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Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and let’s begin your run smarter journey.
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On today's episode, how mentally strong runners navigate injury and races with Claire Bartholic. Welcome to the only podcast delivering and deciphering the latest running research to help you run smarter. My name is Brody. I'm an online physiotherapist treating runners all over the world, but I'm also an advert runner who just like you have been through vicious injury cycles and when searching for answers, struggled to decipher between common running myths and real evidence-based guidance. But this podcast is changing that. So join me as a run smarter scholar and raise your running IQ so we can break through the injury cycles and achieve running feats you never thought possible. Welcome back Run Smarter Scholars. have Claire Bartholik on the podcast who has appeared on the podcast before talking about strides and coaching programs. But now she's doing something a little bit different. She's helping runners dive into mental strength and cognitive conditioning. As she mentions, a lot of runners kind of think this is a bit airy-fairy, but this is embedded in science and ways that you can improve your running performance, negotiate injuries a bit better. topic I propose to people in the Facebook group and the level of interest compelled me to have Claire to come on, especially talking about injuries, chronic injuries, how to best navigate setbacks. So if you are mentally struggling with injuries, or if you find that during training or race day, you're kind of psyching yourself out or just not mentally sharp, Claire's going to talk about some real practical takeaways that are really simple and will help you be a better athlete. She is the planted runner across all our socials. I'll make sure to add all those links in the show notes. Let's take it away with Claire. Claire, thank you very much for joining me on the Run Smarter podcast once again. Happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me back. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this one. I am curious before we dive into the other questions I've written down. um Last time we spoke and the last time I had a look at your content, you weren't necessarily talking about the you know, mental strength side of things. And I'm just curious, like, has there been much of a career transition or something you've always been curious in? Like, how did that come about? It has always been a core part of my coaching. So I, I feel like running training, or at least my running coaching has three pillars. So it's obviously the running and the strength training, all the stuff that, you know, most people think about. Then of course it's nutrition and then the mental strength. part because if you're running or honestly doing anything hard, if your mind's not right, you're not going to complete what you want to do. So I've always had mental strength as a part of it. At the end of my podcast, I always do the mental strength minute where you can fortify your mind in 60 seconds or less. But what I'm doing now is really, really going a lot deeper into it. I think it can expand outside of running as well. Excellent. Why go deeper? Like why now? Well, honestly, I've had some challenges personally myself. So my community was affected by a devastating hurricane about 18 months ago, 20 months ago. and really, really affected a lot of things in my community. My life personally changed in a lot of ways uh related to the hurricane and not related to the hurricane. And I went through a very difficult breakup, which is a result of that. I mean, not exactly a result of the hurricane, but kind of. And I went through some difficult times myself, and I really leaned into a lot of these mental strengths. techniques myself. But the truth is I've been doing this kind of work for a long time and I've never really found exactly what I was looking for that would help me as a runner, as a person. I did a lot of this a long time ago when I was pregnant with my kids. I was looking for some way to mentally get through pregnancy and birth and all the difficult times that have to do with that. And a lot of... what I found out there worked kind of, but I really, I'm the, I'm just a serial DIYer. So I got to make something that works for me and, I have. Great. Um, and so when you talk about those mental strength techniques, helping you personally, you then decided to, guess, double down and overemphasize the need for it for other runners as well. And so decided to, develop something in terms of like a business sense and an online platform sense? Yeah. mean, a lot of runners come to me when I talk to them on coaching calls or in my community. And of course we talk about running, but a lot of times we talk about the struggles, not just struggles in your life, but you know, I had a runner today actually who said, I missed a workout today and it was because of all of these very real normal things in life. I know that missing a workout isn't going to affect my fitness, but I can't help but spiral about it. I can't help but go down this path that I just feel like a complete failure because I've missed that workout. Of course, we all know intellectually that that's ridiculous. One workout doesn't affect your fitness at all, either good or bad. One workout doesn't make an athlete. But I bet most runners and most high level athletes have had those thoughts before. They've had that programming in their head. They've told themselves those stories. Even though intellectually we totally know it's ridiculous, we do it anyway. And so what I really wanted to do is the research to find out how can we fix it? There's lots of ways to fix that, but um I really sort of fell down the rabbit hole of cognitive conditioning. And it's very similar to physical conditioning, but it's something that you do for your brain. How would you define it? Cause I think like you've used mental strength as a, as a concept and now this cognitive