I received this book as a holiday gift from my father-in-law, and liked it so much I want to share my thoughts here. This isn’t a sponsored post.

Yay! I actually finished a book in a normal amount of time (two weeks) – which means I can cohesively comprehend what I read! Ha ha.

160111HowBadDoYouWantIt

How Bad Do You Want It?, by Matt Fitzgerald, is about how endurance athletes can learn to cope with discomfort and stress while performing, to achieve their best results. The book is heavily focused on the psychobiological model of endurance performance – that the mind and body are deeply connected, with the mind being in charge (as opposed to previous models which believed endurance performance was mostly biological, not psychological).

Well, that makes sense, right? Our brain runs everything! But it’s more than that – it’s the concept that in order to become a better endurance athlete, it’s NOT so much actual effort you have to learn to deal with, but perception of effort – how your brain reacts to what you are doing. Only then, can you push yourself further and further to your limits.

IF you want to. I mean, the title of the book is “how bad do you want it?”!!! I know I’ve been in races and given up toward the end, deciding I didn’t want what I was going for (and truly not being upset about it). I’ve been beaten out of first place (in age group and overall) by less than 10 seconds a few times and said to myself – “yeah, she wanted it more than me and she worked for it, good for her!”

But… what about when you DO actually want it bad enough to go for it?! This has happened to me as well (thankfully, ha) where I had my mind so set on something that I pushed for it and got there – and if it’s happened to you, you know it’s one of the best feelings in the world! This book is about how to achieve that.

The book is twelve chapters – an introduction and conclusion, and ten chapters in between, each one going over a different coping (with the pain of working hard) mechanism, using anecdotes about endurance athletes from the past forty or so years.

I like that it was anecdotal. Stories tend to stick with me – I remember the examples from them better than reading straight up research. And each chapter does have a lot of research in it – but sandwiched between the story (each chapter seemed to start with the story build up, then there’d be the research-y/science-y stuff, then you’d get the conclusion to the story, after).

I did NOT like the goofy analogy throughout the whole book of endurance training being like a fire walk – you know, when people walk on hot coals. That’s just not relatable to me. It felt cheesy and forced.

I also thought it was funny that Pre is on the cover, but he is not even brought up until the final chapter! I was getting worried he wasn’t going to be in there at all!

But the book was definitely effective. Since reading it, I’ve already thought to myself during workouts, “how bad do I want this?” to push myself a bit more. I think I’ll review each chapter’s “coping mechanism” and my highlighted notes from time to time, to see if I am retaining what I read… and if I am using it!

I ended up highlighting a ton of passages! Here are some of them (items in italics are my notes):

  • One cannot improve as an endurance athlete except by changing one’s relationship with perception of effort.
  • Bracing yourself – always expecting your next race to be your hardest yet – is a much more mature and effective way to prepare mentally for competition. (as opposed to hoping the race won’t be a hard effort)
  • Regardless of how an athlete chooses to train, her training will yield greater improvements in race times if improving race times is the explicit goal of the training process. A bit, “well, duh,” but you have to plan to improve, to actually improve.
  • The amount of effort that an athlete puts into a race is influenced by her perception of the attainability of her goal. If the goal seems attainable, you will push harder to reach it, during the race. 
  • As an athlete, you’re much better off directing your attention externally, to the task at hand, which distracts you to some degree from your suffering, allowing you to push a little harder. 
  • Distinct from mental rehearsal, or practicing a sport in the mind at rest, which is proven to enhance performance, fantasizing about desired outcomes is a maladaptive coping skill be associated with lack of confidence in ones’s ability to make these outcomes happen through one’s own efforts. I thought this was really interesting – make sure your mental work is not just fantasy!
  • Counterintuitive though it may be, caring a little less about the result of a race produces better results. This has definitely worked for me, time and time again.
  • In psychobiological terms, sweet disgust enhances performance by increasing potential motivation, or the maximum intensity of perceived effort an athlete is willing to endure. Sweet disgust is the angry resolve one has to do better, after many failures. It lets you use your anger to fight back, in a healthy way.
  • The coping skill that is required to avoid overtraining is self-trust.
  • When people work together, their brains release greater amounts of mood-lifting, discomfort-suppressing endorphins than they do when the same task is undertaken alone.
  • Believing one is good at something can elevate performance, independently of actually being good at it.
  • The fitter a person expects to get from an exercise program, the fitter he really does get.
  • People who have a positive attitude and sweat the small stuff tend to age slower and live longer.
  • Passion enhances psychological well-being in ways that are sort of like a personality makeover. People who have a strong passion for an activity are known to spend less time in age-accelerating emotional states such as anxiety, just as naturally positive people do.
  • While scientists have found that these brain systems work the same way in all healthy individuals, they have also found that the things people value are highly individual, especially where abstract rewards – such as those associated with the personal meaning an athlete attaches to trying his or her best – are concerned. How hard you are willing to work in a race depends on what the race means to you.