Mental Strategies for Race Day
Physical and mental state is important before and during a race strongly affect performance. You might be physically prepared, but are you mentally prepared? Read this mental strategies.
From the archive,
Articles
Training science, coaching, and the 80/20 method — from Matt Fitzgerald and the 80/20 Endurance coaching team.
Blog Time Machine
How to Run Stoically (and Why You Should)
Originating in Athens around 300 BC, Stoic philosophy is grounded in principles of self-control, radical acceptance, and personal character. I got into it some years ago after noticing that the great runners I admired and wished to emulate often embodied these principles. An example is Eliud Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic marathon champion from Kenya. At…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
Cloning Myself
AI can be used with good or bad intentions. Ironically, being a victim of bad AI motivated and taught me how to use it for good. Last October I learned that Anthropic, the AI behemoth, had illegally pirated eighteen of my books—along with half a million other books by three hundred thousand other writers—for use…
Matt Fitzgerald ·
There Are Two Kinds of Perfectionism. One Makes Champions. The Other Breaks Athletes.
Ask a room full of endurance athletes whether perfectionism helps or hurts, and you’d better clear your afternoon. Some will swear it’s the engine behind every good thing they’ve ever done. Others will tell you, with a little too much feeling, that it nearly ended their relationship with the sport. Matt Fitzgerald ran into exactly…
Jim Vance ·
What I Tell My Athletes, I’m Still Learning to Tell Myself
Coaches of Color apprentice Rosina Garcia reflects on the challenges of coaching oneself. Last fall I was training for a couple of races: a cross-country 10K in December and a 50-miler in early February. One of my workouts was 8 x 1K with one-minute recoveries, and I nailed it. Six months later, I did the…
Rosina Garcia ·
Performance Anxiety in Endurance Sports: What’s Happening & What to Do About It
You’ve put in the training. You’ve done the work. So why does race day sometimes feel like it’s working against you? For many endurance athletes, the missing piece isn’t fitness or nutrition — it’s what’s happening between the ears. In this free live session, mental performance expert Carrie Jackson, M.A., CMPC breaks down the psychobiology…
Jim Vance ·
Race-Day Nerves Are Costing You More Than You Think (Science Says So)
You’ve heard it before. “Just toughen up. Everyone gets nervous. Push through it.” Good advice — if you want to keep underperforming at the starting line, blow your pacing in the first mile, and make terrible decisions in the back half of a race you trained months for. The truth is, race anxiety isn’t a…
Jim Vance ·
HYROX Run Training: The 80/20 Way
Is HYROX a strength sport or an endurance sport? Most athletes assume it’s the former — and most athletes are leaving performance on the table because of it. In this Tuesday Teaching session, 80/20 Endurance co-founder and bestselling author Coach Matt Fitzgerald makes the case that HYROX is fundamentally an endurance race — and that…
Jim Vance ·
He Took 12 Years Off. Then He Came Back and Beat His Old Time by Over an Hour!
80/20 ENDURANCE — ATHLETE STORY “I Didn’t Do Anything Extraordinary. I Simply Followed a Well-Designed System.” How Brad Jansen returned to Ironman 70.3 Geelong at 55 — and finished 65 minutes faster than he did at 42. In 2014, Brad Jansen crossed the finish line at Ironman 70.3 Geelong in 6:30:39. He was 42, placed…
Jim Vance ·
Could Your Smartwatch Be Hurting Your Recovery?
By Jim Vance When athletes think about recovery, they usually think about the big rocks: sleep, nutrition, hydration, rest days, and managing training load. All of that matters. But there is another piece of recovery that often gets overlooked: mental strain. Recently, I stopped wearing a phone-connected smartwatch and went back to a watch that…
Jim Vance ·
Why 80/20 Training Reduces the Risk of Injuries
Endurance sports like running and triathlon demand a lot from the human body, bringing a constant underlying risk of overuse injuries. For many athletes, the intuitive approach to getting faster is pushing hard day after day. However, doing too much hard training is not only the most common mistake in endurance sports, but it is…
Jim Vance ·
