Mastering Mental Skills for Massive Gains

Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDot uses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you better results in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate, inspire, and entertain. We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches and special guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley: Hey folks! We’ve got a real heady episode of the TriDot podcast for you today. Success in our training and racing can be just as much a mental thing as it is physical. We all put in the hours swimming, biking, and running to train our body, but what are we doing to develop our mental skills as triathletes? Here today to help us unlock the performance potential of our minds is legendary endurance coach, Bobby McGee. Bobby has over 40 years of experience in the endurance sports industry as the head coach, founder, and CEO of Bobby McGee Endurance Sports. He’s worked with everything from age group athletes to USA Triathlon Olympians and specializes in running mechanics and mental skills. Bobby, thanks for joining us today!

Bobby McGee: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it.

Andrew: Also joining us is pro triathlete and coach, Elizabeth James. Elizabeth came to the sport from a soccer background and quickly rose through the triathlon ranks using TriDot from a beginner to top age grouper to a professional triathlete. She is a Kona and Boston Marathon qualifier who has coached triathletes with TriDot since 2014. Elizabeth, are you excited to help me interview legendary coach Bobby McGee today? 

Elizabeth James: Oh yes! I’m so excited. I mean mental skills are such a critical component of sports and I’ve really been looking forward to discussing this topic on the podcast. Then, I mean, today’s episode is just going to be great and I’m thrilled that we are joined today by Bobby. The expertise that he’ll provide I know is just going to make this a go-to resource for athletes. 

Andrew: Well I’m Andrew the Average Triathlete, Voice of the People and Captain of the Middle of the Pack. As always we'll roll through our warm up question, settle in for our main set topic, and then wind things down with our cool down. Lots of good stuff, let's get to it!

Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s get moving.

Andrew: As endurance athletes we love to swim, bike, and run. We love it so much that we often find ourselves trying to schedule opportunities to do one or all three even in the midst of a vacation. Bobby, Elizabeth, as you reflect on your own training sessions completed while in full blown vacation mode, which mid vacation swim, bike, or run session would you say was the most memorable for you? Coach Bobby McGee, what are you picking here? 

Bobby: Tough question for me because the whole concept of vacation is a little lost on me. I was a school teacher for a long time so weekends were coaching, weeks were teaching. So it was not a lot of vacations there and then vacations were spent working at camps and stuff…

Andrew: Yeah. 

Bobby: …with athletes and coaches. But either way I used to dabble in long course racing a little bit and my main training block was a camping holiday in South Africa in an area called the Cederberg which is quite remote actually. It’s about 100 miles from Cape Town. 

Andrew: Okay. 

Bobby: And you know these informal runs that used to bop out, most of it was just mountain biking. We had these high tensile steel mountain bikes that made us real strong for long course racing. But we would try and find swimming and there’s odd lakes there. It’s a dry area. So one of these days we found this beautiful little concrete bridge and the water was really accelerating under the bridge and we decided to do our swim workout there. We just sort of jumped in and I’ve never swum in a flume in my life before and it that was basically a flume. It was just swimming upstream staying in the same place…

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: …and then moved to the side, stand in the shallow water, catch your breath and dive back in again and swim in the same place and it was magical because you could see fish and the water moving down below you and it was very much treadmill running in the water for me. It was an amazing workout and we finished it up by doing just a little five mile run and I remembered I had left my running shoes at the camp and I ran in flip flops for five miles and it was just perfect. So it was definitely a joyful workout for me in a holiday mode. 

Andrew: No, that certainly stands out. It’s almost like, I mean you compared it to a treadmill, but it’s almost like a natural endless pool you know and just get in and swim. How was your running form in flip flops? Did your form break down at all? Were you able to run kind of close to normal? 

Bobby: Well, I’m a midfoot guy so flip flops worked pretty well, but I’m also quite externally rotated so in that case I wiped out the outsides of the flip flops. But otherwise, no not too much trouble and it’s not like we were going six minute pace, right? 

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh for sure. Elizabeth, what about for you? What is a– from all of your traveling while you were truly vacationing, what was a workout you got in that was memorable? 

Elizabeth: Yes, and that’s the qualifier there– truly vacationing. 

Andrew: Yes. 

Elizabeth: Because right now, vacation is going to race. But you know, we’re picking races where– oh where do we want to see? What part of the world do we want to travel to? 

Andrew: All for it. 

Elizabeth: But I’d say for me, my parents' 25th wedding anniversary they planned a trip to Maui and just lucky us they brought the kids with them for the anniversary celebration. So there was a day where just everybody was kind of doing their own thing and I went to a local bike shop, rented a bike, and just asked where they would recommend riding. So there was this 80 mile loop, it’s called the West Maui Loop, and it was just beautiful. I mean, I didn’t bring my bike shoes with me so not as courageous as running in flip flops, but I was back to tennis shoes on top of the pedals and just gym shorts and a tank top, but oh my gosh. I’m so glad I did the ride. It was just gorgeous and just spent a couple hours out there. I will say it was also memorable for me because I am terrible with directions. I normally don’t like riding by myself because it is almost a given that I will get lost and for some reason I was feeling brave enough to go do 80 miles by myself in Hawaii in tennis shoes, but glad I did. 