conditioning, if people aren't familiar with this and it sounds a bit, uh, blasé or vague, could you make it concrete? So conditioning is, is, is similar to physical condition. get, we all kind of understand physical conditioning. That's when you. repeat an exercise until you get better at it, right? I mean, you can work yourself through running something cardiovascular related. You can get better condition by strength training. You can do the same thing with the brain. So conditioning your mind is basically the science of neuroplasticity. It's how to retrain the stories that you tell yourself, how to rewire your brain so that when you miss a workout, you don't spiral. So instead of telling that story to yourself, I'm a failure, you can tell yourself a different story and repeat it through conditioning. it's a lot to do with repeating out loud or writing, um saying the same things over and over again, because someone somewhere taught that runner that she is not good enough, right? somebody repeated that story so that she got it stuck in her head years ago. We're not doing therapy here. We're not trying to figure out what your childhood issues are, but what we're trying to do is retrain your brain through neural conditioning. So lots and lots of repetition of saying the things that you want to say to yourself because the brain doesn't... know or care what is true, it only cares about what you repeat. Is there like a certain like characteristics or I guess experiences that some runners might have that leads them to or leads you to suspect they might need better help with mental strength or this cognitive conditioning? think all runners could use a little bit of it. think runner running in general kind of attracts a sort of type a personality, not always. I'm going to stereotype a little bit. But it attracts somebody who doesn't mind being alone a lot, has a lot of thoughts in their head, really likes to analyze things, likes the numbers, loves putting effort in to get a result out, loves the sort of analytical side of it. We see a lot of runners like that. And that is all great. You need all of those qualities to be a great runner. But on the flip side of that, it can also translate into overthinking, rumination, a little bit of spiraling when things go wrong. And so it's a little bit of a universal thing that runners especially tend to experience. So I've been coaching runners for 10 years, thousands of runners at this point. I can't even believe that I can say that number. But over and over and over again, these issues are coming up. They'll tell me about their anxiety. They'll tell me about their pre-race nerves, which I used to get so bad. So I can relate to this kind of thing. But I keep hearing the same things over and over and over again. And when we work on certain mental strength techniques, we see a change. And we see them have better self-talk when they're running a race or doing a hard workout. There's lots and lots of ways to improve your self-talk. Cognitive conditioning, which is repeating things over and over again, is one way. There are many. You can journal. You can go to therapy. There are lots of different ways to change your relationship with yourself. But what attracts me to this style is that It's so athletic, you know, there's so many parallels to training and you know, when you go for a run, you'll get better when you run more, you know, when you lift weights, you'll get better with repetition. And so it's the structure of the repetition that is really, really fits the runner personality really, really well. Yeah. Especially if you can reframe it in a way of like, I'm an athlete. This is like why cognitive tasks to be a better athlete and sort of like reframing it around that. Obviously a lot of people would be on board. mean, it's the same with nutrition. Like a lot of people familiar with, uh I need to get these miles in, need to do these quality sessions. Um, but you know, they fall away on the sleep side of things or the hydration side of things or the, you know, getting the right carbs or nutrition. But as soon as they change that narrative to be like, I'm an athlete. I know that I need to get to bed early because then my recovery is enhanced and this is what I need to do to be a better athlete. As soon as they sort of like reframe it that way, they're all on board. Their buy-in is a lot better. so the techniques that you talk about, if you can reframe and think about it differently that way, I think a lot of people would definitely be on board. Yeah. And what you're talking about is identity. We identify as runners. And because we think, oh, a runner should go to sleep, a runner should have good nutrition, a runner should do X, and Z, we'll do those things because we identify with that label being a runner. Conversely, that can also be a problem when we're injured and when we can't run. We identify so much with being a runner and then when we're not a runner or temporarily can't run, everything crashes down. And so these are things that we need to work on ahead of time because there's always going to be a time if you run long enough that you're not going to be able to run at times and you need to figure out a way to make that not such a devastating experience. Yeah. There's a book called rebound by Carrie Cheadle. Uh, Cindy Kuzma, I think was the other one. Yeah. one thing that really resonated. Yeah, absolutely. The one of the phrases that I use is like when you're injured, it's like, okay, rehab is now my sport. You're sort of. shifting that identity because like you say, that identity, the identities shift can be really, really devastating for some people and they go to their run club or they, you know, they don't attend their run club and they see others preparing for races and doing their races and do what they love. And if they're injured on the sideline, can really devastate them emotionally. But yeah, like I say, that identity shift is really, really hard. But if you say, look, you know, recovery rehab is now my sport. I am an athlete, not just a runner. You can put as much