like a specific time that suits the most conditions that they like in a way just for the phase until they mentally recover feel fresh and then here okay we start to challenge them again every once in a while i like to work up close with coaches not just with the athletes i like to be very much connected with the coach to know what's their philosophy in training to know how much are they willing to challenge the athletes and here okay we make this we got we got to work as one team to know around this coach around this athlete to know like what are the goals of this athlete what's his character like uh how much are we willing to develop their mental capacity because a lot of aspects from mental capacity development they come from the physical training when you put them in brutal conditions that they dislike like heat or cold uh after that you're gonna get an outcome of okay they will start adapting to training in the

rain they'll either figure it out or they don't yeah i've had the case of an athlete that like you you couldn't tell her okay train in the rain she was using treadmill whole winter and then yeah and then we she was in training camp uh and weather was brutal in that area in winter like the worst conditions temperature was five degrees celsius with rain and wind this is like it's not snowing yeah which makes things easy and it's it's miserable wet and cold you don't want that miserable but she just got used to it every day she was out twice so she just got to it after a couple of weeks um but sometimes you get athletes that break and say okay i cannot do this anymore so you challenge them a bit you say okay how about we try this today uh tomorrow we do okay two days off we train on a treadmill but in her case it took a couple of weeks for her to adapt but training wasn't extremely challenging because we wanted one element to adapt to at the time so it wasn't possible to put this highly structured training program otherwise it will stress her from both environment and the physiological aspect so we chose one one of those which was the rain once she adapted she was able to resume training normally in the beginning her self-talk was horrible she was feeling miserable in the rain like i'm cold i'm struggling and then it was like okay once the rain coming i'm ready it was amazing to see in two weeks

how this self-talk transformed from complete negative denying like like how she was asking herself what is she doing out there like what am i doing and then it was like uh it became joy it became like something she wanted she wanted to train in the rain eventually so i want to come back to this aspect of how athletes can use self-talk and intentionally develop it and use it to their advantage because the example that you just mentioned is it we keep using the word organic it was one that i mean i'm kind of getting the sense from you that the athlete just kind of figured it out you know eventually they just reveled in this you know cold rainy type type of environment but i do think that athletes in general can do a better job of evaluating their previous training looking at those cues of what created great workouts and great performances and using some of the self-talk learning lessons for the future but i don't think a lot of athletes have a pathway of how to actually do that whether they're kind of diy in their own training or they're working with a coach or they're working with a sports psychologist and so when take us through what like how you actually do that as a practitioner you already went through okay we're going to evaluate you know we're kind of going to evaluate the notes we're going to look at you know what what is in training peaks what's in final surge but give a little bit more depth to how you can bring that to

light from an athlete that has you know six or nine months to train for an event that eventually is going to have to leverage better self-talk to optimize performance just to explain something from the case of the athlete training in the rain um we did work on the self-talk okay uh what made it easy in a way is that i was physically present in training camp for those two weeks so um a bit of encouragement in the beginning a bit of excitement it it can really affect the other athletes and this is where my job comes that uh i have to ignite the excitement somewhere like okay we're getting it done it might be like this on race day we will adapt to every single situation this ignites something internally like especially the competitive athletes when you tell them on race day yeah you might embrace these conditions it might be a strength point against your competitors and they she embraced this these conditions perfectly like recently she raced really well in these conditions it was brutal on top of the summit she was flying in those conditions she was doing very well like she wasn't thinking about it and making peace with conditions is very important on the mental aspect um when it's raining it's very natural for us to make this certain grimace because you're having you know um raindrops coming on your face and wind so here you're making your face a bit stiff so it's kind of like this anxious uncomfortable face

yes it's going to affect your whole form it will affect your whole performance but if you make peace with it if you say i'm gonna smile through it i tell the athlete today's exercise during the run is to smile through it is not to allow this grimace anxious face then it's going to relax the whole body it's going to relax the mind the body and you will be rolling nicely so to go back to to answer your question of let's say we have a six months time frame um it's a good time frame to work with an athlete on the mental aspect i would say four to five months is the minimum um so in the beginning we have a long phase of reflections and exploration of organic capacity we have a phase of assessment not just for self-talk but self-talk is interrelated to every single mental skill like your skills of setting goals uh imagery um controlling uh controlling uh controlling anxiety and stress they're all interrelated to self-talk so at least to me i see self-talk as a very important foundation um so after an initial phase of assessments and reflections and just to get to know the athlete get to know their behavior their thoughts here we start to highlight points that we need to work on let's say if i sense that we need to work on setting specific goals and or modifying goals we do that