Andrew: Yeah, no, and you 80 miles in tennis shoes and a tank top on pedals probably finished that 80 miles faster than I could have on my TT bike in my cycling shoes. So I’m sure you were the strongest cyclist on the road that day not wearing cycling shoes. But no, that’s a great pick. For me I was thinking of all the coolest places that I could pick for this. It wasn’t truly a vacation. It’s kind of what you’re talking about, Elizabeth, where you pick a race somewhere neat and while you’re there you’re obviously training so a lot of our traveling has been for that. So the one I could think of that was truly a vacation, where we weren’t there to race, we weren’t there to train. For my wife’s birthday a few years back we decided to go to Washington D.C. My wife’s birthday is close to Christmas, just a few days away, so it was kind of Christmas season in D.C. and so everything had Christmas lights everywhere and we were actually staying at the famous Watergate Hotel. So I took an evening while my wife was getting ready for the dinner we were going to that night, I had kind of a spare hour, and just from the Watergate just ran up the Potomac to where the Mall is and kind of ran all the way down the Mall to the Capital Building and back and then went back down to the Watergate and that was pretty cool. Just an evening run. It was chilly. The air was nice and crisp and just to see all those famous buildings in the Washington D.C. Capitol Mall area lit up for Christmas time at night was definitely a memorable one and really, actually the only time I could think of where I truly did a workout on a trip that was a pure vacation for my wife and I. So that’s the pick for me. 

Hey guys, we’re going to throw this out to y’all on social media. Make sure you are a part of the I AM TriDot Facebook group. We have thousands of athletes just talking swim, bike, run every single day in that group and we always throw out this warm up question to you guys to see what you have to say. Can’t wait to give you the chance to kind of brag on your vacations and brag on the really cool spots. Bonus points if you drop a Strava file to show us exactly where you did your workout while you were in full on vacation mode. 

Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in 3…2…1…

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Andrew: Being a well-rounded athlete has as much to do with your mental fortitude as it does your physical fitness. I’m sure we’ve all encountered a workout or a moment in a race where the body was willing, but the mind just wasn’t there to push to our capacity. We can follow the training plan and know our bodies are getting stronger and fitter, but how can we improve our mental strength so that we can get the best out of ourselves in our training and racing. Bobby, before we get too deep into our conversation here about the mental game being played in endurance sports training, can you just kind of share a little bit about your background, how you got into coaching, and what led to your strong interest in running mechanics and sports psychology? 

Bobby: Good question. I wanted to be a coach from the very beginning so I basically at 17 went to college to study human movement studies. Then by the time I got around to doing what so many of us do, that’s study exercise physiology, I decided to do my post grad work in perceptual motor aspects and in sports psychology. So that’s where that started and back in those days South Africa hadn’t got back into the Olympics because of the sports embargos and all those different embargos against apartheid. So the highest level you could go to was basically be a school teacher and then coach part time, but I was very lucky that my sports psych professor was the first guy brought on board in ‘92 when we went to the Olympics to be in charge of the sports psychology component and he wrote me in in writing those first progressions for athletes going to the Olympics and how we should prepare them mentally. So I was hooked from the start and in fact my final thesis was on a tool for athletes to prepare themselves mentally for major competitions and I used that tool for many years thereafter. So I’ve been in this role of a coach even before I was any level of athlete. 

Andrew: Oh wow. 

Bobby: Then the second part with the mechanics, that’s interesting, right? So if you look at the percentage of people that qualify in human movement studies and do a degree in sports science, it’s typically going down the physiological pathway when it comes to endurance events. You know, if you look at all of those things that are involved with what makes a person an efficient distance athlete whether that be triathlon or whether it be running or cycling or swimming, and prominently one of those factors is mechanical efficiency. But there’s so few people relative to those that study exercise physiology, that study mechanics for a start, and then mechanics has a very low hierarchy level when it comes to running because running is such a primary sport. We pretty much know about running before walking because race walking is a construct whereas running is a primal activity and so a lot of coaches and a lot of athletes to this day believe you only mess with your running mechanics to avoid injuries or to learn how to not injure yourself and the concept that it plays a huge role in terms of your efficiency, overall, has been not well documented or studied. Then the amount of people that can actually teach that and approach it are even less. So it fascinated me so I’ve been a coach pretty much since day one. 

Elizabeth: That’s just so cool. I mean, you mentioned also working with these Olympic athletes and you’ve worked with a number of Olympians and the USAT Olympic hopefuls helping prepare them for events as recent as Rio and Tokyo. How rewarding is it to help athletes really make that leap into that Olympic level?

Bobby: It’s massively rewarding, but at the same time there’s a lot of it that is similar to just working with a regular age group athlete, right? They have the same kind of aspirations, they just have different talents. And almost at the elite level athlete is trying to make a living, obviously trying to get to the Olympics– Olympics add a different wrinkle to it, right? There’s an emotional component too there, but it’s a really, really good question. Actually somebody asked me a similar question and I took the starting list of the men’s race in Tokyo and I took the starting list of the woman’s race in Tokyo and I’ve had some work with 9 of those men and 11 of those women and I’ve had some work with both the gold medalists; one very little, but the other one quite a lot. So it just shows it gets in your blood. I remember going to Barcelona which was my first Olympics and saying I never want to miss this party again. It’s the greatest party on the planet. So you deal a lot with, I think, having that imposter syndrome, right? How is it possible that these people want to work with me? But I guess after all these years and various champions and things, at some point you have to say, “Well, I’ve obviously got something that’s useful.” But it’s very rewarding. I feel honored and privileged to be able to work with athletes of this caliber year in and year out. I’m not the youngest chicken on the block anymore, but I still find that people think that what I have to offer is relevant. So it’s honoring and exciting. 

Andrew: So you have a great friendship with the founder of TriDot and the CEO of TriDot, Jeff Booher, and you guys go way back working on projects together at the Olympic training center, college recruitment programs, and the Tri for Him junior and professional team. What do you remember from those early days working with Jeff and what has it been like watching him develop TriDot? 

Bobby: You know, the junior community which was the context in which I first met Jeff is a bunch of coaches that I know well from my early days from being a high school track and field coach and a cross country coach. Super enthusiastic, super motivated, super in need of expertise and knowledge and they’re all sponges and they vibrated at quite a high level, right? But when I got to meet Jeff he was completely the opposite. He’s always calm, he’s always collected. He’s never at the forefront. He’s not– So that attracted me to Jeff in the first place. He had this huge heart and this huge capacity to– and I related to him because I sometimes think Jeff should be more utilized because of his capabilities. But because he’s not so rah-rah-rah out there, very, very about pushing himself he hasn’t sometimes got to where I think he should have got to. Just always gravitated towards him when we get to these competitions and so on. When he comes to camps he would always ask his questions afterwards in a private setting and very thoughtful about how he phrased his questions. So he’s just a joy to be around, you know, just an exemplary human being. 