focus, as much dedication, as much motivation into that thing. Then all of a sudden everything changes and their identity changes. And if they can reframe it to be like, okay, I do the right things physically, but every time I get to a race, I fall the pieces mentally, emotionally, I get these anxiety symptoms that just emerge and it really derails my race day. put in so much energy and focus into getting the right miles in, doing the right quality sessions. Like how important is it for me to train my mind and train this cognitive conditioning? Like the importance of that's through the roof, I'd say for a lot of people. Absolutely. I think you're speaking to so many runners right now because especially with the marathon, but with other races too, the marathon, we're putting our eggs in this little bitty basket of one day you're training for. three or four months or years, however long you're training, and it all comes down to one day. And so there's so much pressure that you put on yourself, especially if you have any kind of competitive personality. You really can get worked up about it. And if you don't learn techniques to calm the emotions down, you're going to be a basket case. And it's important to know that your emotions aren't the enemy. You're going to have these reactions. You're going to have these emotions. It shows that you care about what you're doing. Those are really good things. We're not trying to turn ourselves into robots or stoics. You know, we're not trying to be emotionless creatures, but we are learning to have a better relationship with our emotions. We're learning to understand that our emotions are actually a good thing. Even the bad emotions, they're there for a purpose. They're there to serve you. And you just need to learn to have a little bit of a different relationship with them, especially if you tend to spiral about these things. Could you maybe go through two extreme examples? Like we'll use the marathon as a scenario. like athlete one thinks they're doing all the right things, but unbeknownst to them mentally really struggling could really, really benefit from cognitive conditioning. What might their race day look like compared to athlete B? who has done the cognitive conditioning work has the same kind of emotions that pop up all the same like scenario, but can better handle them. Can we go through what that might look like? Yeah. So if you're, you know, starting on the day of the race and you just wake up and you probably can't sleep, you get nervous about that. And then your stomach feels queasy. So you can't eat. And if you can't eat, it starts a spiral, then your hands are shaking. This is exactly who I was. So I would be on the starting line at my local half marathon. I had, you know, this is a local race. Who cares, right? But for some reason, I really cared. I had a chance of winning maybe. And maybe that means that I had to put extra pressure on myself. but I would get so worked up that I would almost be sick before racing for no good reason. And I knew intellectually that this wasn't the proper reaction. so uh my breathing would get fast. I would even start to get dizzy. I would start to wonder if I was, did I take too much caffeine? All of these things start to compound on yourself. And then the race would start. And there is something about physical activity that kind of dampens some of those thoughts. You start moving, the blood starts pumping. And part of it is because you're actually breathing deeper, you know? And breath work is a part of it too. Breath work does a lot to change our uh emotional state. So when we start running for most people, it starts to get a little bit better. you know, the adrenaline starts to do what it's supposed to do and you start to feel a little bit better for the most part when you start that race. But then it'll get to a point where the race is hard, right? If you're racing to race, things get hard. And when your stress levels go up, negative voices show up, right? So anytime in life or in running, when you're under stress, all of your default patterns are going to be what emerges and it's what going to be the loudest. So it's that mid race or late race whenever things start to feel hard, that's when most runners will have much more negative self-talk. And sometimes it'll get the best of you. Sometimes you'll quit, you know, or sometimes you'll just say, I'm going to slow down. I don't need to run this hard. So sometimes the wall that we hit isn't for any other reason, but The negative self-talk just gets you, you know? And you make it to the finish line and you're disappointed because the training was there and you didn't have the race you wanted. Now, somebody who's prepared for all of this, first of all, recognizes that those feelings are going to happen. When you uh reframe the anxiety that you're feeling as activation, When you reframe uh those nerves as excitement, this is something you get to do, not something you have to do. When you understand that the adrenaline and all the hormones surging through your body are really to help you in flight, they're actually there to help you perform, you can reframe it in your head if you practice this enough. