From Dr. Jason Karp: Physical vs. mental

I receive periodic emails from Dr. Jason Karp, a running coach and writer whose work appears frequently in Runner's World. The following email, which I received earlier this month, fascinated me and I made a mental note a few weeks ago that I wanted to share it with readers of this blog. I don't necessarily agree with his zero-sum feeling on mental training vs. physical training, or that there is necessarily a binary relationship between the two. I believe they are interwoven; and, yes, I do believe the physical components are by far of greater importance. With our athletes, we spend the majority of our time on the physical aspect of the game and maybe not enough on the mental aspect. To suggest that the mental approach is minimal and not all that important, which I believe he implies, is not entirely accurate ... based on several decades of coaching D1 athletes of all shapes and sizes. Good food for thought though! Here's what he wrote ...

I was talking to an elite Kenyan distance runner who told me that running is all physical. "You just have to run," he said in his thick Kenyan accent.

There are many people who like to say that we need to train our minds, that performance is mostly mental. I believed when I was a kid running around the school fields, and still believe now, that this Kenyan runner is right--performance is all physical. The mind may get you out the door and into the gym, or on the track, or in the pool, or on the bike, but it is the physical work, combined with the DNA inside of us, that determines our performance. When you're not fit, when I'm not fit, it's not because of our mind. It's physical. We are animals.

Do the physical work, and the rest will come.