Andrew: So Bobby, as we start to talk about mental skills and improving ourselves mentally for sport and for competition, what do we mean by mental skills? When you start working with an athlete on their “mental game” what does that training and what do those conversations look like? 

Bobby: You know, we don’t have all the time in the world and it’s something that really, really interests me so I think the best place to start off is by saying in endurance sports specifically, all our training sessions is mental training. So you go out and you put your feet to the fire and then you deal with those consequences and that’s where your mental training starts, right? So I always feel that there’s two components. Knowing how you respond under those pressure situations and how much pressure you do put yourself under in a training session. Then the second part of mental training– really all good coaches know this and it is knowledge. So the athlete knows their competition, knows the course, knows their fitness, knows their skills, knows their tactical capabilities. Those things are actually at the heart of what confidence is. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: So to me that’s the start of going, “What doesn’t the athlete know?” So just an interesting antidote there is very often with this privilege that I’ve spoken about of meeting elite athletes and being able to work with them is that concept that people that have knowledge and have something that they can offer these athletes don’t do so because they believe the athletes should know these things. How do they get to be so good? I’m constantly shocked at how elite athletes don’t know things that I taught my 15 and 14 and 16-year-old…

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: …high school runners because nobody bothered to teach them. If some kid comes out and he’s 18 years old and he runs a sub four minute mile there’s suddenly a whole lot of people that don’t want to give him anything because they believe he knows and that they will embarrass themselves. Sometimes with mental skills, just like physical stuff, you have to go to the fundamentals. What does the athlete want? What does the athlete know? What is their current practice? And then start from there. Then the last thing you really want to say is that teaching somebody mental skills, starts off with the fundamental understanding that everybody can learn these mental skills. That you’re not working with an individual that has some situation that they should be seeing a psychotherapist for. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Bobby: Which is what we don’t do and shouldn’t do and can’t do. So you trying to help an athlete– If you ask a top class golfer or NBA player or elite athlete at a very high level in the sport, why do they have a sports psychologist? What’s wrong? What’s broken? They say, “No, no. I’m going for an edge. This is where I get an edge.” They get words and understanding and insight to their process and then can figure out, okay how can I do that better because they want to win. So that’s what mental skills are about is enhancing performance. So Peter Haberl is somebody that I have a great deal of respect for and he’s the head sports psychologist for the USOPC and we always work– He’s always taught me that. That your entrance into that is mental skills. So it’s all about being able to execute your physical ability. So he would say, “You’re never going to perform well no matter how good your mental skills are if you just don’t have it. If you don’t have the fitness, the conditioning, the talent, the ability. But if you have all those things and you don’t have the mental skills, you’re guaranteed to fail.” So it’s the portal through which performance comes. You can’t have great mental skills and then be a roof screw like I am in terms of talent and hope to perform at an Olympic level. You know what I’m saying? 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: I love how you talk about it as that portal for performance. I know that the mental aspect of sport was huge for me as I was making the transition from an age group competitor to racing professionally and that was something that racing as an elite was thrilling. It was the fulfillment of the dream and also terrifying. You know, that lack of knowledge of what is this going to be like? The fear of failure was so high for me that as I began that transition in early 2020 my coach, John, and I recognized that this is going to be essential for me to work on my mental preparation as well as continue my physical training. So I work with a sports psychologist and I work on the knowledge, the confidence, addressing fear of failure, self-awareness as well as then the specifics for competing on a particular course and particular pre-race routines. So that’s just a really cool way to think of it as the portal to performance. 

Bobby: It’s funny how that term that you state, fear of failure, comes up. I worked with a group in Boulder called Fast Forward and their head coach comes from winter sports. His name is Scott Fliegelman and he eventually came up with a t-shirt with a cassette on it and it said, “Prerecorded for success. Just press play.” And to me that was a great way to look at– because I’m always saying when you are under duress in an endurance sport, you are intoxicated, right? You are not able to think clearly and you really need to pre-plan the content of your thoughts. 

Elizabeth: Uh-huh. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: Another top coach that I work with and uber sports scientist is Dean Golich and he’s coached multiple medalists and world champions and Tour de France athletes and so on. He says coaching elites at that level is really, really easy because there’s no surprises on race day. Now he specializes in cycling coaching as well, but what he’s pertaining to is the numbers are the numbers and if you don’t produce the numbers on race day then there’s something mentally going on. It’s very simple math. Did the coach make a mistake? Was the taper wrong? Was the training wrong? If none of those things occurred then we have a mental situation that we need to deal with because that portal wasn’t open. It didn’t allow the performance to come out. A very freeing concept for mental skills teachers as well as coaches is they don’t give the athlete anything. They just remove everything that is not performance. 

Elizabeth: Um-hmm. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: So the gold is right there, we just reach inside and shake the other stuff off so that the athlete is aware that, “Oh I do have it. All I have to do is express it.” 

Andrew: That’s a cool way to look at it even as an athlete is just knowing that what I need on race day to succeed, what I need in my training to succeed is already in there. 

Bobby: Exactly. 

Andrew: I might just not know how to tap into it. I might be looking at the wrong things or getting distracted by things like fear of failure and just mentally kind of not getting my– You hear the phrase, somebody couldn’t get out of their own way. 

Bobby: Yep, yep. 

