Competitiveness and Mental Toughness

“When it comes down to the end of the race, it’s all about guts and desire.” – Coach Miller

 “Life is easy when the going is good.  Mental toughness comes into play when the going gets bad.  Nobody cares if you’re hurt or sick: in the final analysis you either do the job or you don’t.” – Joe Newton

"They have a word in Finnish called sisu, which basically means guts.  It's the strongest word in the Finnish language.  You tell a Finn he doesn't have sisu, that's like spitting in his face." - Arthur Lydiard

"Mental will is a muscle that needs exercise, just like the muscles of the body." - Lynn Jennings

            Competitiveness is possibly the most important attribute that leads to success in athletics.  There are many values that you can possess to build yourself toward a championship level.  Hard work, leadership, positivity, and passion are all key ingredients that prepare an athlete to enter competition.  However, the most successful athletes all possess a competitive edge that enables them to build on their preparation when they enter the arena of competition.  Champion athletes have special doses of willpower.  They pit themselves against others and simply refuse to back down from any kind of challenge.

The greatest competitive athlete I have ever watched was Michael Jordan.  Jordan was special not only because he was talented, but also because he approached every contest – regular season or playoff – with the same high level of competitive intensity.  Bulls coach Phil Jackson also said that Jordan was the greatest practice player of all time.  He would play so hard in practice that his teammates would either rise to his level or be humiliated on a daily basis.  Competitors like Jordan simply cannot turn it off.  They want to win at cards and board games just as bad as they want to win a basketball or baseball contest.  Competitors thirst for the thrill of pitting themselves in a contest against others.  Competitors never quit until all options for winning are exhausted.  One of my favorite Bulls games from the Jordan era was a regular season contest versus the Denver Nuggets.  The Bulls lost only ten games during the 1996 season, and they were renowned for their ability to play hard every game.  In this particular game, the Bulls played awful in the first half of this game.  At the half, they were down by 31 points.  Almost any team would have quit, and many superstars would have sat on the bench to rest for the next game.  Not Jordan.  He spearheaded a massive comeback.  At one point late in the fourth quarter, the Bulls were up by four points.  They ended up losing on a last second shot, but it was one of the most competitive losses I ever watched.  Jordan simply would not quit, in that game or any other one.  His daily competitive spirit made him a perpetual winner.

All great competitive runners carry heavy doses of this spirit within themselves.  Competitive running is all about pain, and the man who can deal with it better than anyone else is the winner more often than not.  Great runners compete from the gun all the way to the finish.  They smother their adversaries, refusing to quit off of the pace.  You can feel these special competitors during a race.  Any time you try to pass one of them, they speed up.  They do nothing but fight.  When a great runner comes to the “moment of truth” in a race, he refuses to back down.  He embraces the pain necessary to achieve a victory because his competitive spirit will not let him choose otherwise.  American Olympian Steve Prefontaine once said, “A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into an exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more. Nobody is going to win a 5,000 meter race after running an easy 2 miles. Not with me. If I lose forcing the pace all the way, well, at least I can live with myself.”  Prefontaine’s competitive spirit is almost an object of worship among U.S. runners.  His punishing racing style defined what we want to see out of ourselves – the man who will back down from no one in his quest to be the best. 

Another important quality that works in conjunction with the competitive spirit is mental toughness.  Mental toughness is a person’s ability to deal with adversity.  There are a lot of competitive people in the world, but not everyone adapts when conditions change or when adversity rears its ugly head.  A champion runner must be mentally tough enough to perform in all types of weather and under the strain of great pressure.  A lot of guys who are good competitors run great times and place well early in the season, but true champion runners must perform in the big state, national, and international races when the pressure is on.  Think about the women’s marathon in the Athens 2004 Olympics.  Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain owns the women’s marathon world record at around 2:15 minutes.  She has run over five minutes faster than any woman in the history of the world.  However, in Athens a stunned crowd watched Radcliffe drop out at the 20 mile mark as unheralded American Deena Kastor ran to a personal best and won the bronze medal.  Both women are great competitors, but Kastor reacted best to the challenges of a hilly course and the humid 95 degree air.  When faced with large doses of adversity, Kastor outperformed Radcliffe and won an Olympic medal.  On a day when many dropped out, Kastor proved to be mentally tougher than all but two other women. 

