halo effect
n.
An effect whereby the perception of positive qualities in one thing or part gives rise to the perception of similar qualities in related things or in the whole.
The halo effect can be one of the most powerful catalysts to transformational performance. Consider the last time you had a good race; I’m not talking about one that you bonked at or didn’t prepare for. I’m eluding to the one where things just clicked, you passed the person you were trying to catch on the run, or glided throughout the event seemingly effortlessly, or pushed so hard that you tasted metal but still were able to persevere until the end to set a new PR.
Aside from feeling good at the moment, or long enough to recount with your friends every step that you took along the course until they prayed for you to talk about anything else, what did you do with this experience?
The answer usually comes in two forms. The first is found in the person who feels that they have completed the task that they trained for. They take a number of days off and tell themselves that they will ease back into it in about a week or so - and they do. A week later they go out to run or cycle or swim, (whatever their event may be) and then they focus on starting all over again. They remember their event and then look for the next challenge ahead of them.
The second approach is to go out right afterwards, not to race again, but to spin your legs. What you just might find is that you can’t help but be moving faster than you were prior to the race itself. The reason for this is that it is exceedingly difficult to truly mimic race conditions during your training. The endorphins released create opportunities to do things that in training are unthinkable. So much of performance is mental, and requires us to break through perceived barriers. Racing allows us to do this because during a race, we are usually spending a whole lot more time doing, and a whole lot less time thinking, or more to the point, over-thinking.
By going out after a race and spinning your legs, you might find that you have made a breakthrough of sorts. If this has occurred, then you now you have something to build off of. You have the ability to use the end of a race as a new beginning rather than simply the completion of months of training. More importantly, the right midset to racing can allow you to focus on the continual journey rather than on a series of outcome goals.
I was reminded of this during this past week. Last weekend, a group of us drove up to Lake Placid to race in the Tinman Half Ironman race at Tupper Lake, NY. Everyone had breakout performances, it was one of those days where all of the pre-race anxiety is found to be irrelevant as soon as you get out onto the course. The race, similar to the long course at Wildflower, is on a Saturday which makes it possible to go out on Sunday to ride of a loop or more of the Ironman Lake Placid bike course before driving back to the city. Now don’t get me wrong, on Saturday evening, the last thing I wanted to do was jump back into the saddle of my Kestral, but I knew that come daybreak, the world would look a whole lot different, and it did. Sunday we headed out onto a course that I haven’t been on in two years. We didn’t set any land speed records, treating it as a recovery ride but what we did do was communicate a clear message to our bodies and our minds that Saturday, as great as it was, was just a pebble in the stream, something to flow past and take note of before continuing along our journey.
Like every good coach that practices what he preaches, I took Monday off as a recovery day and did absolutely nothing except focused a bit more on my nutrition to help fend off any threats to a depleted post race immune system. And then came Tuesday morning. Tuesday, July 3rd began with me waking up with the sound of the birds outside my window around 4:50am. I headed out to do a run on legs that felt, well, different, they felt thick, or solid, or pumped. There’s a fairly hilly 10K loop that I do regularly from my house. It begins with an immediate if not extensive ascent. I immediately found myself breathing rapidly and laboring from my first steps. It was an interesting sensation in that I just was having trouble catching my breath but I wasn’t feeling tired, just having trouble taking in enough air. I decided that this would be an even pace run as opposed to a constant effort run. This means that I would keep the pace constant throughout the run by increasing effort while climbing hills and then recovering a bit on the other side. I focsed on my form which was easy from the muscle memory refined during Saturday’s race - good midfoot strike under my center of balance, my hands moving forward and pointing where I wanted to go, my head neutral and my shoulders relaxed. It was a challenging run, don’t get me wrong, I felt like I labored and was dragging myself up the hills. I also felt that the run must have taken forever, until I pushed the stop button on my Nike upon returning to my house only to find that I had completed the run faster than I have done so in the past six months. I finished the run a full two minutes faster, and in a 10K, that is huge.
Throughout the run, I felt like my legs were weighing me down and I was just concentrating on getting through it. There must be some mistake. I must have caught a green light at an intersection that I normally would have had to wait around at. In fact, none of this occurred. I simply ran faster and the internal connection of how fast I was running to my perceived effort was all out of whack, because of Saturday’s race.
What did occur was that the timing belt on my legs sped up. The neural connections between my head and my muscles were firing faster and I was simply running faster while in fact feeling like I was running slower. The race on Saturday had stimulated my ability to recruit fibers quickly, enhance my turnover, probably perfected my form and allowed me to turn around and keep those benefits with me when I went out on Tuesday for my run. The goal now is to take that with me and build off of it as I continue my own training. I’m now running my 10K two full minutes faster than I was less than a week ago.
In essence, the halo effect of my race on Saturday was that it acted like shock therapy to my training. A good race can set you up to break through any plateaus that you’ve hit in your training. It can make you do things that you didn’t think were possible. While the race itself is one experience to savor, don’t lose sight of the lingering benefits that exist days afterwards that you can use to remotivate yourself and reinvigorate your training.
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” Virginia Woolf