Andrew: Sometimes it takes a coach to help you get out of your own way and get out of your own head. We were in Waco a couple days before Ironman Waco and I’m sitting at a table having dinner with TriDot coach John Mayfield, TriDot coach Joanna Nami, TriDot coach Kurt Madden and then my wife and I and then TriDot athlete Shannon Cranson. So we’re all sitting there at dinner and all the coaches at the table are just having this great in depth conversation about the things they do with their athletes, the ways they communicate with their athletes and I’m just sitting there quiet as a mouse just soaking it all in and listening and Coach Kurt Madden was talking about the types of conversations he’ll have with his athletes heading into race day. It’s exactly what you’re talking about just in terms of okay, when you’re on the course, when you’re in that moment of intoxication where you’re not able to maybe think clearly because you’re in the middle of pushing your body in an endurance event. When you get to T1, what are you going to be thinking about? What are you going to be focusing on? What are you going to be trying to do? We know in our heads, okay I’ve got to get to my bike. I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that, but we don’t always stop to think through what am I going to be thinking about in that moment to help me process through it? And as he was talking about this he looked at me and he was like, “Andrew, for example. In your race when you get to T2, you get off the bike, what are you going to be thinking about?” And I was able to kind of stop and process and say “Okay, when I get to T2 I’m going to be coming off the bike. I’ll have just ridden 112 miles. It’s going to be 90 degrees. I’m going to be hot, probably a little dehydrated. That transition is just totally exposed to the sun so I’m going to be thinking about park your bike, get your running shoes on, and get onto the run course so that you’re out of the sun and into the shade.” So him asking that question helped me process, in that moment what do I need to be thinking about and that was just so cool to hear coaches kind of talk about that. I think watching those coaches coach when I travel to events, the number one thing they give to athletes isn’t necessarily the training. The training is already there with TriDot. The number one thing that our TriDot coaches give to their athletes is those mental skills and the idea of just how to think through moment to moment. How to get through those tough training sessions. How to get through those key moments in a race. So Bobby, as we’re preparing for race day, mentally what are the concrete things that we can do in our training to mentally be ready for race day?

Bobby: Yeah, you’re going to have to remind me along the way because you brought up a whole lot of very important points. So, Elizabeth brought up that point of fear of failure, right? So when you listen to things like fear of failure, remember how excited we all got when we heard about the twisties in gymnastics. It’s a new concept for us and we’ve heard about the yips in golf. In twisties you lose spatial orientation, right? The yips in golf is you muscularly freeze. You’re neurologically not able to draw the club back. So this fear of failure in endurance sports is something that you really want to look at from the start and say, okay– it’s something that’s said a lot, but do we really think about what it means? To me the whole thing with– You know the acronym for fear is False Evidence Appearing Real, right? 

Elizabeth: Um-hmm. 

Bobby: Then we create a paradigm about our fitness and what we should be able to achieve and the true source of healthy anxiety before a race is based on our expectation of ourself…

Andrew: Yeah. 

Bobby: …and how embarrassing it will be to us if we don’t achieve what it would seem is obvious we should be able to achieve, right? So that’s the main cause of anxiety. I’m not going to do as well as I want to do and think I should do. 

Andrew: Yep, 100%.

Bobby: Yeah. So what I always remind an athlete of is to take a very in depth look at the source of the information that created the paradigm. How did you come to this point that that would be good and that would be bad? It’s like the same definition in training, right? It’s not slow and fast, it’s easy and hard because that covers everybody, but slow and fast doesn’t cover everybody, right? 

Andrew: Umm yeah. 

Bobby: So Gwen goes out and she does a run and she’s running 7:30s then she’s kind of upset because that’s slow, right? And most of us go through our lives and say you know if I could run one 7:30 mile I’ll be psyched. So it’s looking at where are we sourcing that information. Who told us that? What data are we using, right, because data’s important, but not all data is relevant. So when you start having that conversation saying, “What do you think you can do today?” Then you can introduce things like, but what about the weather? What about the humidity? What about the wind? What about the chop? What about this? What about that? So again, in my work with Peter Haberl the first part is self-knowledge. So the hardest time in the whole world for an elite coach is when the athlete walks out onto the pontoon and you have no idea what they’re thinking. You’re hoping they’re thinking what they were thinking before their best workouts. I remember working on this mental piece with a US Paralympic coach leading into 2016 into Rio and afterwards he said to me, “The most important thing you said to me is it doesn’t matter how many world championships these athletes have been to, the Olympics are different.” Nobody knows what they’re doing in the Olympics. It’s a complete– It’s a different country. It’s different people. It’s not the same crew running the show and so you’ve got to be the only thing they know that is constant. You’ve got to be the constant. He said that made the most difference of creating an environment that they can latch onto some stuff that is common for them and that is wrote for them and is calm for them. So I start this process off with saying to athletes, “You need to keep an internal dialog log.” What is different between your thinking on race day versus your thinking on intense quality workouts that are fundamental workouts to your race performance. So finding out how you think and there’s only one way to do that and that’s mindfulness. Because what does mindfulness do? Mindfulness starts making you aware of what your thoughts are. It doesn’t help you sort them. It doesn’t help you control them or anything, but it makes you aware of what they are and then when you start doing breath counting or mindful walking or any of these sort of things, now you start realizing, “Oh, I have this ability to shift my focus around and what I need to be able to do is to make my focus intentional.” Now there’s this one little quirky thing in endurance psychology. Endurance is a rogue movement, it’s a pattern movement. It just gets going, it doesn’t even get up to the brain. Running for example happens in your lumbar spine. It’s called your extensor cross reflex. If you think about your running form when you are fresh you get something called cognitive intervention or paralysis by analysis. So your automatic brain operates let’s say 50,000 megahertz and your conscious brain operates at like 5,000 megahertz. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: So the minute you start thinking about executing a movement like the swim stroke or the cycling pedal stroke or the running, you become inefficient. You use more oxygen, you expose yourself to injury, and you just can’t go as far as you would be able to go at the same intensity. 

Andrew: Fascinating. 

Bobby: It is fascinating stuff. So when I first read this question it occurred to me that the question is wrong. 

Andrew: Okay. 