The aforementioned Michael Jordan was also one of the most mentally tough athletes ever.  His famous performance in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA finals is the most mentally tough athletic performance that I have ever witnessed.  With the series tied at two games apiece, the Bulls needed to win the game to take control of the series.  At the top of the telecast, though, Ahmad Rashad came on and reported that Jordan had a 101 degree fever and was vomiting the entire night before the game.  He was going to play, but Rashad doubted his ability to perform at his normal level of greatness.  Even during warm-ups, Jordan looked like he was on the verge of collapse.  His usual energy was gone, and he looked like a sapped and beaten man even before the tip-off.  How did he react?  He played one of the greatest games in NBA Finals history, scoring 38 points and hitting a 3-pointer in the last thirty seconds of the game to put his team up for good.  Jordan reacted like all champions do – he refused to let circumstances outside of his control affect his performance.

              Mentally tough athletes like Jordan acquire mastery over their own minds.  These athletes frame their performances in the most positive light possible.  Rather than fearing pressure, they yearn for it.  Rather than shrinking back from bad weather, they see it as an opportunity.  The toughest runners are always those who can be counted on to perform well under all sets of circumstances.  They are champions because their coaches and teammates can count on them without a doubt in their minds.  Like anything mental toughness can be acquired and honed in practice.  At Palatine we practice in all weather conditions from 100 degree heat to temperatures below 10 degrees.  We run in the rain, snow, sleet, and heat in order to prepare our minds for the varying conditions we could possibly face in a competition.  We are mindful of injuries and nagging pains, but we try to run through pain and discomfort.  No runner is going to feel great all of the time.  Aches and pains are part of the sport.  By learning to handle pain in practice, our athletes can hopefully do the same in competitions.  When your team starts to look at dual meets like an off day, then you know that practices have been sufficiently tough!  At least once a season, we do a workout whose soul aim is to test our athletes’ mental toughness.  This past summer we ran brutal intervals up a 300 meter hill at Devil’s Lake Park in Wisconsin.  Before the workout, I told the boys that an ordinary runner could do four repeats, but that a good runner could do eight.  They attacked the workout with vigor, suffering together and maxing out on the last repetition.  As we stood at the 300 meter mark, I sprang the challenge on them: a good team might do eight hills, but a championship team would do ten.  I made them adapt.  On the tenth one we ran a savage 1200 meter uphill to the top of the east bluff at Devil’s Lake.  The last two intervals were not about physiology.  They taught mental toughness – adapting to adversity when it is unexpectedly placed in front of you. 

 Pirate Lore:

Glenn Morris is the most mentally tough competitor that I have ever coached.  His personality is fairly level to begin with – he doesn’t let too much bother him.  One story about Glenn that captures being mentally tough is his race at the IHSA Sectional meet in 2004.  Glenn had won the MSL conference title for the second straight year two weeks previous, but he became injured during a workout during the week of Regional.  We held him out of the Regional meet to save him for the later stages of the state series.

The 2004 Sectional meet was run under highly adverse conditions.  Winds were gusting up to 50 miles per hour, and the temperature was in the mid-40s.  We pride ourselves in working out in all conditions at Palatine, but the thought even crept into my mind that I wouldn’t want to race that day.  We hadn’t lost a meet to any team but Elmhurst York all season so there was a lot of pressure on us both to qualify and to win.

At about the 800 meter mark of the race, Alex Sutphen stepped on Glenn’s foot and tore his shoe halfway off.  I noticed at about 1 ¼ miles that Glenn was running without a shoe.  He was hanging around in the lead group, but I started to get worried.  The rest of the team was foundering in the wind after going out a bit too hard and now our best runner was running in the cold without a shoe in the biggest race of the year.  On top of that, he had been injured the previous week.  In short, Glenn had every excuse to quit or put in a sub-par performance.