If you have 10k left of the run, imagine yourself at the beginning of a 10k course you’ve run a million times.

Transport yourself there.

In my first half Ironman, my run was a real mess.

I made all the rookie mistakes:

  • Pushed too hard on the bike with no consideration for the consequences it could have on the run
  • Went out way too fast in the first 5k
  • Never trained in the scorching, shade-less, relentless heat
  • Gave nutrition no thought whatsoever
  • And oh, yeah, never did any bricks in training ๐Ÿ˜…

Furthermore, I had just run the Seoul Marathon a month before and thought my sub-4 time there was sufficient enough to achieve a respectable run in a 70.3.

Leading up to that marathon, I had done the heaviest running mileage in my life, and thought that would guarantee me a glorious run in my first half Ironman.

(insert sarcastic hubris note here)

I was overconfident and under-trained.

I couldn’t figure out why it all hurt so much ๐Ÿ˜‚

So in order to survive, I had to come up with mental tricks to salvage any bit of sanity or dignity I might have had left.

A big one was imagining familiar distances and sort of overlaying them on my current course.

For example, there was a 19k run Iโ€™d do on Tuesday and Thursday mornings often over the prior few months.

I did it so many times I had pretty much every curb, corner, and crack tattooed on my memory.

I knew exactly where each km mark was, so if I was at km 10 of my race, Iโ€™d think of the surroundings at the 10km point of my familiar 19km run at home.

On this unfamiliar course, doing this gave the course a sense of familiarity to me.

These mental pictures and references were more relatable and emotionally significant than any arbitrary distance marker.

โ€œI have 11km to go,โ€ is far less meaningful than, โ€œIโ€™m almost all the way out to Sembawang Park [insert your own landmark here].โ€

I had done that run so many times that this re-calibration suddenly made the remaining distance seem trivial.

Contrast this with the daunting thought of running 11 more km in the searing heat, around some endless course Iโ€™ve never been on thatโ€™s totally unfamiliar and even unwelcoming. Or intimidating.

This newly-framed situation โ€“ repositioning the foreign as familiar – made the run a tiny bit more doable.

I have since done this in other equally painful runs and will continue to transport my senses away from the foreign and back to the familiar.


Related tips:

#18: Check the course before race day

#50: Visualize the race, especially the end