Bobby: Before a race is too late. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: It’s got to be a continual process and now as we’re starting to learn with physiology, you don’t really want to necessarily taper that hard into a race because things start to get switched off and it’s the same thing with your mentality. You don’t want this up special mentality before races. You want this rock solid, anti-fragile approach to racing. It’s what you do. You’ll often see it in very experienced athletes. You don’t see that same kind of anxiety and anguish because they go, “I’m always nervous. I always end up doing it anyway. It doesn’t change anything.” And then they slowly say “It’s just a race.” 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Bobby: “And I’m in the race.” I don’t know if you remember that Gene Hackman movie, Hoosiers, the basketball movie.

Andrew: Yes. Yeah. 

Elizabeth: Um-hmm. 

Bobby: You know, remember when he took them down to the court and he took out the tape measure and he measured the court and he said, “Look, it’s the same size as the court at home.” 

Elizabeth: Same size, yep. 

Bobby: Yeah. That’s the whole thing. I know that was a longer answer than you wanted, but that’s where I would start is how does the athlete think? What are they thinking? Where do they source their belief mechanism for this specific event or in general about their ability? 

Elizabeth: That’s awesome. Another thing that I know that we wanted to touch on a little bit today was goal setting and I do. I like goal setting. John and I did an episode about it back on, gosh, like episode 17 I think. I know–

Andrew: 100 episodes ago. 

Elizabeth: Yes, exactly. I know this is something that you use with athletes. Could you talk us through how you discuss goals and how solid short and long-term goals can help us in our training. 

Bobby: Yeah, those coaches that did their sports psych level 1, USAT training will know this by the conversation pretty well. Quite recently psychologists kind of took to look at the lessons that are being taught by these life skills teachers, right, like Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra and so on and they undertook a study to see if these principles would really work in terms of psychological terms. So instead of having an anecdotal approach to so and so earned $100 a month and after doing my program they now earn $10,000 a month kind of thing. They literally looked at the mechanisms and they found in a surprisingly large amount of cases that these techniques were very effective. One of the things that I stole from Tony Robbins was the difference between goals and targets. In its simplest format a target is a placeholder along the way. So I’ve got to do this in a workout. So I’ll give Gwen a workout for example and I’ll say, “Alright, our ultimate goal for this workout is this.” So we’ve got a date pace, what you achieve today. The next workout will be date pace plus, right? So in other words it will be better than today, but it won’t be what we’re looking for ultimately. Each workout has this target to hit this number because the next one will be a little better and a little better and that’s how I would deem most of these performance goals. These are the sets in the pool. So for this set ultimately you want to do this if you want to be able to swim to that capacity, etcetera, etcetera. Then for goals, make those being goals. In other words what type of person do you want to be? In other words now you can go into a race and have this being goal where today I’m going to be patient and nothing can impact that goal other than you. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: So if you fall off your bike you can still be patient. When you get back on your bike, check your bike, check yourself and then slowly move up to where you need to be. So that will be patience. If you get up and you forget to check your bike out and you just rush off and you go too fast and then you blow up then you’ve failed in that target of being patient. But no cow walking in the middle of the road or no wind storm or no bomb cyclone that cancels the event should be able to impact your goals because they are much more personal about who you need to be to achieve what you want to achieve. Because then you get to that whole concept of in your race plan, you have this trust in your race plan that it only provides the highest likelihood that you’ll perform. If you don’t follow the plan you reduce the likelihood that you’ll perform, but there’s never any guarantees otherwise it wouldn’t be called sport. But what you’re trying to do is to address those things that are capable of being addressed and consciously being aware that you’re paying attention to things that you can do nothing about and putting them down. So sports psychology 101 is avoid the don’t because when you tell somebody not to do something you might as well tell them to do that thing. 

Andrew: Of course. Yeah. 

Bobby: It’s exactly the same thing in brain psychology. So if you don’t want to go out too fast, how do you need to go out fast? So that’s the– I never actually said it. That’s the thing that’s different about endurance sports. You don’t want that cognitive intervention. So when you’re standing on the start line you don’t want to have a lot of technical thoughts. You want to be using mood words. You want to be saying things like smooth, well-paced, prepared, capable, tough, strong. Things that are general. That’s being goals, right? I’m going to be tough today. No matter how badly it goes or how well it goes you’re still going to be tough. Or are you going to fail and say, look, I wasn’t as tough as I can be today, but it was nobody’s fault .It wasn’t conditions or my bike or anything like that. Does that make sense? 

Elizabeth: This conversation is just awesome. Even as we’re here I’m still jotting a couple notes, nodding along. This is fun. 

Andrew: Elizabeth, I invited you on this one because I knew of all of our staff you would probably appreciate it more than anybody to be a part of this one. 

Elizabeth: Yes, yes. Well I appreciate that. I was thrilled. Another thing I know that we wanted to touch on today was visualization. How can this help prepare us either in our workouts or for race day? 

Bobby: So they started a study called a MO Gap study where they started asking medalists about what mental skills they used and they asked them thousands of questions, but one of them was what mental tool do you feel is the best tool that you can have? Most of them, the large majority, said imagery. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: Then subsequently there had been a number of high profile athletes, Nadal and Woods and Jack Nicholas and Simone Biles have spoken about how they do this, right? So I’ve been fascinated by that all along because A, we all do mental imagery. For example, Tiger Woods doesn’t like to do imagery because it makes him jittery. 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: So he does a form of physical rehearsal like slow motion movements which is a kind of imagery, right? So he’s looking for a feel. Then a lot of people don’t think in pictures, they don’t think in movies, right? But if you do the studies with athletes they get triggered by smells. They get triggered by tactile things. They get triggered by taste. A common one is they get triggered by music, a certain tune. In my day it was Vangelis and Chariots of Fire that was always playing when you showed up at an event. Now days it’s a little bit more Eye of the Tiger, but they are starting to go downhill as well. I don’t know what the latest one is, but there are all these triggers. So the big thing with imagery is to work from ground zero. What is the athlete doing in that regard? If they are seeing negative things, they’re seeing themselves falling apart, seeing themselves going through that– I think in fact in the 70’s or the 80’s when they did research on visualization they found that that’s the one part they try to avoid in visualization is seeing yourself fail. So they wanted people to go through, they wanted people to utilize as many senses as possible, they wanted to do all that kind of thing. Nowadays the big thing is trying to create training environments that absolutely mimic the race conditions and having the athletes get comfortable in those environments which is hard in triathlon. But either way it’s like which one of the senses that you visualize works for you? So that’s my take on imagery is that it must be well trained and you’ve got to be aware of what is the athlete seeing? How do they experience it? Does it calm them down? Does it get them to an optimal state of arousal? With endurance athletes mostly they need to be calmed down. Weight lifters they need to be calmed up. They need to be revved up, right? But if you look at sports psychology study they talk about the Bell Curve. You can be under aroused and you can be over aroused and you’ve got to be just aroused at the right level. 