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance. If you don't believe it, it's not going to work. But if you practice it enough, you'll learn to understand that, okay, I can do some of my breath work. I can do some resonance breathing. I can do some box breathing. You know, I can do whatever breathing technique doesn't actually really matter. It's just the fact that you're doing something that you know helps your nervous system. And then you can go through the race. And again, that second runner is going to feel better as soon as they start running too. But of course this doesn't make the race any less hard. No matter how well your brain is trained, the race is not going to be easy if you're truly racing. But when those negative voices show up and say, this is too hard, this is, I'm, you know, I'm failing, I'm slowing down, it's too hot, or whatever your negative voices say, you can recognize them as what they are. And it's just your brain trying to stop you from killing yourself. Right? And if you practice it enough, you can hear those voices. They're never going to go away, but you can recognize them as something other than your true self. And what I like to say is those those voices are always going to be on the bus, but you don't have to allow them to drive. And so you train yourself for these things. And when they happen, you recognize them and you're not going to spiral as bad. Again, this all takes practice. can talk about this all day long, but it is, it is something you need to practice over and over and over again, just like your physical training. that, you know, for a lot of people, if they are doing a marathon, it probably comes around once a year for most recreational runners. so race day is like one opportunity to practice, you know, real time or like, you know, real life scenarios. there. Ways we can practice it. Should we do like hard training sessions and practice these sort of things in our training? Like what's the best way to go about that? Yeah. So cognitive conditioning is something that you want to practice when you're not training. It's, um, so my program is called begin with 10 because you begin with 10 minutes of training every day. And so you don't want to actually practice it while you're training because you really want to pay attention to that and not everything else. But then of course, like anything that you do every day, it will permeate into the rest of your life. And so there are different practices for when you are training. like, for example, everybody knows mantras, you know, so when you're doing something hard, let's say you're running up a hill and the hill is hard. You can say, I don't know, I love hills or whatever you say, whatever you say that gets you up the hill, you know, a short phrase that you repeat. That's a mantra. That's a little bit different than actively trying to condition your brain. That's something that you're using in the moment to change your thought patterns. So that is uh what I would call a mental strength technique that works really well. And there's a million of those that you can use during training. ah And yeah, some of them will overlap. There's certain things you might be working on in your cognitive conditioning that will carry over as a mantra that you would say to yourself. I think your bigger question is how do we practice all of this? You practice it the same way you practice run training. You practice it every day or almost every day. You practice it throughout your life. The more you practice it, the more your default thought patterns will change for whatever you want them to. It's positive brainwashing basically, you know, if you want to, if you, if you want to change your brain, you have to change what you repeat to yourself. Do you have any personal effective phrases that you repeat to yourself say during hard times in a marathon? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many, um, that, mean, I have some personal ones that I would say, but what I, what I would say is what you want to make sure that you're doing. is making them process-oriented and neutral, not something that there's going to be a whole lot of cognitive dissonance or arguing from your brain. I think the misconception is what we're doing is just making stuff up or manifesting. like you see a bunch of stuff online that you should repeat, wealth comes to me easily. And you're going to disagree with that because And getting wealthy is hard, right? So you don't want to come up with things that you're automatically going to disagree with. You want to come up with things that are totally neutral. So you can say, stay in the mile, stay present, or things that you're not going to argue with. Because that's when it all falls apart. If you are sort of saying wishful thinking things, or I'm going to win this race, or whatever it is, or I'm going to get my dream time, you might find a way to argue with that if you truly don't believe it. So you can say things like, I'm going to stick to the plan, or uh mile two is when I take my gel, or things like that. You want to really focus on the things that you know that you can control. You know that you can take your gel at mile two or whatever it is. So those are the kinds of in-race training thoughts. that are the most helpful instead of things that, that negative voice wants to pick apart. When you're going through those examples of the, the two runners going through the marathon, made me think of a few, uh, sentences to kind of reframe the scenario because a lot of clients I've had, it's been helpful for them in the past is saying, okay, I've got to the start line. All my hard work is done. Like I've put in, I've put in the hard work. I've put in the training. to get to the start line now, it's just about having fun and seeing how I go on race day. And a lot of people like it that way. It's like the hard bits over and the amount, the months of dedication that's just got me to the start line. And just reframing it that way just takes away a lot of pressure and build up in the moment. Cause like a lot of people do the opposite. It's like, okay, it's all built up to, like you said, this one day where I need to execute and everything needs to go to plan. But there are a lot of things that are out of your control. And if we can just shift that expectation of the day to be like, now's my time to, I don't know if people say have fun, but now's the time to just like go out there and see what my training has, you know, come to fruition. If it's all gone to plan or whether I need to make adjustments for the future. Um, lot of people think that like race day is like, that's all there is. Like they just look on the race day is the one big day, but I often like think. like thinking long-term and being like, how the next 10 marathons, let's use this marathon as just like, see how I go to help me for the next 10 marathons. And not a lot of people frame it in such a long-term view. It's like, okay, this is the only thing that