Strategies for successful mental preparation for a Marathon

In sport, physical preparation is important, but mental preparation is also important.

A Marathon is an event in which you have to run for 42 km in a row, so it requires a high performance physical, tactical, technical and mental preparation, adequate to the effort that we are going to submit our body and mind.

Although there are professional athletes who participate in this event, many of them are popular runners or people who are running a marathon for the first time after a period of preparation and after completing other long-distance races (half marathon, ten thousand meters, etc.). In order to prepare for such an event, the following are needed a series of psychological coping strategies ideal for training for the Marathon, as the mental aspect will be key to the preparation of the race.The mental aspect will be key throughout many kilometers.

Strategies to prepare

As sports psychologist Jose María Buceta explains, runners tend to use techniques such as thought stopping, self-instructions and attentional refocusing plans because it has been seen that what most influences the Marathon runners in the race are their thoughts.

In this way, through proper psychological training, athletes use coping strategies such as use strategies such as coping to interrupt harmful mental activity and replace it with one that favors and replace it with another one that favors the overcoming of those critical moments and does not diminish the performance in the race.

Associative and dissociative strategies

The authors Morgan and Pollock proposed that the mental activity of Marathon runners was defined by associative and dissociative strategies. The former 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 latter involve attentional disconnection from the above factors in favor of stimuli unrelated to the activity, i.e., focusing on the scenery, the music, the audience, etc. These strategies change depending on the type of runner.

Jose Maria 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 during most of the race, alternating them with dissociative strategies in the less critical moments.

What are the emotional phases of a marathon?

It can be observed that at the psychological level, fatigue, tiredness and wear and tear are produced.The psychological level of the runner is also affected, since there are many kilometers involved in this event. Vich establishes different stages or "emotional phases" that we go through depending on the kilometers we are running.

Emotional phases of the Marathon (Vich, 2002):

Concluding

To conclude, it is important to emphasize once again that the Marathon is conditioned as much by physical qualities as by psychological ones.Since it is such a long physical effort, it requires a lot of mental toughness. Therefore, 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 and psychological aspects if we want to obtain a good performance in the race.