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How Small Gains Add Up: A Marathon Calculation
A marathon repeats the same movement tens of thousands of times. Improved biomechanics repeated on each step, thousands of times can produce large diferences in overall speed, and injury prevention.
How many steps are in a marathon?
A runner finishing in about three hours and forty five minutes, at about 175 steps a minute, takes roughly 39,000 steps. An elite runner finishing in about two hours and five minutes, at about 185 steps a minute, takes closer to 23,000. Every one of those steps is a chance to run better.
What does the arithmetic show?
Take a round figure of 40,000 steps. Saving one hundredth of a second on every step saves 400 seconds, which is six minutes and forty seconds. That is a personal best hiding inside your stride, and it is why small improvements in foot placement, cadence and running form are worth chasing.
What about energy and injury?
Imagine improving the effectiveness of your stride by just 2%. Across many thousands of footfalls, a genuine biomechanical improvement like that pays off in running time, in energy retention and possibly assist in prevention of injury.
Do small margins matter in other sports?
Roger Federer told Dartmouth graduates that he won almost 80% of the matches he played while winning only 54% of the points. A margin that thin built one of the great careers in sport. Two lessons follow. Small improvements make for large gains, and the capacity to leave failures in the past and focus on the point at hand, combined with talent and training, results in significant success.
Where does mental rehearsal come in?
When your running coach identifies an adjustment for you, you practise it physically, take the feedback and see what it does. Mental rehearsal adds repetitions of the instructed rhythm and movement sequence between sessions. Under hypnosis, I guide you through deeply focused rehearsal of the pattern until it feels like your own.
How do you keep it natural on race day?
Research on choking under pressure, including a well-known study of golf putting by Beilock and Carr (2001), shows that well-learned skills run best when you are not monitoring each component of the movement. Rehearsal does the work in preparation, so on the day the movement runs automatically and your attention stays on the race.
How will you see the gain?
Time the same route in similar conditions before and after the change, and repeat it several times, because weather, sleep, pacing and fatigue all move a single run. Your times across the repeats show the gain. The method is in Build a Mental Rehearsal Plan for Your Sport.
Ready to start?
Bring your coach’s instruction to a first session and we will build your rehearsal from it. See sports hypnotherapy in Melbourne to book.
Research & Further Reading
- Beilock, S.L. and Carr, T.H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
More in this series
- Is There a Perfect Technique in Sport?
- Practice Makes Permanent: Why Instruction Matters
- Hypnosis and Mental Rehearsal for Athletes
- Sports Hypnosis Beyond Confidence
- Build a Mental Rehearsal Plan for Your Sport
To find out whether this approach suits your sport, see sports hypnotherapy in Melbourne.
Part of the series on mental rehearsal in sport. Return to the guide.