Advanced Endurance Coaching | Blog Article 02
“For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” — 2 Timothy 1:7
Your brain was not designed to make you happy. It was designed to keep you alive.
That distinction matters more than you might think — especially on a long run.
Back in the days before roads and running watches, the brain’s job was threat detection. Stay alert, stay cautious, avoid the predator. That wiring has not changed much. And on a hard training run, when your legs are burning and your mind starts looking for reasons to stop, your brain is essentially doing its prehistoric job.
Understanding this does not make the hard runs easy. But it gives you a fighting chance.
The Filter System: How Your Brain Shapes What You See
Your nervous system is processing millions of pieces of information every second. To manage that, your brain runs everything through three filters:
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Deletion: What happens when you park your car and can’t remember the drive to the shops. Your brain decided most of that journey was not important enough to store. The same thing happens during a race — you may not recall what was said at the aid station at 7km, because your brain deleted it while focused elsewhere.
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Distortion: How your brain warps reality. You have probably heard that marathons are terrible for your knees, or that trail running is dangerous. Neither is categorically true — but once the belief is planted, your brain distorts incoming information to confirm it.
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Generalisation: The shortcut your brain takes from one experience to all similar ones. If a dog bit you once, you now have a phobia of dogs. If one long run went badly, every long run becomes something to dread.
These filters are not flaws. They are efficiency tools. But they can trap you in patterns that limit your running — and your life.
Negativity Bias: Why the Bad Sticks More Than the Good
Research is consistent on this: negative information has more psychological weight than positive information. The headline “5 Runners in ICU After Race Event” gets more attention than “20,000 Runners Finish Strong.” Your brain defaults to the bad news.
Think about a year in which you ran a thousand miles. One of those runs was genuinely terrible. But that terrible run takes up an outsized amount of mental space — it becomes the story you tell about your running, while the other 974 good miles quietly disappear.
This is negativity bias at work. And on a long run, it can convince you that you are further behind than you are, slower than you are, and more exhausted than you are.
How to Catch Negativity Patterns Mid-Run
The first step is simply noticing. During your next run, when that little voice says “I’ve only gone 4.9km — it felt like 8” — catch it. Name it. That is your brain doing its primitive threat-detection thing, not an accurate report from your body.
When you notice you are drifting into that spiral, shift your focus. Not by forcing fake positivity — but by genuinely redirecting your attention to what is actually in front of you.
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Start with your breathing: How are you inhaling? How are you exhaling? Just that, for a moment.
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Scan your physical sensations: Notice the feeling of your running shoes on the ground, the temperature on your skin, or the roof of your mouth.
All of these things were there the whole time — you just weren’t paying attention to them. What you pay attention to, you get more of. This is not motivational talk; it is how the brain’s filter system works.
5 Practical Steps to Break the Negativity Pattern
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Notice your pattern: Do this with curiosity, not judgment. When did the excuses start? What triggered the slump? Awareness is the beginning of change.
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Take a real break: Not the kind where you hit snooze three times and end up too late to run. A genuine pause to analyse what is actually happening. What story are you telling yourself? Is there another interpretation available?
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Scan for the opposite: When someone is sharing a horror story about a brutal hill section, notice how it colours your experience before you have even reached the hill. Seek out the runners who have run that section and found it manageable. Both stories are real. Choose which one to carry.
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Practise gratitude for what you have: You have a body that can run. You have time to train. You have a goal worth chasing. These are not small things.
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Limit your intake of negative running media: Articles about running injuries and race disasters are designed to grab attention, not to make you a better runner.
Overcoming Mental Slumps: A Personal Perspective
There was a season where the snooze button became a daily habit — once, twice, and by the third time it was too late to run. A perfect excuse. It crept in without warning, and before long it had become the default. That is how these patterns work. They do not announce themselves.
The way out was not a massive overhaul. It was noticing the pattern. Naming it. Choosing something different.
Reframing Your Running Journey
You are not your worst run. You are not your worst week. You are the sum of every mile you have put in — and most of them have been good.
God bless you, and remember — take it easy.
Recommended Running Resources
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Advanced Endurance Coaching Podcast — available on Apple Podcasts
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Brain Training for Runners — heikostribl.com
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Mental Training for Runners — hypnorun.com