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We often find it difficult to continue after running just a few times. Think back – when you plan to go running, do you hesitate when thinking about the discomfort of being out of breath? Or do you give up when remembering how you’ve never been able to stick with it before?
The inexplicable fear before running that makes it hard to take the first step comes from neglecting two key psychological preparations:
- Adjusting your pre-run mental state and clearing inner obstacles
- Finding sustainable motivation to keep running
Let’s look at how to address these specifically.
01. How to Clear Inner Obstacles?
Step 1: Listen to Your Body’s Protests, Don’t Force Yourself
Many people constantly push themselves while running, mentally whipping themselves and gritting their teeth to run just a bit longer. After a few weeks, they may indeed reach their target duration, seemingly having “tamed” their body to become stronger.
Isn’t this method effective? In the short term, yes, but it doesn’t solve long-term issues.
People often ignore their inner voice. When the body feels tired and can’t meet all demands, we blame it, get angry, and push it to exhaustion. In reality, your body doesn’t like being mistreated or pushed to its limits.
Your body will resist in various ways, requiring more energy to convince yourself to exercise next time. Your body will remember the pain of exhaustion repeatedly, reinforcing your resistance to running, potentially even developing fear, creating a vicious cycle.
So when you feel like giving up or don’t want to run, stop berating and forcing yourself. Instead, try to understand your body’s feelings and needs, value its signals, and learn to speak its language to adjust your mental state.
Step 2: Dialogue with Your Body, Relax
Relaxation is essential in pre-run preparation. This includes:
- Physical relaxation
- Mental/nervous system relaxation
Physical relaxation means using proper running form and appropriate exercise intensity. What’s appropriate intensity? Simply put, it’s intensity that makes you feel “high” rather than “scared.”
For mental and nervous system relaxation, we need to understand how the nervous system works. The sympathetic nervous system helps humans and other animals resist various dangers like severe cold, dehydration, and predator attacks. When we focus too intensely on exercise goals, the brain sends electrical impulses stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, affecting muscles and internal organs, causing symptoms like:
- Sweaty palms
- Rapid heartbeat
- Shortness of breath
- Dry mouth
However, tension doesn’t help us perform better. In many competitions, tenser athletes are more likely to underperform, which is why relaxation is important. When relaxed, only the muscles needed for exercise work, there’s no mental burden, and performance actually improves.
During running, maintaining dialogue with your body can help you relax.
For example, you might feel tired after thirty minutes. But this fatigue is subjective – ask yourself:
- Where exactly do you feel tired?
- Is it heavy breathing or sore legs?
- Which part of your legs specifically?
This questioning helps you realize that not your entire body is tired. Adjusting the tired areas can quickly help you feel refreshed.
Step 3: Accept Your Inner Voice
You might ask: what if self-critical voices persist even after doing everything above? Trust that we can coexist with these protesting voices without letting them affect us. Here are two specific methods:
Method 1: “The Little Person with Signs”
- Close your eyes and imagine a little person holding up signs displaying your thoughts
- If you have no thoughts, the sign is blank
- If you have thoughts, they appear on the sign
- This helps you observe your thoughts objectively
- By visualizing thoughts on these signs, you separate them from yourself, preventing them from controlling you
Method 2: “The Bus Driver Experiment”
- Imagine life as driving a bus to your desired destination, with you as the driver
- Passengers get on and off along the way, including “troublemakers” who try to intimidate you
- They can’t actually harm you or take the wheel – they’re just trying to scare you
- Should you keep driving or stop to argue with them?
- If you wait to finish arguing, the bus can’t continue
- When you firmly decide to keep going, you’ll realize these “troublemakers” are just posturing kittens that can’t stop your progress
02. Find Your True Motivation to Keep Running
When asked why they run, people usually answer with goals like:
- Losing weight
- Staying healthy
- Losing specific amounts of weight
- Completing a half-marathon
- Maintaining normal health indicators
However, these are just side effects of running, not the true goals. There’s only one criterion for identifying true goals: whether they can spark your motivation.
For example, when asked “why do you run,” a 40-year-old woman answered that she wanted a healthy body to better accompany and support her two children as they grow up. Behind “staying healthy,” we can identify a more authentic running motivation – the thought of regaining health and vitality to have enough energy to accompany her children’s growth makes her want to run.
Why does this work? It turns out that compared to convincing ourselves with logic, the human brain more easily acts on emotional perception, as the saying goes: “Knowing all the right principles doesn’t mean you can live a good life.”
Our brain has three layers:
- Innermost Layer (Physiological Brain)
- Located in the nuclear region
- Focuses on physical safety
- Characterized by quick reactions
- Middle Layer (Emotional Brain)
- The limbic system
- Focuses on emotions and feelings
- Tends to extremes
- Only has “like” and “dislike” options
- Outermost Layer (Thinking Brain)
- The cerebral cortex
- Responsible for rationality and intelligence
- Handles visual projection and reasoning
To be rational, we must first pass through emotions. Logic is often defeated by emotions, and if we want to spark running motivation and keep going, we can use the power of emotions: let the emotional brain generate positive feelings, creating imagery that makes us happy, naturally leading us to run immediately and fully engage.