matters once it's over. If they're disappointed or not, they look set aside on the next race. And now that's the only thing that matters. And it's like, there's a, we put a lot of weight on ourselves. We put a lot of expectations and yeah. sometimes to a lot of people's detriment. um But before I get to that, the sentence of, all the hard work is done. Now it's just time to see how I go, was one that was brought up for me. But the other one was kind of like, it's supposed to be hard. Like a lot of people freak out like physically and mentally and emotionally when it starts getting hard, maybe a bit earlier than they were expecting and they like really work themselves up. um I haven't done a marathon for a long time, but I do high rocks races at the moment and it's painful. And I like to remind myself it's supposed to be hard. Like your training, it's hard in training. It's hard on race day. Everyone is meant to be hard for everyone. Let's just see if you can negotiate that hardness better than your previous self or better than others that are on the course. And like, just that repeating that to yourself is good enough for me to actually just mentally be like, yeah, let's, grind through this. And because that's exactly what it's meant to be. And everything is temporary too. It's meant to be hard, whatever you're going through is temporary. you know, there's going to be waves in the race where you're feeling good and then you're feeling terrible and then you're feeling okay. And then you're feeling good and then you're optimistic and then you drop something and then it all, you know, it goes up and down. And one of the most interesting pieces, little tidbits that I was learning when I was diving deep into all of this was that emotions really only peak at about 90 seconds if you let them. If you ruminate about them, you keep stretching that out with more negative thoughts, it'll go for a lot longer. But if you're feeling whatever emotion, frustration, anger, jealousy, disappointment, any of those things, if you just feel it, it usually will peak and then fall again. And once you know that and you just sort of learn to become more of an observer of your own emotions, then you can handle them a lot better. But if you get super frustrated and super worked up and you just keep going down that spiral, if you don't pause a second and say, wait a second, And look at yourself, it's called metacognition is thinking about your own thinking. It's that's one of the most sophisticated form of like psychological control you have. If you can learn to think about your own thinking, it becomes incredibly powerful and you become a lot stronger than you think when you learn just a few things. Sounds that sounds like it would take a lot of practice for a lot of people. Like I'm just thinking of myself trying to do that. Yeah, that would definitely take practice. Yeah, but so does running, right? So does fitness. It's, it's something that never ends. It's something that, you know, you're always going to need to exercise physically. And if you exercise mentally, it's the same deal, you know, simple, but not easy. Yeah. A lot of people say that like marathons are whatever percent 50 % mental, um, sometimes more, I don't know, like it's a subjective thing, but like, many people spend 50 % of their training? working on the mental side. And I'm just trying to think like in the moment, like during the hardest phases of a marathon, a lot of people like, Oh, my legs are burning up. I didn't train too well. I didn't do this. Didn't do that. And then they psych themselves out. But then two weeks later, when they reflect upon it, they're like, it's probably a mental thing. probably like, they think it's physical on the day, but then upon self reflection, they're like, Oh, I might've talked myself out of that. I think I could have gone. longer. feel like I could have kept running if I really mentally snapped out of that spiral that I was in. so it's like, yeah, just, I guess, highlighting, reminding people about the importance of the mental side of things. Yeah, I mean, how many runners come to you after the race and they're, they're like, I could have given more. Very few people, like, I mean, some do, but some, some collapse at the finish line. Obviously, there's no more you can give, right? If you're just falling down at the finish line. But the vast majority of people, I have every runner rate, their effort level, almost no one says 10 out of 10. Very, very few people will say that was my very best effort. I could not have given more. Nearly everybody will say six, seven, eight, nine. And they'll always say, I could have done just a little bit more. Not that you need to give a hundred percent, not that I want anybody collapsing on the finish line. This is not, I mean, for most people, it's, you're not trying to break a world record, but you're trying to really get the best of yourself. And everybody knows, everybody knows it's mental, but yet hardly anybody practice it. Practice it. Took me through this, like, begin with 10, cause it's kind of like an online cohort that you're going through at the moment. This program that we were trying to time. with the release of this podcast to start like with the start of the cohort, which unfortunately you're now currently going through that first wave. Uh, what does that look like practically for people? What does that online course entail? Yeah, I will, um, be opening up a new one in the fall. I don't have a date yet as of the recording of this podcast, but there will be another one in the future because people are just raving about it, but basically what it is, it's a 10 minute per day. Um, audio workout. So you will, so it's, it's delivered like a podcast, but it's, it's a private podcast. And so you will basically sit down, hopefully first thing in the morning. It does not have to be first thing in the morning if that doesn't work for you. But what's nice about first thing in the morning is that that just sets the tone for your day. And you want to sit and listen to it. You can do the first part of it. Um, on