and then we try to integrate some of those in the self-talk uh if we say okay we have a six months time frame from a physiological aspect then let's say we have two months of base training as an example i like to periodize mental skills in general and even self-talk i really like to periodize like self-talk for base phase is different from self-talk and race specifically how are they different like what's like fundamentally what's the difference between those okay in base in base training phase what sort of physiological elements are we trying to induce for the amateur to intermediate at it's building up endurance building up more capillaries building up the volume uh so i like the self-talk to be directed to those such as i'll give you an example um because training is not intense i assume especially in the beginning uh if you're working with a good coach in that case and you know in the beginning it's going to be nice and smooth to start start with then i like it to be really fresh and nice self-talk that we work with the athlete together to know we can introduce phrases such as i'm starting this i'm working towards my goal uh i'm building up myself these words will also help the physiological elements happen like i'm building up my endurance i'm going to improve uh words like this will help the athletes stay fresh and in the game

and then gradually as the volume starts to build up here we can see what's challenging the individual what's happening with the negative self-talk when they're fatigued and we try to find answers for those like if they're fatigued i see is it are they reading fatigue from physiological feeling or are they fatigued mentally from being out there for too many hours so once we assess if it's physically induced or mentally induced we modify the self-talk and make answers to those if the athlete says i'm fatigued i cannot do this anymore we try to sit together and discuss and make logical answers it's a dialogue negative thoughts are going to be there no matter what but what matters is how you how you answer them how to how you negotiate with those negative thoughts and then make the best out of them by transforming them to something either neutral or perhaps positive it depends on the situation and it depends on the how heavy is this self-talk let's say uh after two weeks of break this athlete starts with their base training and on the third week uh he or she would run with an athlete uh that's a bit fitter a long run a bit fast and they fall back a bit the athlete here is going to have negative self-talk i'm not good at it they're better than me how am i going to catch up so i like in that case to prepare

the athlete for such situations uh once we highlight that we are getting such types of self-talk and in base training i like to i mean it's common for athletes to get these sort of feelings in early phase of training so we try to prepare the athlete mentally what to answer those uh we can we can put answers such as okay i'm in the beginning i'm improving a bit it's going to need a little while to get back at it uh and try to make logical answers for those like it's okay to be a bit below my regular level these answers are neutral and a bit logical we cannot make it 100 positive in that case right you're gonna have to suck it up at some point and say okay this is how it is it is what it is yeah it is what it is and then week after week we see how things go and then let's say we get to a little race test a time trial or hard workout start here i like to see what the athlete how do they what do they tell themselves uh about pacing before starting a hard workout so on to try to prepare together what's the self-talk is going to be for the bigger events i did this today with an athlete that she has a half marathon coming up but before the half marathon uh she has a little 5k so we use this little 5k to test the ultimate strategy that we're

going to use in the half marathon it's a little sample so we're both going to test the half marathon tempo in a way in this 5k race um and also we're going to test what sort of words will will work for her in the beginning of the race in the middle and towards the end so after this little experiment we're going to discuss and see okay what were you telling yourself did it work this few words to use on the start not to start too fast because 90 percent of the athletes start too fast i mean even even the pros would do that they just with the excitement so this is something i really like to control with any level of athletes control the start you will protect them from feeling fatigued uh early in the race uh and then okay once we feel fatigued what are we going to tell ourselves from these little experiments and little races leading to a big event i like to collect a lot of information i like the athlete to reveal hopefully all of their negative thoughts negative feelings and then we try to understand what led led the athlete to feel those and to make logical answers sometimes i've had this track athlete preparing for a 10 000 meter race we listed about up to nine different thoughts that might occur on the event negative thoughts like i cannot do this anymore or the pace is too hard or it's too

