Using Belief to Defeat Negative Thinking

You spent months and trained harder than ever to make this your best race ever.

Your mind has to be on point. No negative thinking this time.

You’re excited about the race and training has been great.  

Until one day you hear that negative voice in your head say “you’re too slow,” “you don’t know what you’re doing,” or “you aren’t training enough.’

You push it away and think something positive but it keeps coming back - louder and more critical the closer you get to race day.

Negative race thinking disrupts your daily life. It jacks up your anxiety, costs you sleep, and shreds your focus. 

You think that if you only had enough mental strength, you wouldn’t be having this problem. You wouldn’t be thinking you’re too slow.

So you work harder on the positive self-talk and attitude.

“I’m not too slow. I can make cutoff!” you correct yourself. 

This race day is going to be different. You’re not going to think negative thoughts in the race. 

But the race actually starts, you quickly find yourself dragging behind the main pack. A few miles in and it feels like you’re last.

“What made me think I could do this? I shouldn’t be here,” you think in frustration.

A while later, you feel a twinge of nausea. 

You had this solved but it’s happening yet again…and earlier than usual.

“This shouldn’t be happening. This was going to be a great race and now I’m not even sure I can finish,” you despair.

When you arrive at the next aid station, you’ve lost time on cutoff.

With a knot in the pit of your stomach, you think, “Everything’s going wrong. I’m not going to make it. There’s no way. All that hard work for nothing.”

It overwhelms you and you drop...but it wasn’t because you had negative thoughts.

The real problem was you believed in your negative thinking instead of your ability to control the negative thinking.

You believed it when it said “there’s no way,” instead of questioning that and deciding for yourself what you were going to believe.

And when you believe you can control your negative thinking, you no longer need to make negative thinking go away. You can just manage it instead. 

The voice telling you “you can’t do it” is no longer a problem. You simply decide whether to listen to it or let it affect you.

All you have to do is learn to spot negative thinking before you act on it and do something like drop.

Then disarm it with my process one client calls the Doom Slide Preventer. It works for everyone - fast, slow, 50k-er, 100-miler, new, veteran. It’ll work for you.

So much easier than needing negative thinking not to happen.

And learning how to manage negative thinking like this gives you peace. You don’t have to fear it any more, or waste all that energy trying to make it go away.

It’s just a voice - not the truth. 

You don’t have to drop because it says you can’t stay ahead of cutoff.

You can listen to what it says, understand it, calmly disagree and go on to finish strong.