How I used Psychology To Become a Mediocre Marathoner

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How I used Psychology To Become a Mediocre Marathoner

I ran in the 2024 Pittsburgh Half Marathon on May 5, 2024.  https://www.thepittsburghmarathon.com/.  This isn’t my first rodeo.  It isn’t even my 12th rodeo.  I’ve pretty much lost count of the rodeos at this point.  Let’s just summarize to this point: I’ve been in a lot of rodeos.  And I have a PhD in Psychology.  There are two people that can’t stop talking: Psychologists and people that run Marathon.  So, I have something to say about how psychology can improve Marathon Performance.

Social facilitation and responsibility

– for most of us, running long distance is a social sport.  We train together for the months leading up to the event and run together.  Many runners feel that they run better when they are running for their team or for someone else.  If you can run with someone else that is about your speed that will help you feel that you have somebody to run for and with.  You don’t want to hold them back and you want to run well to help pull them forward when the going gets rough.  Even if you are making a “single-use race friend” I encourage you to use this strategy.

The Virtual Cheer Squad. 

If you are using audio, then I suggest you include a Virtual Cheer Squad.  Ask people you train with, and friends and family to record one minute messages for you.  Include them in your playlist.  I have told my cheer squad which miles they are going to be on and I can estimate that pretty well calculating how many minutes have elapsed on the playlist.  Again, this increases the social facilitation effect.  https://www.simplypsychology.org/social-Facilitation.html 

Goal-setting. 

https://youtu.be/t1F7EEGPQwo It can help you to run better simply by setting the right goal.  When you have set a goal to run a certain pace per mile or to reach certain parts of the course by specific times, then you are more likely to do that than if you set a goal of running “as fast as you can” or “running within yourself” or even “keeping up with someone who looks like they are running about my speed.”  It is important to know what pace to target and when to adjust that on the fly during the race but unfortunately that is beyond the scope of this blog post.  I will say here that my strategy is to stick to my pace goal through the first three quarters of the race even when I feel good and then adjust faster at the end and my strategy is to never adjust a race pace goal in the first quarter of a race.

Use a playlist that has tracks playing at the right steps per minute.  Every song on my playlist is around 165 beats per minutes so that my step cadence remains constant.  You can use sites like https://songbpm.com/ to calculate the beats per minute of virtually any song.  

Use the doorway effect to your advantage

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/.  13.1 miles is a long time.  26.2 should be twice as long but it seems much longer than that.  It helps to not run 26.2 miles at the same time.  You can harness “the doorway effect.”  Psychologically, when you step through a threshold, you wipe the slate clean.  In some ways that can be a problem like when you forget why you came into the kitchen, again.  But when running the marathon, that can be really helpful because you can think of running a brand new segment.  Pittsburgh is built for that because of the number of bridges and neighborhoods we run through.  But you can make any segment seem like a separate effort.  Many of my coaches advised me to do two ten milers and a 10K.   The Pittsburgh Marathon is not one race but a series of interconnected races in a row.  All of them hilly and awful

Avoid the dreaded middle problem. 

https://share.snipd.com/chapter/c54aadf8-33fd-4313-9593-060ede45d256

We don’t have stable amounts of motivation through a long race like a marathon.  Motivation is highest at the start and then at the end.  But there is the dreaded middle part.  In the marathon that was for me between miles 18-23.  It was far enough into the race that I was tired and hurt but not close enough that I could feel the end.  You can minimize the middle problem by breaking up the race into smaller segments as in Step 5.  I also found that specifically setting the goal of maintaining my pace (Step 3) during the middle helped me though what had formerly been the Death Valley of the Marathon.