humid for every single one of those we elicit four or five logical answers and we try to transform and to throw in something positive when we are preparing for a race over a really long block six months let's say you can collect a lot of positive from the athletes what's their strength point is it power is it endurance is it speed is it the uphill the downhill uh loving the technical terrain rain sun snow we try to collect a lot of those and then we kind of want to use those as much as we can once we find the right element if the terrain was very technical and the athlete loves technical terrain we throw a lot of we inject them with a lot of it's like taking a gel we inject them as much as we can with positives related to what they like so they feel fresh mentally with this so they can mentally recover on this block if the athlete loves the uphill we will put few words to remind them that okay i love uphill this is what i'm here for i love it i'm feeling nice if it's actually and physiologically their strength point it will be very fruitful because they might be passing some competitors they will grow both mentally and physically so that if they struggle with the downhill they will have a bit of mental energy left over to deal with that i get a lot of athletes especially in trail this is something interesting running that some athletes are better in uphill and the downhill some athletes are good in technical downhill but not

uh yeah a dirt road downhill the more runnable ones so i like to explore every single strength point they have all the terrain read the race as much as we can and know okay with the race profile here we're going to say this on the downhill we will try to say that and i challenge them like what if you puke here what if you fall what if you lose something we try to challenge the athlete with a lot of factors that might happen anticipation is very important once we anticipate we're going to have an image and the image will be related with thoughts and words so this is what we modify and we get prepared for okay i want to it will be wired for the event at least for the majority of things that might happen not everything but the majority i want to come back to that anticipation point because i do think that a lot of athletes spend time haphazardly rehearsing these things that may or may not happen in races without a whole lot of framework to them and i've always found that just to to then this is to ping off of your strengths and weaknesses piece that in a race or a competition type of setting weaknesses tend to get reinforced to a greater magnitude as compared to strengths because not only is the athlete going to like literally lose time in their weakness but they're also more critical of themselves at that point at that juncture as well

so it's a negative reinforcement loop that in most cases the compounding of those two things physically not being as good in that at that particular part it's a technical downhill right yeah physically not being as good during a technical downhill and then also being hard on themselves during that technical downhill the psychology reinforcing the physicality that the negative physicality part of it is worth greater than the sum of its parts it normally supersedes their strengths because normally on a strength they just kind of run as opposed to hey i'm doing awesome during this part and it's my stuff and that and that has the same compounding effect they normally don't do that but i want to kind of get back before we go to racing i want to kind of get back to training because athletes always want quick fixes and you and i are you and i are in alignment there are no quick fixes to training it's always it's always chronic adaptation you presented this scenario where you have an athlete that's training for a half marathon they're doing a five cam prep and they're doing that five k to not only dial their pacing in but also to dial their self-talk in i don't want listeners to come away with oh there's that there's a solution i'm going to do a 50 mile you know i'm going to do a 50 mile training run in advance of my 100 mile race and i'm going to practice self-talk during this 50 mile uh during this 50 mile event just to clarify we've been working on refining self-talk for if i'm not mistaken four or five months okay but this is training in little tempo runs here and there but how to put them like this little puzzle to test it

she hasn't had the chance to race until now so we didn't have the option and that's what i want to get at like how many you work directly with athletes and you also work in conjunction with coaches how many times per week are you saying we you're going to do these specific things on this day like what's the right from a self-talk and a sports psychology perspective what does that look like on a weekly basis is it twice a week three times a week every single day of the week like how does that unfold okay um it depends on the level of the athlete um and their needs so i like the minimum would be two okay but they have in a way an idea like during an easy run we're going to say this and this and that during the hard workouts we will experiment if if they're in race specific phase they will experiment race related words that we will use on race day uh if it's a long run we will use this and this and that so they already have an idea what to use according to the type of the run but if it's a high level athlete in that case we we're we're dealing in a way in a more structured way like i would schedule i i like to know with a coach what's the plan of the week way and we schedule together specific keywords to be used in specific sessions even we go in depth like say an athlete had eight times one thousand meter repeats we went one time with this athlete in really detailed level

