Matt Fitzgerald

Counterintuitive though it may be, caring a little less about the result of a race produces better results.

The most important discovery of the brain revolution in endurance sports, and the most important truth you can know as an endurance athlete, is this: One cannot improve as an endurance athlete except by changing one’s relationship with perception of effort.

Pre was tough—there’s no doubt about it—but his toughness did not consist in any kind of superhuman imperviousness to pain or fear. Instead it took the form of a steadfast refusal to accept in himself the wimp that exists in all of us. Exercising mental fitness was a daily battle for him, but a battle he chose. ‘How tough in fact, is Steve Prefontaine?’ he asked himself in an interview for Track & Field News. ‘When he’s ready, very tough. When he’s not ready, not very.’

A large body of psychological research has demonstrated that the more time people spend fantasizing about desired outcomes—everything from passing school exams to losing weight—the less effort they put into pursuing them and the less likely they are to achieve them.

These enlightened researchers are now willing to concede that the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi had it right when he said almost a century ago, ‘Mind is everything. Muscles—pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.’

If choking is a condition of heightened self-consciousness that intensifies perceived effort and hampers endurance performance, then its opposite would be a mental state in which self-consciousness disappears, reducing perceived effort and boosting performance. Does such a thing exist? It does. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it ‘flow’ and defined it as a state of complete immersion in a purposeful activity.