Andrew: You need to be properly aroused. 

Bobby: Properly aroused, yeah. Basically speaking is with endurance athletes they just need to be brought down a little bit because it’s a very difficult thing for the anthropological mind to consider how they’ll feel in four or five or six or seven or ten hours’ time. 

Andrew: Bobby, it’s fascinating to hear you talk about. I’ve never considered visualization or imagery in terms of the other senses, in terms of what music might trigger you to a certain moment or what tactile or sense might trigger you to a certain feeling or emotion or state of mental wellbeing before a race or before a tough workout. For me it’s always been mentally putting myself there and I don’t remember ever being aware of imagery playing a role in my training and racing until I signed up for Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon and that swim just kind of intimidated me a little bit. So when I was in the pool I was being very intentional about, okay when you breathe to the right kind of picture in your mind the Golden Gate Bridge being there and when you breathe to the left picture the other side of the bay being there and that really kind of helped stabilize me once I was in the water because I felt like I had been there before in a way. 

Bobby: Absolutely. That’s why it’s called rehearsal, right? 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Bobby: It’s very, very important. Yeah, very good. That’s a good job. 

Andrew: All of my visualization that I feel like I’ve cognitively done or intentionally done was imagery and it was physically trying to visualize what that moment looks like and I’ve never considered that there’s other senses you can tap into. 

Bobby: You are already tapping into, right?

Andrew: Yeah. 

Bobby: If you bring consciousness to it then you bring intentional focus to it. Another thing I like to do is to help an athlete create the future from the future. So instead of looking at the finish from where you are now on a timeline, you go beyond the finish and look back and say, “How did that race go?” two, three weeks before the race. What’s going to be your dialog? Something I’ll often ask athletes is write your race report now. I know you’re racing in three weeks’ time, but write your race report for me now. Speak about feelings, speak about emotions. Tell me the first thing you are going to say to yourself when you cross the finishing line. What are you going to say to yourself? Work on that, then you up the accountability level. You’re naming the colors to the mast. I say it. This is what I was going to say and this is what I was going to do and now it holds you more accountable in the moment when you’re just on your own. It basically puts a relay baton in the athlete’s hand and then they’re accountable to their future self which you know how relays work right? You put a baton in somebody’s hand and they’re far more accountable. 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: Alright, so by design, race day can be tough. When you are trying to get the best out of yourself, you’re pushing yourself to the limit, it takes the body being ready, but also the mind to be ready just to have that extra edge. So when we’re out on the race course and things start to get tough or mentally we start to feel like we’re in a dark place or we’re fading. What are your top tips for getting through those moments? 

Bobby: Start with an anecdote. In the final… In Rio… In the triathlon… I have a husband texting me saying “I need cues! I need cues! What do I say?” Just an indication that, you know– pre-planning those things, right? When things go wrong having a plan in place anyway. I love the old, again the Tiger Woods quote, right? “I expect the best, but I prepare for the worst.” So you’ll be able to look at something and say “Well this is not the worst thing that can happen to me. What can I do?” But understanding from psychology how the brain works, right? The brain has a feeling and then there’s a sort of interpretation, but it’s unconscious of that feeling and then you have an emotion. Then the emotion creates a thought and the thought is basically presenting you with some choices. You know what the choices are. You flat out panic from that side, right? It’s time to flat out panic. Let’s just panic and it’s going into a bike accident where you do that versus going “Okay, if I do this I can present a different side of me. I can get my bike between me and the vehicle or whatever the case might be.” But seeing those choices immediately empowers you and you can now start making– “Okay now at least I get to make the choice.” Again, the internal locus of control. So this is happening, this is happening, this is happening. So it’s the same thing as a race plan, right? So the race plan is designed around ideal circumstances, right? 

Andrew: Yeah.

Bobby: And if those ideal circumstances are hard and you’ve mentally prepared for it etcetera, etcetera and you’ve chosen your pace like that. But showing up at the start line and conditions aren’t what you’ve prepared for, it’s not– this is very common from the age group athlete is “I’m just going to see how it goes. I’m going to stick to the plan and then when it falls apart we’ll make a decision.” That’s the fatal error right there. No. You see a choice. Make the choice. From the get go, what in my toolbox is useful? Is agonizing about my condition and I feel terrible and I’m nauseous and I’m puking and I’m hot and I’m this… Is that helping you? What can you do? Oh, I can shorten my stride length. I can scrunch and release my shoulders. What can I actually do? I can take a short, chosen walk break. I can hydrate. I can do this. I can do that. So it’s just feeling in control and this might be a good time to speak about the difference between self-confidence and self-efficaciousness. 

Andrew: Sure. Go for it. Yeah. 