of self-talk that we used for each one of those different set of words and phrases and scenarios like i'll give you an example they were eight the first three we were only practicing the beginning of the race so by the end of the 1000 meter repeat they have never imagined the end of the race as most athletes do they were only refining the self-talk to be used in the beginning of the race and the pace to be used in the beginning of the race now the middle three keyword uh repeats sorry we use self-talk that we will use in the middle of the race and then the last two they were related to the last part of the race sometimes i would challenge them i would put the beginning of the race as the last very last one just not to not to let them push too hard and this is very challenging like imagine finishing seven repeats and then the last one is the end you're required to think of the end of the race but i'm challenging you to think of the beginning yeah that's it so what i want to know is is when you're working with the track and field athlete that type of self-talk it seems and so you can correct me if i'm wrong it seems that it's fairly predictable what you need to do if you just divide the race in thirds like you did beginning middle end it's kind of going to have this self-talk pattern but i'm envisioning in an ultra marathon situation where the type of self-talk is not as predictable never it's never predictable so it's not even not as

predictable it's never predictable like what's the analog right i guess is what i'm what i'm asking like you're going through a track and field you're going through a track and field example what's the analog in an ultra marathon situation to where an athlete has this like array of self-talk skills that they can deploy that is not necessarily contingent upon the chronology of how the race unfolds chunking chunking all right i love it i love it i love it yeah so i'll give you an example uh how many hills did the hill climbs that UTMB have in total seven seven yeah i think it's seven okay so we could for example put beginning middle end for each of those hills this is an example yeah or to take from one aid station to another as an individual part alone and then reset again like okay i'm done with this now the next goal is the next aid station so it's terrain based i mean you're you're you're suggesting a terrain based chronology or train based approach always it's so easy for us to look at any race as from terms of distance and gain all together most of the athletes that have been we were working together for long races such as UTMB or ccc we did the soft talk and the imagery all based by the elevation plot of the race i would put them to visualize this is a like a a month before the race

but not the week of the race because i like them to be mentally fresh not to think of these too much so i like them to really go with the elevation of the race imagine different things and visualize the self-talk visualize the negatives and how we deal with them and then we chunk in different parts of the race so it's not okay for everyone i like them to tell themselves to calm down in the beginning this is very common i would say in any race but then it becomes very different than ultra running because most races in ultra running you there's a really high chance that you will have a low point somewhere you're gonna have to deal with it this is how it is so we try from visualization and training to accept that okay there will be a low point but what's very challenging if the athlete wasn't racing so much is that they might be shocked from how low it can be on how how much they will like they tend to forget that it can be miserable sometimes and this is something in training it's hard to use because in training it's especially for the amateur ultra runner they're going to be out 35 hours 40 hours in training you're not going to train for 40 hours so you can physiologically it's very challenging to mimic how miserable things can be so here it's uh we try to mentally prepare and try to remember so we do a lot of reflections related to previous events remember how miserable it can be but still it's not 100

similar and this i've seen that it was very challenging to mimic to prepare for many athletes were shocked like i i even you know you i'm a sports psychologist and i get shocked by races sometimes like uh especially the shorter ones like every time like it's it's hard it's brutal and you train you prepare and it's a short event but still in race day it's always different it's always here here's what i do you can give me your thoughts on this and i do this especially with my like really experienced athletes where i know that they're going to go through a low point and even as experienced as they are they might not um they might not have experienced as low of a low point as they're going to experience in in their next race so i just have them draw up the worst scenario they can think of write it down on you know paper electronic paper send it over to me inevitably when they send it over to me i add four or five things on this like dog pile of crap that they have kind of come up with right they come into an a station their crew's not there they've broken a pole their shoelace is untied you know they're nauseous they're throwing up like you know there's like 10 different things that are all kind of like happening at once and once we come up with that whatever kind of like contrived situation that is that is inevitably an amalgamation of real things that could happen all at once and that's typically what creates these really low low points is it's not just one or two things it's four or five

