Mental Skills for Endurance Athletes: January 2024 Training
Do you get in your head at the start of a race?
Keep asking yourself, ‘why am I doing this?’ as you contemplate dropping out of a race?
Finish part of a workout and start telling yourself ‘you suck, go do something else.’
Feel like an imposter?
You’re not alone. All athletes battle with up’s and down’s in their mental game. However, we’re not necessarily taught these skills and certainly isn’t what a lot of coaches are teaching.
Mental skills training is not just for elite athletes. Everyone can benefit from it. Whether you’re training for your first ultramarathon, racing Ironman Kona or trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon, developing and enhancing your mental skills is not just going to prepare you for race day but longevity as an athlete.
Mental Skills for Endurance Athletes
This Six-Session program that starts January 24th 2024. This program is designed to help athletes hone their mental skills for race day by teaching applied sport psychology skills and how to integrate them into your training over the course of a season. In addition to learning these skills, we’re going to focus on developing a healthy mindset for endurance sport so that you keep pursuing your dreams for years to come.
Each session is a seventy-five minute long Zoom call.
This isn’t a webinar.
Participants will be asked to contribute! We’ll have ample opportunity to learn about and discuss the topic as it pertains to endurance sport. This cohort is small, we have a maximum of twelve athletes and or coaches in this group so we can have dialogue, connect with one another and above all, support one another in your journey. While initially designed for ultrarunners I recognized that we all have something to learn from one another no matter the type of endurance sport.
In addition to the group sessions, we’ll schedule three individual 50-Minute coaching sessions to help you guide you in using this program and gear it for your endurance sport.
Individual Sessions will be scheduled separately.
Zoom calls will be recorded for those that may miss it although it is highly encouraged that you attend each session to participate.
Session 1 January 24, 2024
Summary – We’ll start out with introductions and an ice breaker a review of the course and dive in. You’ll find that mindfulness is interwoven through-out. That doesn’t mean we’re sitting on cushions and resighting mantra’s. It means we’re learning to be present so we can direct our focus to where it needs to be!
Topic:
Self-awareness is Key
Introduction to mindfulness
Mental Toughness, what is it?
Developing a Healthy Mindset for Endurance Sport through self-compassion, harmonious passion and optimism.
Session 2 February 7, 2024
Summary – We discuss motivation and goal setting, the underpinnings of what get’s you to the finish line and gets you to show up every day.
Topic:
Motivation: Enhancing and staying motivated.
Goals, beyond SMART one’s you’ve heard of.
Session 3 February 21, 2024
Summary - Here we go further into ‘why are we practicing mindfulness’ and how we’re going to integrate it into our sport. We’re also going to look at self-regulation- how do we get into a race composed and ready to go.
Topic:
Mindfulness: It’s role in endurance sport and developing a practice.
Self-Regulation.
Session 4 March 6, 2024
Summary - The research is unequivocal. Self-talk and imagery work. What are these skills and how we’re going to use and practice them daily so we’re prepared to compete.
Topic:
Self-Talk
Imagery
Session 5 March 20, 2024
Summary – The most important topic and where we’re headed – focus. Focus and attention is the currency of performance.
Topic:
Focus.
Session 6 April 3, 2024
Summary – During this last session we’ll put it all together. Create mental performance plans for race day, review what we’ve done and where we’ll head from here.
Topic:
Putting it all together for race day.
Not sure about all this - email me questions or to get on a list of invitees for a special 30-minute introductory webinar held in early January.