Bobby: To me this is what they learned from the mass Olympians. Kids that showed up in a questionnaire as not being confident did really, really well and they asked them when they go in what are they thinking? And the kids feel that they were self-confident were subjectively saying I think I’m good enough. I’m not going to embarrass myself here. I think I’ll be able to win, etcetera, etcetera. The kids that were more effective were self-efficacious. This is Bandura’s work from the 70’s, right? So they were thinking about what do they have to do? So if I get this math problem, which equation do I use? So that’s how they visualize it. They’re visualizing problem solving. They’re not visualizing ego stuff. How am I going to feel? Am I going to look good? Am I going to win this? What happens if I don’t win? What happens if I do poorly? And none of their thinking is there. They’re thinking about the doing. So now I’m dying out here. What are the signs? I’m dehydrated. What do I need to do? I need to find some electrolytes. I need to get some fluid in me. I need to regather myself. So walking is moving forward so I’m going to take a little walk break and I’m going to look at my options, etcetera, etcetera. At the next aid station I’m going to do this than the other or I’m going to shuffle. I’m not going to be putting out a lot of range of motion, etcetera, etcetera. Because how many people forget that they have two gels? They forget that they have a glucose tab hidden away. They forget that they have an extra bottle or that the next aid station is a mile away and they’ve got a special needs bag there or whatever the case might be. It all goes out the window. You know, it’s presence. It’s literally presence and working with what’s in your toolbox and to me that’s why mechanics is so beautiful because I can’t teach people great mechanics. What I can do is teach them to maintain their mechanics for a longer period of time, hopefully for the duration of the race. So my best compliment is “Wow, that athlete came out of transition and they stayed exactly the same from start to finish. Nothing changed.” So that’s looking into your toolbox. That’s doing the body check. Where are my shoulders? Where’s my chest? Where’s my chin? What am I doing with my arms? And then addressing those things and going through them. With Barb Lindquist I’ve put a little stopwatch inside of her suit that would just beep every minute and every minute it was just reminding her to go through her cues. Are you doing this? Are you doing that? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? Then she would remember, okay I’ve got to do this. These are my typical failures when I start to fatigue; my arms get forward or my shoulders get hunched or my chin goes up or whatever the case might be. Address those things because you can. In terms of go harder, you’ve got to pick up the pace. No I’m an elite athlete or I’m a really good athlete, I would pick up the pace if I could. 

Elizabeth: Yes, that’s so true. That’s so true. 

Bobby: Tell me how I do that. 

Elizabeth: So there are some athletes that are confident in training. They can nail their training sessions day in, day out, feel good in the pool, confident in their ability on the bike, they know that they’ve got the run in the bag, but then race morning comes they get nervous, they underperform or they get into the water, they panic and it kind of throws off their day. What would you say to athletes who are kind of good at the homework, but struggle with test day so to speak? How can they learn to ace race day? 

Bobby: So we’re talking about 98% of the population, right? 

Elizabeth: Pretty much. 

Andrew: I would say so. 98% of the endurance athletes, yes. 

Bobby: So I can be a little facetious here…

Andrew: Sure.

Bobby: …and I can say, okay they don’t like test day. So you can change the name of test day or whatever. You could call it– In your own mind it could be as a coach you’ve got this is my assessment workout, but I’m not telling anybody about it, right? The other thing is if they don’t like time trials, give them more time trials until they’re so bored with time trials that they just give you a physical representation of what they’re capable of on the day. But bottom line is what I eluded to earlier. The internal dialog has changed. So there was either false bravado or some sort of mindset that was ego involved saying “I want this, I’m good at this” even to themselves when they are so vocalizing in front of the mirror, “You’ve got this, you’ve got this, you’ve got this.” That’s gone away now on race day because the microscope is now fully on them. So the really, really good athletes like to open their mouth and say “I’m going to do this. This is what I’m going to do.” They nail that intent out there and then they hold themselves accountable for that. Most athletes are one of two things. We all knew them in high school, right? I didn’t study for this test and then they ace the test. Either they’re doing the work behind that or they’re brilliant students. One of the two. But that’s part of that interplay that you need to consider is what changes. Internal dialog, what changes? They’re suddenly thinking about how they’re going to be viewed versus what they’re capable of. So you go from self-efficacious to ego and you go like, “How am I going to be evaluated today if I don’t do this.” So very often you’ll see those individuals that don’t suffer from that. They have that kind of mentality. A good way to look at it is to say if somebody is generally quiet and then they motor mouth on race day, they’re not the same person. 

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. 

Bobby: So they’re not showing up on race day and vice versa. If they generally are outspoken and so on and suddenly just dead quite, crickets on race day, then you know uh-oh. There’s a different person in there; mindsets. Like I spoke about earlier, the coaches watch their athlete walking out to the podium and they’re saying “Please, please, please be the same athlete I know.” Because if that athlete doesn’t show up then that’s literally what not showing up means. That’s literally what– why they call it the internal dialog. There’s two components to that and so you might have the white angel talking to you all the time through training and then the little red devil shows up on race day and he gets to run his mouth. So it’s who’s talking? Because remember that’s what your mind does. Your mind produces thoughts all the time and there’s habituation to the thoughts it produces when you’re training well. Then as soon as it’s no longer producing those thoughts, then it’s a different mechanism at play and it’s basically a different person. So that’s what happens in these long races. You’re present, you’re present, you’re present to your plan and then suddenly you start feeling tired and that has the emotions and the feelings and all those sort of things going on with it. So you stop thinking about what you’ve done and what you’ve still got to do. You’ve still got a long way to go and now you go past and future based thinking and you’re not present. Research has shown over and over again when you’re not present the power goes down, the efficiency goes down, the ability goes down. You must have had that feeling Elizabeth. You’re in the bars, you’re racing along and suddenly you’re seeing a heart rate number and a power number matched up to each other that you’ve never seen before. You’re in a flow state. You are flying and the minute you cognitively realize that, boom, up goes the heart rate, down goes the power or something like that and you lose it, right? 

Andrew: Wow. 

Elizabeth: It’s like, “Wow! Where did that come from!” 