things that are greater than the sum of their parts and so the exercise is is to to try to try to create the worst of the worst that is the sun that is greater than the sum of all the worst parts that you can think of and then i just ask them to solve the problem like just solve it like write down narrative format go ahead and solve go through all these things and what's the outcome and that whole process usually takes like three or four weeks of conversation to actually kind of work through but the point with it the point that i always mention at the end of the day is is that there's always a solution no matter what you're faced with in an ultra marathon or in life for that for for for that matter there's always going to be a solution to it and and i've and i've used that i've used that technique or that that that strategy like several times and inevitably it's not as bad as what you can kind of create in uh training and you know where i got it from is i got it from the mma world because i saw a lot of coaches and a lot of sports psychologists that would have their fighters rehearse that in training what's the worst situation that you could be in with this particular you know opponent that you're facing well i'm in some submission that they're really well known for it's kind of the the basic scenario right where it's a von flu choke or you know some sort of triangle or whatever that their opponent is really well renowned for they get caught in that is usually the worst thing that they can kind of come up with because when you're in that athlete your opponent's strength it's impossible to kind of get out and i've kind of just used that as a kind of just used

the the what i figured was the ultra marathon mirror image of it and i've actually found it to to to be one enlightening to see what people are fearful of that's the first part that i get out of it as a coach but the second one is to teach athletes that there's no matter what you're faced with there's some there's some solution to it and for most amateur athletes that are looking as for completion of their goal their failure point is not getting out of an aid station when they're at the lowest of lows and if you can come up with tools and techniques to overcome psychologically because it's very rarely a physiological phenomenon if you can come up with tools and techniques to like teach them that they can really get out of it if they really put their minds to it i've just found that really useful on race day it's not going to be the optimal performance but they're still going to you know reach their goal of of completion so i was wondering if that's i mean what do you think about something like that and what are some other analogs that athletes can do to like pull out of those lows this is a fundamental part the practice that you do with athletes is something i do almost about three to four weeks leading to an event it's a fundamental part i usually like to ask them to reflect on or sorry visualize and write this visualization uh through the event challenge themselves with things that might occur to them that happened in the past let's say how they might deal with them and then of course i would

add a lot of surprising and unexpected things and this is why something i like to go watch events yeah as much as i can because in each event you see really unpredictable things that might happen so it gives you a set of creative ideas to challenge any athlete with and to wire them how to behave i've had athletes who decided not to finish a race let's say and they were very fine with it because they knew okay this could be the red line where we have to say okay no more and they were very fine they got back at it again and they finished the events when things aligned perfect not really perfectly when when things aligned well for them so we try to go over really unpredictable things to both verbally and visually try to make solutions and make peace with them because an ultra marathon would have a lot of uncontrollable conditions uncontrollable situations that we might face the nice thing about the ultra marathon is that we we can we can really compare it to life overall we have a lot of uncomparable things you have lows you have highs different conditions day night so it's a quite an interesting event and it it always amazes me whenever i'm working with ultra ultra running athletes you you learn every individual is a learning experience so here's a pro tip for all the coaches that are listening out there that both you and i have talked about go to races and consciously observe what's going on uh you know as much can as much focus as i put on

peer mentorship and continuing ed and reading scientific literature and developing a network of professionals like you know what what you and i've been trying to do for the past several months and and those are all absolutely valuable there's one really simple thing that all coaches can do to immensely improve the effectiveness of the coaching that they deliver to their athletes and that's just to go to races and just constantly and consciously observe what's going on write it down in a notebook and use all those learning lessons and deploy them with your uh with your athletes it's just so it's i cannot i cannot quantify how valuable it is i wish i could charge for i wish i could like charge for that because that's like the golden goose right there being able to do that yeah um also a tip for students that are freshly graduating from either any sort of uh professional sport program is to listen is to listen to coaches even those who might not have a degree but they've been working for 20 20 plus years it's a tremendous opportunity to learn just by listening uh coaches that have been practicing for for a large amount of years like even sometimes they surprise me with mental tips that you don't see in the books or at university even yeah well i mean this brings it full circle to what we were talking about on how athletes can improve is writing down their training and having the coach or somebody else like

actually listen and or read what those comments are to come up with the common linkages of what's going to induce performance i think that that pattern of this is what worked and didn't work and here's how we're going to leverage that for the future you if you do if you put a really good eye on that it works across physiology it works across psychology it works across all of these elements of athletic performance because if you have if you first have a good fundamental framework of how things work and then you can look at those individual components to figure out how each athlete works within that base framework that is a winning that's going to be a winning formula with any athlete that you can work with period and athletes that are diying it that's your winning formula figure out like the baseline knowledge and then look at your like really scrutinize your previous training what you've done how it works and how it doesn't work that on that's that gives you the capability of unlocking so much to make it simple for the athletes and the listeners just like on our previous podcast when we said mental skills should be periodized soft talk should be periodized too it should come in a synchronized way with your training so sit with your coach or if you're a self coach try to sit down make a plan to say okay in base training phase self-talk is going to be related to what sort of effects i want to get from those it should be all

