Training and thinking

For many people, heading out for a run or a bike ride offers a mental break—a chance to think about the events of the day, or about nothing at all,
while the legs navigate on autopilot. But for those who are looking to lower their best race times, a growing body of research suggests that what’s
going on in your head during training sessions can make a big difference in how effective those sessions are. “It’s not just physical intensity that
counts, it’s mental intensity,” says Joe Baker, a researcher at York University in Toronto.
Over the past few decades, psychologists have reached the remarkable conclusion that your level of achievement in fields ranging from sports
to music to science depends less on natural talent than on the number of hours you spend doing “deliberate practice,” a term coined by Florida
State University cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson. In one of his seminal studies, Ericsson found that the virtuosos at major philharmonics had
averaged 7,400 hours of deliberate practice by the age of 18; typical professionals had averaged 5,300 hours; and those who ended up teaching
violin instead of performing had spent only 3,400 hours.
Not all practice is “deliberate” practice. Rather than simply repeating tasks over and over, it involves setting specific goals and monitoring how
well you perform, constantly adjusting and improving your technique. This seems like the opposite of most training for endurance sports—heading
out the door and running for an hour at a comfortable pace, say, with no specific goals, minimal feedback, and no thought about technique.


But top endurance athletes rely on a number of training techniques that do fit the definition of deliberate practice. In a study of the training
practices of elite runners by University of Ottawa researchers Bradley Young and John Salmela, what separated the highest-performing group from
their less accomplished peers was how much they incorporated elements like interval training, tempo runs, and time trials, all of which require
ongoing attention to pace and other feedback. “High quality and high intensity, rather than long slow distance, is at the heart of deliberate practice,”
Baker says.

Traditionally, researchers have divided the mental strategies used by endurance athletes into “associative” and “dissociative.” When you’re
associating, you’re concentrating on the task at hand: your breathing, your pace, and so on. When you’re dissociating, you’re thinking about
anything but the task at hand: the weather, or last night’s TV show. A series of studies over the past few decades has demonstrated that faster
runners have more associative thoughts during competition than their slower rivals, who have more dissociative thoughts. “But there’s an important
message,” Baker notes. “No one has suggested that top runners associate all the time.”

Similarly, psychologists don’t suggest that you try to make all your training deliberate. Even the virtuoso violinists, famed for spending 10 or
more hours a day practicing, managed to average only a few hours a day of deliberate practice. For most people, the majority of exercise time
should remain relaxed, a mental diversion. But adding a segment of deliberate practice a few times a week could make a big difference in your

race performance. And there may be an added bonus. Young and Salmela’s study of elite runners produced one very unexpected result: they found
that the types of training that took the most effort and concentration—the most deliberate, in other words—were rated as the most enjoyable
sessions by the runners. So deliberate practice may be hard, but it’s satisfying—especially on game day.