The day before

Most of you will know the strange feeling on the day before an important race.

In the days before the event you should not train too much anymore and should rest instead. That means you have more time on your hands, which you might spend travelling there and running last errands for the race. Some athletes still fit in a small training session the day before the race.

That still leaves plenty of time to think about your form, and your nerves start to rise. The way running feels the day before is often miserable too: your legs seem heavy, and more often than not something twinges here or there.

The obligatory trip to collect your race number is naturally part of it too. You meet other athletes and friends, you go over the race course once more, and you stroll through the usual marathon expo.

All of this can be enormously motivating, but it can also bring on negative thoughts and uncertainty. Suddenly you are no longer sure whether you are fit enough for the coming race, or whether you did everything right in your preparation.

You ask yourself questions like: “should I have trained more, and harder?”

“isn't the course too long, or too demanding?”

These and other questions can throw us badly off balance, or raise our nerves so much that we can no longer call on our best performance on race day. But we do need a healthy amount of nervousness, so we have enough tension to draw on our full potential, or even grow beyond ourselves.

But the real challenge is finding the right amount of nervousness, so you stand at the start with just the right tension.

This is known as the “OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE STATE” (OLZ).

Experience certainly plays a big part in sensing which amount of nervousness is right for you personally. Every athlete is different and needs a different level of tension for their own OLZ.

But there are a few mental tricks to regulate this tension.

If nervousness and uncertainty are too high, it is worth working on your self efficacy and self confidence.

At its core, this is the personal conviction that you can effectively handle even difficult tasks, challenges or problems through your own actions. Put another way, more simply: self efficacy means trusting that you can carry out an action successfully.

Self efficacy is therefore closely linked to a person's self confidence.

But how do I increase my self efficacy?

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According to Bandura, self efficacy can be increased in four ways (see also Lippke and Renneberg 2006)

• Your own experiences of success: experiences of success strengthen the expectation of self efficacy the most. “I have already raced successfully before!” “I am able to hold on even in difficult situations!”, and so on. Vicarious experience (modelling): watching someone else succeed, someone who matters to you or is similar to you, also strengthens self efficacy. Watching inspiring films and videos of other athletes or races can help here too. Verbal encouragement: when other people believe in you and talk you up, that strengthens self efficacy. Surround yourself with people who do you good and can give you the support you need, or who simply have a positive influence on you. Interpreting physiological and emotional states: under pressure or strong nervousness, many people read physical sensations (sweaty hands, shaking, a racing heart) as a sign of possible failure. Through practice, people can learn to reinterpret these sensations, for instance as a sign of joyful excitement. “My nervousness helps me reach my hidden strength.”

It is also worth working with breathing exercises. Breathing techniques give you a very good tool for directly influencing your body's tension.

What happens more rarely is the situation of too little tension before a race.

Here it is worth motivating yourself and setting appropriate goals. Inspiring videos can help here too, to raise your tension.

For me personally, an important step towards optimal race preparation is also the mental shift from training athlete to race athlete. That is why, every evening before a race (or that morning, if the start is in the evening), I lay out my whole race kit, attach my race number and put everything on. That gives me one last check that everything fits the way it should, that I have thought of everything, and that everything works.

This helps me enormously to prepare mentally in the best way too. I also then know that all my gear is ready for race day and the start. That gives me the confidence I need, but also the right amount of tension.

For me it is also normal not to sleep well the night before a race, and I no longer let that unsettle me.

If you need tips or support, I am happy to help you with my professional knowledge.