Strategies For Successful Mental Preparation For A Marathon
A Marathon is a test in which you have to run for 42 km in a row, so it requires high-performance physical, tactical, technical and mental preparation, appropriate to the effort that we are going to put on our body and mind.
Although there are professional athletes who participate in these events, many of them are popular runners or people who participate in a Marathon for the first time after a period of preparation and after completing other long-distance races (half Marathon, ten thousand meters, etc.). To carry out the preparation for this test, you need a series of psychological coping strategies ideal for training for the Marathon since the mental section will be key over many kilometers.
As the sports psychologist, Jose María Buceta, explains to us, runners usually use techniques such as thought stopping, self-instructions and attentional refocusing plans because it has been seen that what influences Marathoners the most in the test are their thoughts.
In this way, through adequate psychological training, athletes use strategies such as coping to interrupt harmful mental activity and replace it with another that favors overcoming those critical moments and does not decrease performance in the test.
Associative and dissociative strategies
The authors Morgan and Pollock proposed that the mental activity of Marathoners was defined by associative and dissociative strategies. The first are based on paying attention, having thoughts or self-dialogues regarding one’s own bodily sensations or the activity involved in the race (attention to the circuit). The second involves an attentional disconnection from the previous factors in favor of stimuli unrelated to the activity, that is, focusing on the landscape, the music, the audience, etc. These strategies change depending on the type of broker
Jose María Buceta saw that in the case of popular runners, both associative and dissociative activity can be relevant to their performance goals. However, when it comes to runners who want to achieve good times, it is preferable to use associative strategies for most of the race, alternating them with dissociative strategies at less critical moments.
What are the emotional phases of a Marathon?
It can be observed that On a psychological level, fatigue, tiredness and wear and tear occur , since there are many kilometers included in this test. Vich establishes different stages or “emotional phases” that we go through depending on the kilometers we are traveling through.
Emotional phases of the Marathon (Vich, 2002):
Concluding
Finally, it is worth highlighting again that the Marathon It is conditioned by both physical and psychological qualities , since it is such a prolonged physical effort, it requires a lot of mental toughness. That is why when facing it, we must also work and train the mental part in order to manage the feelings of tiredness and fatigue that are linked to the test.
It is essential to try to give the same importance to the physical section as to the psychological section if we want to obtain a good performance in the test.
