Sure, she might hold the record for the fastest 10,000m by an Australian woman at any Olympics Games, but long-distance runner, Olympian and mother-of-two Eloise Wellings’ impressive career has been anything but smooth.
In fact, it was a panic attack at the warmup track of the 2016 Rio Olympics before running that very time, which became the catalyst for her renewed interest in harnessing her mindset and using it more in her running.
“It felt like it came out of nowhere! I was in the best shape of my life, my training had been perfect… but I just felt so overwhelmed about what was ahead of me,” she explains.
As she started spiralling with “paralysing thoughts”, she realised the only way out of that harmful mindset was to be present and focus on the things that she could control. So, she broke things down, step by step, for what she had to do to get to the actual starting line – beginning just with her breathing.
“There’s no better place to train your mind than preparing for a running race,” she explains. “The challenges I’ve experienced in running have allowed me to get the best out of myself.”
But what is ‘mindset’ and how can it affect how we perform? Well, according to Rory Darkins, a positive psychology academic and Wellings’ mental skills coach, our mindset is like a “lens we see ourselves and situations through”. And we have the ability to train it.
Together with Darkins, Eloise has created a ground-breaking course, Marathon State of Mind. Normally priced at close to $1000, access to the six-week course (which includes a personalised mental game plan) is free to all TCS Sydney Marathon registered runners. Here is their advice for runners who are interested in training their mind.
STEP 1: Understand your why The first step is to understand why you are running or training in the first place. “Knowing your ‘why’ in itself is so powerful; when you go through difficult days in your running, you can think about why it’s so incredibly important to persevere,” Eloise explains.
STEP 2: Build your self-talk
Next, take notice of what you’re saying to yourself when things are not going well. “Be mindful and reflective of what you’re actually saying to yourself when you’re in pain,” she says. “Try to understand ‘Oh, my brain goes there but I don’t have to associate with ‘I can’t do this’.”
STEP 3: Be in the present
Use that self-talk to help keep your mind centred on the moment and in the race, also known as being “in the flow”. “So much of long-distance running is getting ‘in the flow’, where you stay in the present moment, not worrying about what is ahead, not fixating on
mistakes or how far you’ve come,” she explains.
STEP 4: Practice tech talk
In addition to honing your own self-talk, a helpful strategy mid run is to embrace any pain or discomfort with ‘tech talk’. “Ask yourself, ‘How can I run efficiently? What’s my body doing in this moment?’, then notice your breathing, relax your shoulders and try to manage your form,” she explains. “In my recent marathon, I said to myself, ‘be calm and efficient’. That meant calming my breathing down and going back to the things I can control.”
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