The following is a great excerpt from the article, "6 Ways to Change Your Running For The Better In 2017." We all know that running is truly a mental sport and the following excerpt shows how to make it an asset in your running!!
5. Embrace Positivity
“Run joyfully.” It is Goodman’s mantra, her website’s name, and what she tries to personify when she opens the door every morning to put in her miles. What does running joyfully entail?
“One, it’s really living off those endorphins,” she says. “I mean, how many runs do you ever regret going on? Nine out of 10 times, you feel better, happier, and have a clearer head for having spent a few minutes out in nature—or the urban jungle. The other half comes from a place of gratitude. Just appreciate the opportunity that you have to be out there.”
Tim Catalano, coauthor with Adam Goucher of Running the Edge, ran for the University of Colorado before getting advanced degrees in psychology and education. He says this approach is a good example of self-determinism. You can choose to focus on the positive or the negative in any endeavor and create your own experience. When Catalano tackled the six-day, 120-mile TransRockies Run stage race in 2015, he put that approach to the test.
“There are going to be some terrible times when you run 50 miles in a day or 120 miles in a week,” he says. “But what I chose to remember later—and what I chose to remember in the moment—was, ‘Holy crap, this is an amazing gift that I have a body that can do this. I’m in the middle of the Rocky Mountains with no one around, experiencing Colorado in a way that very few people get to.’ And when you hold on to those notions while running, you’re just happier.”
Controlling your mental outlook is no New Age gimmick, nor a call to abandon concrete goals. You can be a positive perfectionist. Eminent German psychologists Arne Dietrich and Oliver Stoll have published recent studies that show how perfectionism falls into two categories. Positive-striving perfectionism leads you to set high standards and benchmarks for your performance and helps you achieve your goals. Self-critical perfectionism, on the other hand, leaves you in a state of constant worry and disappointment and is correlated with anxiety, stress, and depression. Despite all their attention to detail, self-critical perfectionists were less likely to achieve their goals because any minor setback was seen as defeat.
This is one reason why experiencing running as an autotelic experience (one that’s enjoyed for its own sake) may be the key to running faster. Putting in more miles, doing quality work, and experimenting with different workouts become rewards, not chores, when pleasure is found in the act itself. That doesn’t mean every mile will be wonderful, Goodman says. But if you take a moment, even in the middle of a raging nor’easter or a tough workout, to remind yourself how fortunate you are to be running in the first place, then you’re more likely to appreciate the process.
“We don’t have the power to change an experience—an experience is what it is,” Catalano says. “But we do have the power to change how we experience that experience. You can let those dark voices [in your head] overwhelm you and have a bad day, or you can make the voices focus on all the good stuff, and it turns out to be a pretty amazing day. And the thing is, it’s the same damn day.”
Change this: Enjoy running for running’s sake, not just for its outcomes.
Why: A happy, positive runner performs better and feels more satisfaction.
The challenge: Runners are competitive—we use the numbers to convince ourselves of our worth. It is difficult to accept the relativity of our performances and reframe our perspective. Plus, some days running just doesn’t feel good, and positive psychology can feel like a load of you-know-what.
The risk: You may sound like a flower child to your running buddies.
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