around joy mindfulness roaming around nothing really too structured because you don't want to mentally burn out you don't want to be a race specific self-talk i will do it i'm thinking of race too early it even will affect your your training sessions so much you end up increasing your effort even heart rate can easily raise by 10 50 beats simply if you're thinking and telling yourself stuff related to a race i see this every other day with athletes you see that they get too excited they increase the pace or even they keep the same effort but you know heart rate rises up to 15 beats and then the athlete would come and ask you okay what has happened today i asked him okay was it hot no okay what were you thinking about was it race okay that's excitement so um and then as the race draw and then as the race draws near that's when you can deploy all the race specific stuff exactly so when you start to train for your event in really specific first off try to know your strengths don't do too much of those sneak in them and every now and then but for the high level athletes or intermediate athletes if let's say they hit the downhill i hope that coaches would listen to a sports psychologist in that case to know like okay the athlete is really having negative self-talk on the technical down so we might want to add a bit of those to sharpen them up for the event to allow them to adapt and then okay in parallel we will be working on refining that self-talk with physiological adaptation once they start to

feel a bit better with the downhill then we can find something positive and we hammer it to really start to make it eventually a strength point because this is what we want to do we want to make something we're not good at we want to make it good and eventually very good so same goes with the self-talk that comes in parallel to the physical skills so in the beginning of in the middle of the season we're refining self-talk we're trying to make answers for the negatives where where some of the things we're transforming them to positive or to neutral at least and then towards the race it's race specific you know what you're good at you know what you're not good at and you're trying to make a bit of logical explanation and you're trying to understand how your chain of reaction is working and you're trying to somehow cut or a bit manipulate these negative ones uh but uh my tip number one is always start on the conservative side and control your self-talk in the beginning yeah this changes the whole event this is my golden tip for any athlete over any distance like really control your self-talk in the beginning especially in ultra running it's a long journey it's not that first uphill or that first hour of the race you don't know what might happen if you're three four hours out there and even on longer events 20 hours out there that one hour uh can make a huge difference if you really start on a bit of a conservative side we see even the elites blowing it off with their start yeah and the more and more i talk to the sports psychologists the more

and more i realize that how much it actually parallels what you're trying to do with the physiology i mean even down to that just race scenario you'd say the same thing physiologically you don't want to blow yourself physiologically in the first you know quarter of the race and the same thing with self-talk or any sort of sports psychology the mind is going to read what the body is feeling it's very simple i get a lot of coaches uh that would say when you're watching events i think we spoke about this in the previous podcast but i will repeat it we're sitting and watching the a championship in on the track and we'd say everyone's saying ah this athlete mentally let go on the last uh two three laps most of the time they didn't let it go they just started slightly too fast and they're paying yeah for that mistake so it's not mental we we blame the mental a lot of times like it's mental they're mentally let go they're not strong in the head and then everyone will tell them that after the event and they will make them feel horrible about their mental state horrible but this is a big mistake that we see from coaches a lot of time the coaches has to understand that there's a lot of physiology happening the mind is reading the physiology and a lot of physiological consequences can happen it's so simple from that starting too fast by a couple of seconds on that lap uh it's gonna put you in a really negative spiral and then the community will bombard you because they everyone just thinks that you mentally let go okay sometimes we do mentally

let go but it's not as common as you think if you pace yourself well if you know physiologically what you have and you try to pace yourself well given good conditions of course then okay you you can you can do well eventually i'm always reminded that the peanut gallery really never knows what's going on yeah we're we're dealing with that right now with the after we're sitting here a week after UTMB recording this and all the banter this week is going to be on how terrible the us men are which is true they weren't very good i think that's you know that's kind of goes unstated but the peanut gallery as to why and i'm part of the peanut gallery i'll fully admit as to why they were so bad we very rarely would know actually what's going on at the end of the day right only yeah only the athletes know and i think if we take that as the first perspective it offers a little bit of sometimes it's unrelated to to things that okay the athlete has trained uh everything was really good the preparation the training mentally everything is fresh and sharp but sometimes you just a lot of a lot of factors can happen it's just not your day sometimes especially on long events yeah they're tricky and you might end up dropping dropping and that's okay that's part of the sport but you know again one time things are going to align together to a good ratio that you will go through your event and well and congratulations to your athletes