an easy run if you wanted to, but I don't want you doing this while you're driving or anything like this. Just give yourself 10 minutes. And what it starts out with is first of all, an explanation of the science, why you're doing what you're about to do. Because I think when you understand why something works, there's a little bit more buy-in. Um, just like with physical training, when you understand why you're doing a tempo run, you're more likely to get it done right when you understand what it means. And then we'll start off with some breathing exercises and they change throughout the session, not the 10 minute session, but throughout the course. There's a bunch of different ones and certain breathing techniques have been shown to do certain different things. the science, I'm not the scientist. I'm just the coach training people. And in my personal experience, I think all breath work is good. I think Do the ones you like, do the ones that fit you. If something resonates with you more, great. There is science behind a lot of the breath work, but again, it's sort of like, my personal opinion is choose what works for you if you like a certain technique better, but I'll guide you through that. And then we go over a specific cognitive um technique or a specific topic that you'll want to work on, that we work on for the day. It'll all have phrases that relate to that. And again, these are short, repeatable, neutral phrases that you can't argue with for the most part. And those are something that in the first phase, you're going to say them out loud. In the second phase, you're going to practice writing. So the writing part of it is no typing, no iPads, nothing like that. It's been proven that... when you write, the connection between your hand and your brain makes you remember things. So just like writing things on a sticky note and putting it on your mirror is going to help you remember something the next day, it's not actually the sticky note that makes you remember. It's the act of writing that makes you remember a lot more than seeing that visual note. So we go through 25 different topics. throughout the course of things that you can work on. And this is a big laundry list of things. So some of them might not be your particular issue. I think they're all universal. I would say do them anyway. But there's going to be some that resonate with you more than others. And maybe those are some you would go back and work on. the types of topics are reframing, identity, self-confidence, self-trust. A lot of the things that we as adults need to have in order to have calm confidence when we walk in a room or when we give a meeting or when we're speaking on a podcast, all the things that we would like to do to um control how we react to our emotions. Because again, like I said, having emotions is what makes us human. We're not trying to get rid of our emotions. but we are trying to work on how we react to our emotions and therefore how we feel as a result. So it's kind of circular. You're gonna feel an emotion, but it's your reaction to it that determines how long it lasts and it's going to determine the next emotion that you're gonna have. So this all truly can be practiced. don't... I don't make up the technique or I don't make up the science, but I put it in a way that it's actionable and it is a real practice that you can do just like you're stretching, just like your strength training, just like your run training. Yeah. And it sounds very much practical in the way of like, uh, the time people have available. 10 minutes is a good commitment because like I say, let's just say hypothetically that a marathon's 50 % mental and 50 % physical. And you've spent, you know, some 50 hours training like per week. How about, you know, let's do 10 minutes a day to work on the cognitive side of things. mean, that's, uh, yeah, it sounds like a pretty easy trade off. Uh, bringing up this topic, I put this forth to my Facebook group to say, is this a topic people are interested in? Um, And the response was great. So obviously having you on here, one of the topics and questions that did come up was around injuries and setbacks and chronic, chronic injuries and people really struggling with that. Uh, so if we, if you wouldn't mind touching base on this particular topic, is there a certain type of person or characteristics or traits that might lead someone to not coping with an injury versus. uh coping, better handling, better navigating an injury? Yeah, I think this is a really important topic and a really valid concern because the truth is that you are more likely to get injured if you have had a previous injury. That's just the facts. so the fear of getting re-injured is valid and is not something that we should be dismissive of because absolutely if you have, I don't know, a weak ankle, you're more likely to sprain it again. So first of all, the fear is valid, but we want to know how we can get back and release the fear. So first of all, how do we build confidence? little steps of success build confidence, so both in athletics and in life. So you first want to do things to physically strengthen whatever your injury. So let's use the ankle again as an example. So you have an ankle injury, you do your PT work, you do your strength work, you do everything physically that you're supposed to do to heal this injury, but let's say you can't run. You can't run because of the pain. You can't run because the PT told you not to. Right. So the first step there is to focus on what can you do? Not what can't you do runnings off the table. Fine. What can I do? Can I bike? Can I swim? Can I get on the elliptical? Can I do strength training? Can I do things on the opposite leg? You know, when you strengthen the opposite side of the injury, the healthy side, your brain actually tells the injured side to strengthen as well. So you can lift weights on your healthy side and your injured side will get stronger physically. So those are all the things that you can do physically. Mentally is what we're really talking about. How can we get through that injury? So