Your Memory Sucks! (And Maybe That’s a Good Thing)
Your memory is unreliable.
Remember how awful your last terrible marathon was?
Remember how bad you felt at 25 miles, when you swore you’d never do another one?
Then why do you find yourself, a month or two later (or less), looking for another one to sign up for?
It turns out that your memory for how well you remember how bad you felt is pretty terrible.
It’s probably the same reason some women have more than one baby.
In a recent study, marathon finishers were interviewed immediately following a race and again three or six months later.
As you can probably guess, their memory of how they felt became rosier over time.
“Typically we think pain is just physiological, but people need to understand that pain is also an emotional experience,” Eddie O’Connor, the head sports psychologist at the Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan told Runner’s World Newswire. “For marathon runners, as the time goes on you recreate the memory to remember more of the positive aspects of the race.”
What this suggests is that as you begin to suffer in a race, you can probably benefit from focusing on the positive outcome rather than what you are feeling at the moment.
You’ll still hurt, but maybe you won’t whine so much.
Read more at Runners World online.