uh in that case if let's say you know uh um i'm closer to such an athlete i would easily a day or two after the event sit and reflect on how things went well and explore a lot of elements a really long discussion with a lot of before the break before that break after really it has to be fresh to know okay what went well what sort of things aligned well to know just to have an idea that what suits this athlete what happened in the head what happened in the physiology what happened in nutrition uh it might be overwhelming to for the athlete to work with several professionals so let's say if i'm a sports psychologist i'm going to have a discussion with her if you're her coach the physiological aspect you're going to have a discussion and then maybe the nutritionist this is a lot that um but for high level coaches i recommend really knowing a bit of everything just so you can help other professionals get an insight rather than doing separate discussions like i know you're really keen on knowing a lot from a lot of fields so you can somehow discuss a lot of elements all together but for for a lot of coaches it's not like this yeah so we're ultimately jacks of a lot of of trades and masters of none. I have to give a little bit of context to that. So Kareem and I, we sat down, we had pizza and a beer the day before CCC. Was it the day before CCC?

It was like in UTMB, I think it was the day before. And we were having this casual conversation about the races and things like that. And I happened to mention one of the athletes that I had out at those races that I was, that I was crewing for that she intentionally had gone through a big mental shift in her psychology. And we were going to see how that worked out during this race. And I remember telling you, I was like, it's either going to work or it's not, you know, and if it works, this is what we're going to start hammering down on it. And it, cause it's, we found a winning formula and it doesn't work. We'll just try, you know, just kind of try something else. The proof's always in the pudding that athlete was Abby Hall. She had a fantastic race, breakout race. I've written about it. You know, it's in, I'll link all that up, up in the show notes, but it's, it was neat to see that come to fruition because, you know, you as my witness, I went through the mental change that she actually went through and it paid off, you know, it, it paid, it was part of what paid off in a big performance. It wasn't the only thing, but it was a big part of it. So yeah, sometimes these things actually worked out like we wanted to. It was. Yeah. Yeah. All right, man, we're going to let you go. Thanks for coming on the podcast, especially such a short notice. Cause I did want to kind of capture the essence of the rest of that conversation, uh, that, uh, that we had over in Chamonix before we let you go, where can people find more about you and what you do? Uh, currently it's on Instagram, but, uh, my website is under construction. It's going to be the need a little bit of time to be out there,

but it will be out there in a couple of months. Okay. When it's out there, send it to me. I'll blast it out. Cause I really appreciate what you do. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll link up your Instagram handle, uh, and the show notes for anybody to check it out. Thanks again, my friend for coming on the podcast today. Thank you so much. All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Kareem for coming on the podcast again today and explain to us how we can leverage self-talk for better performance. I can't tell you guys and gals out there how much I am coming to appreciate more and more as my career goes on all of these fantastic sports psychologists that are out in the field, helping athletes, and also how I've appreciated how this sports psychology aspect can move and be periodized in tandem with the physical training aspect that we tend to put a lot of time and attention to. I appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners out there. As a reminder, this podcast has no sponsors and will never have sponsors. That is a promise that I made to the listenership at the very beginning of me starting this podcast. And it's one that I have dutifully attended to throughout the course of this podcast, despite people hitting me up and companies hitting me up.

Every single week wanting to throw me a few bucks to endorse their products. It is just not something that I want to get involved in because at the end of the day, I'm a purveyor of advice and I don't want any type of sponsorship or endorsement to adulterate that advice that I'm giving through these airwaves to you guys, the listeners. You all can help this podcast out by sharing it with your friends, your colleagues, and your training partners, or you can leave a rating or review on iTunes. I very much appreciate it when I see those ratings and reviews come across the wire. Appreciate the heck out of everybody listening, you guys. And as always, we will see you out on the trails. Bye.