first of all, exactly what you said at the beginning, think of yourself as an athlete. What can you do? I have an injured athlete right now. Well, he's not actually injured, but he has some arthritis problems and he's not supposed to be running. But what he's doing is he's really getting into biking. He's really getting into strength training, things that he didn't necessarily enjoy so much before. And he's actually having fun again. He's actually enjoying these new activities. He will run again, but in the next few weeks, he's not allowed to. So he is trying to. not be in the waiting room of his own life. He is trying to enjoy his life with the cards that he has dealt right now. So he is making the best out of it and staying fit and staying an athlete. that's the identity portion. That's important. So now let's say you're healthy. You've rehabbed the ankle. You've gotten the clearance to run again. How do you get over the fear of hurting yourself again? just the same way you get over the fear of doing anything scary in life. You take baby steps forward and you build the confidence. So when we go out and run a marathon, if it's our first time or if it's our second time and we're trying to get better than our first time, it's a mystery. We don't know if we're gonna finish it. We don't know if we're gonna run our goal time. That's part of the fun. But we move towards something, we move towards the unknown anyway, right? Not because we are confident. but because we are exploring, right? And one thing that I tell people is confidence isn't something that you wait for, isn't something that just shows up. Confidence is a choice. Confidence is something that you actively choose and you decide, yes, I am confident enough to do this. And if I can't do it, I'm still gonna figure it out. Whatever life throws at me, I am confident I trust myself enough to be able to handle it. I might not get the result that I want, that I'm hoping for, but I can get myself to a point where I trust myself enough to be able to handle even things that are setbacks, even things that I don't want to happen in life. That's all okay. It's in fact good because it is preparing me to be better for the next step in life, the step that I can't see. And that is hard. That's the cognitive leap that we have to make that everything is going to be okay in life, even when bad things happen to us. But we are going to take little baby steps that grow our self-trust, that grow our confidence every day. you know, the first thing when you're injured, it sucks, okay? There's no way around it. It sucks when you're in pain and when you can't do what you love. But... focusing on what you can do and moving towards what you want to do is the way to get through it. Yeah. And I think potentially enlisting some help if you don't, if you can't quite navigate that, if you're unsure of the single leg exercises or the one exercise or cardio is okay for a certain injury. think uh having someone in your corner that you can trust and have confidence in is a good step as well. uh Yeah. A lot of the time it is confidence that a lot of people that gravitate towards me for my services usually have very severe injuries, lot of chronic pain for several years. And a lot of times I assign some exercises and I always ask like, based on let's just say it's a squat or a lunge, you know, this starting weight, what do you feel about, how do you feel about that? And a lot of times you're like, I'm scared to do that. I'm like, don't do it. Don't even worry about it. They're like, I know if you think it's okay. I'm like, if you're scared, we're not doing it. If it's, you know, 20 pounds, let's. do five pounds. How do you feel about that? Oh yeah, I could do five pounds. Let's start with that. Because if you can do five, you're not going to be too worried to do eight. You're not going to be too worried to do 15. And then when you're going to not be too worried to do 20, it's just like, it's the confidence that the level of confidence is like the initial step. then eventually getting to tap into what eventually might be a strength signal or something like that. But yeah, the, the mental side of things for a lot of especially for the chronic pain side of things is very important. Yeah. I think your lunge example or squat example is a metaphor that we can use everywhere. Yeah, you can't do the 20 pound weighted squat, try the five. And then when you're confident with the five, you do the 10 and then the 15. And then you can do the 20 pound or whatever your goal is without even thinking about it and it's easy. That literally is how to do everything. Everything in life. Right there. There's also another when you're talking about, okay, define what you have within your control, define what you have that's out of your control, I think is a very nice clear line that you can put down and learn what to focus on. I think like there's a philosopher, I'm gonna totally butcher this might have been Sun Tzu or someone, but they talk about worry and they say, okay, if you can change it, and you can you do have control of it, you don't need to worry about it, because just do it just change it like assign the right exercises, find the right help, you know, learn about these certain things. But if there's something you can't change, don't worry about that one either, because you can't change it. So what's the point about worrying? Like I said, I might totally butcher that, but it's something that I think about a lot. It's like, what's in my control. If I'm worried about the things that are in my control, let me just change it so that I'm feeling more confident and have less worry about it. But then just accept if I am worrying about things that are out of my control. try to accept, okay, these are out of my control. Let's focus on the other things and absolutely. Worrying about the future is ruining your present. You know, it never helps. It never helps. It doesn't mean don't prepare or don't anticipate things or don't, you know, look at possible risks in your life. I'm not saying that at all, but worrying and rumination