Bobby: Yes exactly, exactly. Now you start– the other part of you, the observer, the peanut gallery that’s sitting up there and commentating on how good or how bad you are, the value judger is now in charge. Don't’ make a fool of yourself out there now. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t be silly. This that and the other. That’s the commentator. The commentator has got no fitness, no ability, has done no training, just wants to shoot their mouth off Monday morning quarterback before the race. So being aware of where you are at, being able to literally say, “Ahh, I hear what you’re saying. Thank you for sharing. Let me tell you what I’m committed to and then we’ll go from there.” Because you can’t block the negative thought, right? You can’t block the naysayer. When you acknowledge it and you say, “Look, this is what I’m going to do and this is what I’m doing.” Then it feels addressed and now you can continue. But having that awareness of those two voices is very critical. So you can say, “Okay, I know what you’re saying, but this is me here, the doer, and this is what I’m going to do.” 

Andrew: You mentioned earlier, real early in the conversation today, that by the time you get to race day it’s too late to hone in on what your mental state should be. That needs to be practiced in your workouts. It needs to be practiced in your rehearsals. So when we’re considering the mental relationship we have with triathlon, the mental relationship we have with our sport, when we’re in those training sessions what are we looking for out of a healthy relationship and a healthy mentality in our training? 

Bobby: I think that’s the authentic nature of the whole question, right? Why do I do this? Am I doing that? We know this conundrum. You’re going to do your first race whether it’s a 5K or whether it’s an Ironman and you’re going to do it because you want to finish it. Then forever thereafter if you’ve done a specific distance then you’re going to have a situation that says, “Faster.” 

Elizabeth: Uh-huh. 

Bobby: “Faster, better.” That’s why TriDot does so very effectively. It doesn’t say this is your readiness for an Ironman, it says this is your readiness for this Ironman based on this amount of fitness. That’s why it’s such an amazing program. It really is a question of being authentic, being vulnerable and being aware of why you are doing what you’re doing. Then if you’re able to vocalize that and be honest with yourself– that’s why I really like the exercise standing in front of the mirror and saying, “Look, come on. Be honest with yourself. What do you really want out of this race? What do you think you’re really capable of?” Let’s go verify that with somebody who knows. Then we lay down a plan to achieve that and then we do the best we can to execute that plan and then we take it from there. But tomorrow is another day and this is only triathlon and then also take other places in your life that have been successful. We know triathlon attracts people that are successful individuals in their lives. So they have this model of being successful where they can go okay. So on race day you go, “I chose this. This is voluntary. This is me being my best self. I’ve worked hard at this. I’ve invested a lot in this. This is the one place on the planet today in this minute that I really want to be.” I want to be challenged. Life is not one long purple patch. I’m looking forward to the valleys as much as I’m looking forward to the hills. Then I think you go into it with a much more open mind. I love the concept– again I’m bringing up Frank Schroeder, but he said before the gold and the silver medal. He said “I still want to be married. I still want to finish my degree. I still want to have children. I still want to run my own business. I still want to do this–” All these goals after this. They’ve done studies, Olympic athletes who win gold medals or win world championships they feel the sense of– especially in the Olympics– they feel the sense of “Wow, I just spent six years of my life on that and that’s all it was? Really?” 

Andrew: Wow. 

Bobby: And then ten years later, “Oh it was the time of my life.” 

Andrew: Yeah. 

Bobby: So I spend a lot of my time talking to high school triathletes saying to them “This is the time of your life. Don’t wish it over because this is what you’re going to tell your kids about. This is what you’re going to tell your grandkids about.” This is the time of your life. Don’t wish it over. Don’t be in the middle of an Ironman saying “Oh I wish this would be over.” No! You signed up. You did all that work for that. Just going through a little hole here. Just pull yourself out of the hole and then that's another story and another thing to be proud of that you pulled yourself out of that hole. 

Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’s cool down.

Andrew: We’ve covered a lot of ground on mental skills with Coach Bobby McGee today and this has been just such a valuable conversation for all of us. Elizabeth and I have just been sitting here soaking up every word like a sponge. But Bobby I would be missing an opportunity if I let you go without asking you about running. This is a huge area of coaching expertise for you like we’ve kind of already alluded to. Before we go, can you just leave our athletes with a Bobby McGee nugget of run coaching wisdom? Maybe for athletes who really want to improve their run this year, what are the initial steps they should take to do so? 

Bobby: Good question. I think the first thing that people need to realize when they look at elite runners is, you know you’re looking at some of these track athletes and these female marathon runners– those girls are weighing 88 pounds– that you think okay I need to be thin and spindly to be able to be successful, but I’m a real firm believer at every level of the sport that you need to be strong before you go long. You need to be strong before you go long. It’s absolutely essential. And by that I mean low back, hip, quad, knee support musculature, ankle, arch, feet. That needs to be strong. For people to realize there’s a big difference in the strength you require to ride your bike versus the power you require to run well. That’s a very different conversation. So you can get really, really strong on the bike but that’s concentric contraction and you can ride with low revs. You can do a really good Ironman, half Ironman at 75-80 revs; won’t be able to run afterwards. It needs to be much faster. So when you’ve gone through a strength phase in preparing to go long, you need to go through a little power phase. You need to add some speed to your movements. So that will bring in posture and balance and explosiveness and elastic return and only then should you attempt to do these very long distances. So way before you go and run continuously for an hour you need to do a lot of work so that you can run continuously for an hour week in and week out without breaking down. So that would be my one big piece of information is strong before long. 

Andrew: Well that’s it for today folks. A big thanks to Coach Bobby McGee and pro triathlete Elizabeth James for the mental talk today. A big thanks to TRIBIKE Transport for partnering with us on today’s podcast. Head to tribiketransport.com and use the code TRIDOT22 to save $25 off your next bike transport. Enjoying the show? Have any triathlon questions or topics you’d like to see us talk about? Head to TriDot.com/podcast to let us know what you’re thinking. We’ll have a new show coming your way soon. Until then, Happy Training!

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