Reduce the Pre-Race Anxiety that Plagues You

Pre-race anxiety can ruin your sleep, keep you from thinking clearly, and make you snap at those trying to help you.

We’re talking more than simple pre-race butterflies.

Pre-race anxiety can get unbearably uncomfortable and since you want to feel confident going into your race, it’s natural to want to reduce it or make it disappear.

You might think you’re doing okay with positive self talk and attitude until you can’t calm your racing mind, get scared about the start, and get the urge to bail on the race.

You try harder with the positive self talk, or unburden yourself to a friend but can’t stop that feeling. There’s no escape.

That’s because you’re letting your brain go where it wants, unsupervised, and when this happens, it tends to veer off the road to your goal into the negative ditch.

And it uses all the places where you still doubt, against you.

It’s like a conversation. You do some positive self talk, it replies with a bunch of reasons you’re not going to be able to finish the race, and you think, “Yikes, that’s right! I need to worry about that.”

“What if my stomach goes south again?”

“What if I’m too slow to stay ahead of cutoff?”

“What if something I haven’t even thought of goes wrong?”

You end up replaying all the negative scenarios…and since race day is imminent, it’s too late to fix anything and your flight-or-fight reflex kicks in.

It doesn’t matter how many races you’ve run, it can happen until you learn to control this dynamic.

I teach clients how to control it by doing two things - handling anxiety when it happens and creating belief that leaves no fuel for anxiety to start.

It works because it addresses the underlying doubt and gives them a handy tool to squash anxiety when it pops up.

Positive self talk is great but when you believe it in your head and not your heart, it’s like wallpaper over doubt. The doubt’s still there. You need to expand your belief to remove space for the doubt.

And even with belief, you still need a tool to manage anxiety that comes up. Anxiety will spike when you’re triggered by something - when your pacer tells you she can’t make it after all, you see fellow runners excitedly posting about the race on social media, or the RD sends a long “Important” email with lots of details (and maybe something you missed) while you’re in the middle of packing and getting logistics in place.

But when you know how to control anxiety, these spikes don’t affect you the same way - you’ll catch it and process seamlessly through it instead of spiraling in it.

Pre-race anxiety feels so overpowering it seems like you need superhuman mindset abilities to counter it but all you actually need is to be willing to face it and practice a new way of thinking. That’s it. Skills you can learn, not abilities you need to be born with.

You do impossible things in ultrarunning, so this level of anxiety comes with the territory, but you learn how to run impossible distances and you can learn how to do this too.