and ruminating about something. that hasn't happened yet is just a story you're telling yourself. You're telling yourself a story about what might happen in the future. And if you're going to do that anyway, make it a great story, make it a fabulous story and live your life that way because they're both delusional. You know, worry is a delusion about the future and, and so is fantasy. So pick the fantasy. It's way more fun. Yeah, great. um As we're signing off, is there any other Bits of advice, any other misconceptions, anything we didn't quite touch on, do you think might be helpful for the audience? I think one of the misconceptions about this kind of work is that it's really woo woo. And it's, you know, manifesting things and it's all just sort of silly light, fluffy stuff that, you know, we're calling things in from the universe and all of that. Honestly, if you believe in all that stuff and it works for you, great, keep on the path. It's powerful stuff that way too. But this is not that. It can look like that because you're repeating things, uh but it's actually grounded in neuroscience. We're not doing quantum physics or prayer or any of those things, but they all work. because of the same neurological reasons of repetition, your brain believes what it repeats. I like that. And especially like I think about the someone who's always pessimistic, like they always just seem pessimistic because that's what they repeat to themselves over and over and over again. It's similar to like, you know, mental health is a big common issue for the population. ah Someone who is by default, quite anxious, quite depressed, has ruminating thoughts. they're, if that's their default state, when they're injured, when it's race day, when everything ramps up to a head, that's like, that's what they've been telling themselves. That's more likely where they're willing to go for a lot of times. But like you say, if there's repetition, if there's a lot of like optimistic self-talk and repeating themselves, that's something that we can condition ourselves away from. that we're talking about like psychology and. helping people with mental health. Obviously that's a whole other conversation, but just makes me think if someone is always ruminating in negative thoughts, they're more likely to negatively spiral. this is a very heavy science based podcast. And so I'm glad that you highlighted that misconception because yes, it is grounded in science just because it's not physical in terms of doing these workouts improves your VO2 max and science has shown that. there is science about the thought patterns that lead to increasing performance and very, very important to highlight. and if nothing else, you're taking 10 minutes to sit, deep breathe, listen to some chill music and, and set the tone of your day. Even if you believe it's all nonsense, you're still doing that. And that alone is important and will change your life. Yeah. And now like if we're talking about the nervous system, a lot of people on this podcast might be listening, we'll be familiar with the shift in sympathetic to parasympathetic nervous system. If we're in real overdrive and there's a lot of this sympathetic overactivity, it's hard to recover. It's hard to, you know, heal the body. Whereas if you're taking this time, like I say, even if it didn't work, you are still increasing your parasympathetic drive, you are still getting your heart rate back under control. You are helping enhance your recovery strategies and most people buy into that. Most people find that extremely valuable. So yeah, like I say, good to mention. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And the feedback that I've gotten from the people, because this is actually the start of the second cohort and the people that have been through it are just saying, oh my gosh, this has changed my confidence level. This has changed how I talk to myself. And you know, this is just, I mean, there are 30 days, each course is 30 days. You can do one or you can do all 90 days. But so far, the feedback from people is, again, this is type A runners who are over-thinkers and ruminators, right? And they're just like, I feel so much better when I start my day this way. So... Yeah, I'm, I'm, I use it myself and I just wanted to share it with the world. And I'm super excited that, people are resonating with it. Yeah. I want to make sure that I include all relevant links in the show notes for people to find. ah but what should I include? Obviously this is going to be an evergreen podcast. So people might be listening to this a year from recording, but I just want to make sure that whether there's, you know, enrolling other people or not to where the course is closed. uh What links should I include? And as well as social media links to learn more about you and the stuff that you're doing. Yeah. So I'm the planted runner. You can find me on Instagram and on the web at the planted runner.com. And, uh, also have a YouTube channel, but that's mostly just the podcast going there for now. If you want to specifically learn about begin with 10, it's the planted runner.com. Begin with 10. But if you want to learn more about me and the other things that I do, just head to theplantedrunner.com. Excellent. All right, Claire, thank you very much for coming onto the podcast once again. Um, uh, topic we haven't really covered yet, so I'm glad that you've been able to come on, share your wisdom, share your personal story as well. So thank you for that. And I know this is going to help a lot of runners. So once again, thank you for coming on. Thank you, Brody. If you are looking for more resources to run smarter or you'd like to jump on a free 20 minute injury chat with me, then click on the resources link in the show notes. There you'll find a link to schedule a call plus free resources like my very popular injury prevention five day course. You'll also find the Run Smarter book and ways you can access my ever growing treasure trove of running research papers. Thanks once again for joining me and well done on prioritizing your running wisdom.