Confidence Comes from Competence
Why the "mental side" of sport is completely overrated
I played a lot of sports when I was younger. From about the age of 11 on, I was doing about nine to twelve hours of aerobic exercise a week1. Initially this was swimming, but I transitioned to running in high school, and then later took up cycling to complete the triathlon trifecta. I still do all three of these sports, am very glad that they were such a large part of my formative years, and frankly, I would like to get back to the kind of hours that I was putting in a few years ago: dedicating yourself to sport is one of the most meaningful things you can do in today’s society. These sports have taught me many things: patience, discipline, fortitude, and even kindness. They continue to cultivate these virtues even today, and will probably always be part of my life.
However not everything that sport inoculated in me was positive. Every coach I had, from middle school swim club onward, was drawn to a conception of mental toughness, or “grit” that made it difficult to understand where improvements came from, or to have a healthy relationship with competition in general. When races went poorly, poor training, physical conditions, or distractions were never at fault. Rather, I was made to feel that there was something defective in my brain or character. That I was, to quote Severus Snape, a weak person. Not only is this position a philosophically bankrupt form of the worst kind of Cartesian mind-body dualism, it also fails to offer any actual avenue to improvement. Willing yourself not to slow down doesn’t actually work when you’ve completely overshot your sustainable threshold pace ten minutes in to a thirty minute race.
So how does one actually improve mental toughness in racing? There are a couple strategies. The first is to simply not put yourself in a situation where you need to be mentally tough. This means starting out a more intelligent pace that will lead to a slower accumulation of exhaustion and allow you to finish the race without having to rely on mental toughness. This was the real issue for myself and many of my teammates in college: we overestimated our fitness, went out too fast and had to rely on “grit” and “toughness” which couldn’t make up for the extra accumulated muscle fatigue from overshooting our capacity.
The second solution is to recognize that mental toughness is trained in much the same way as physical toughness: by doing training sessions that are physiologically, and psychologically challenging, and progressing these over time. By targeted exposure to the kind of pain that you would be likely to experience in a race, that pain becomes both physically, and mentally easier to deal with. You can push yourself more because it “feels” easier to do so because you’ve practiced it. And that practice looks a lot like the kind of training you are already doing to prepare for the race physically.
However, the two things aren’t exactly identical, or there wouldn’t be such an “epidemic” of mental weakness on high school and college cross country teams. The key distinction, I think comes from how we would break up intense training sessions, or workouts, as they are colloquially referred to2.
In college, we ran an 8k (5 miles) on grass about every other weekend. Our weekly Tuesday night workout was about this same distance, but split up into intervals anywhere from 400m to 2 miles. The longer repeats tended to be much faster, but with more rest proportionally. We sometimes did even longer and slower intervals on non-race Saturdays, but these were never close to the 8k distance. Physically, these intervals made a lot of sense: they allowed us to get in the kind of stimulus (neuromuscular and metabolic) that was essential for improvement in the 8k but without the toll on the body that running a full 8k all-out every Tuesday would have required. Psychologically, it was a different story. My best 8k time was around 25 minutes, but the longest of these intervals was only around 10, providing very little opportunity to learn how to cope with the mentally taxing final 5 minutes of the race. There was also little opportunity for progression week to week: the total length of the workout didn’t get any longer from week to week, and neither did the average interval length.
Contrast this to how my current Tuesday workouts are structured. I would start the season with just a simple 10 minutes at my target half-marathon pace. The next week I would progress in total volume to 3 x 5 minutes, but compensate for the increased intensity by making the workout psychologically easier by splitting up the 15 minutes into intervals. But the next week I would progress psychologically by doing 2 x 7.5 minutes instead, as the longer intervals are harder mentally. And so on and so forth until I got to about an hour of continuous work at half-marathon pace, which would be sufficient mental preparation for that kind of race.
The real problem with our team at MIT was not lack of character, confidence, or belief in oneself, but poor training. Mental strength in racing does not come from some inner reservoir of “will” but from treating the brain as a muscle that needs to be developed in the same was as one’s body through the principles of overload and progression.
I think this has some implications for other areas of my life as well. If I'm giving a presentation at work about my research, I’m going to be much more confident in my work if I’ve spent the time to carefully collect data it and think through the details of the experimental design. If I doubt my own work, bullshitting can only conceal so much of that from the audience. With Spanish, conversations with natives and my reading ability get better when I spend time in the language. If I haven’t read all week, of course my speaking ability is going to suffer. There is no substitute for putting in the time, bro: this idea of willing things to be so through sheer “grit” and “determination” cannot die fast enough. Confidence comes from competence, there are no shortcuts.
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Josh
I think the peak was either in eighth grade where I had 8 swim practices a week (5 weekdays+2 mornings+saturday morning), or the summer after my freshman year of college where I doubled 5 days a week, did a long run (17+ miles) and long ride (40+ miles) on the weekends.
Every training session is a workout of sorts, but we would never refer to an easy run or spin by such a name
Good post, but I do think it simplifies, overly, the sense in which we get "nervous" or "under confident". People fear failure for lots of reasons: loss of face among peers, loss of self-image, a simple hate of failure, loss of belief in ability etc. I am sure psychologists study relative prevalence of these (and more) at length, and I am not too aware of the literature. My guess is that the kind of "confidence muscle" that you build with practice only accounts for a couple of different sources of psychological pain: fear of uncertainty about whether you will be able to finish or not, or to calibrate your internal time-keeping.
I do think the point of "grit" is a bit more general. In life, it is hard to prepare for everything in advance, and regaining one's orientation in order to respond functionally is a generally useful skill. For instance, I am in the final year of my graduate studies, and find myself severely underprepared and unsure of my future. The lessons that I learn about how to have done my PhD better serve almost no current or future purpose. Here, I do have to rely on a general skill of "grit" to make the best of my remaining time, rather than to let fear of failure weigh on me.
What is this general purpose "grit"? I find the following simple reminder quite useful: "Do your best, forget about the rest."
This is really illuminating. Indeed, the best and fastest races I ran weren't ones that required lots of grit or mental toughness. I just ran fast because I was racing, wanted to beat people, and could do it.
Similarly, I find that giving research presentations to a group of people you know is not scary at all. But giving a research presentation to perceived "important, better than you" people is scary. The solution is to be confident in your importance and qualifications... which comes from actually being important and qualified, not deluding yourself that you are.
But are there people who are not confident and crumple under nerves, even when they are qualified to perform? I do think so, even if this isn't the problem most people face. Let's say people have "well-calibrated" nervousness or confidence. For them, the solution is to become more qualified. But some people are "overnervous". For them, the solution is to convince them that they are actually qualified, maybe by showing their ability to hit splits in workouts, or complete tough workouts similar to races. On the other hand, some people are "undernervous" or reckless. Even when they aren't qualified, they go out there and try to do it. Unfortunately with racing, confidence can only get you so far until your physiological limits kick in.
And here we have Aristotle's definition of courage: the mean between recklessness and cowardice. To quote gpt-4o since I don't have a copy of NE on me right now:
"Aristotle defines courage in Nicomachean Ethics as the mean between recklessness and cowardice with respect to fear and confidence. He argues that a truly courageous person fears what is right to fear (such as death in noble circumstances) but does not succumb to excessive fear or act rashly out of overconfidence."