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Summary
On episode 655 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan welcomes back Matt Fitzgerald, an endurance sports writer and coach and author of How to Run the Perfect Race.
Matt argues that runners should stop measuring success against a fixed time from a past race and instead ask a different question: did I execute the best race possible given the conditions I actually faced. He walks through pacing as the central skill of race execution and the psychological traits, body awareness, toughness, and judgment, that determine whether a runner nails it.
The conversation gets specific about the five modes of judgment that shape decision making mid race, planning, reactive tactical decisions, attention focus, emotional self regulation, and self talk, with both Matt and Allan sharing races where their own judgment broke down.
Links
- https://mattfitzgerald.org
- https://dreamruncamp.com
- Episode 226 – Eating for endurance with Matt Fitzgerald
Key Takeaways
- Redefine a good race as one you executed well, not one that hit a specific time. Matt’s philosophy, both as an athlete and as a coach, is to measure performance only by the factors within your control. If nothing you could have done differently would have produced a faster time, it was a perfect race regardless of the conditions.
- Pacing is the central skill of race execution. Since most of a runner’s fitness is built in training, race day is really about not wasting that fitness. Starting too fast, too slow, or too erratically effectively burns hard earned fitness rather than converting it into performance.
- A steady work rate matters more than a steady pace. On courses with hills, wind, or turns, pace will vary, but the goal is to keep effort, how much oxygen you are consuming per minute, consistent, since pushing above your maximal sustainable effort accelerates fatigue in a non linear way.
- Perfect pacing rests on three psychological traits: body awareness, toughness, and judgment. Body awareness is the ability to accurately judge effort and time by feel, similar to a quarterback throwing a pass without consulting a calculator. Toughness determines how deep into discomfort a runner can go before backing off.
- The limit runners actually hit in competition is perceptual, not physiological. You rarely reach a hard physiological ceiling in a race, you reach the point where perceived effort becomes unbearable, which is why factors like caffeine, which changes perception rather than physiology, can improve performance.
- Judgment breaks down into five specific modes. Planning covers decisions that set you up before the race even starts. Reactive tactical decisions, attention focus, emotional self regulation, and self talk all play out in real time, and Matt illustrates emotional self regulation with the story of his shoe coming off at the start of a marathon and consciously choosing to calmly refasten it rather than panic.
- Catastrophizing self talk actively worsens performance. Matt describes a marathon where an unsustainable early pace triggered a spiral of negative self talk, telling himself it was another disaster, and how consciously slowing to a sustainable pace and correcting the internal dialogue let him recover and finish strong.
- Context and environment shape how well you can be. Matt moved from California to Flagstaff, Arizona specifically because the environment supported the life he wanted, arguing that wellness is not just an individual trait, it depends on putting yourself in a setting that does not require constantly fighting the current.
- Matt’s three strategies to get and stay well: build self knowledge since the formula for wellness differs for each person, choose a context and environment that supports the life you want rather than fighting against it, and recognize that happiness itself is the real measure of wellness, even when physical health, in his case long COVID, is outside your control.
“Don’t wait for your limit to find you. It never will. Go find it.”
Matt Fitzgerald
Another Episode You May Enjoy
Episode 60 – Deanna Gets Momentum
Episode Notes
Podcast: 40+ Fitness
Episode: 655
Published: 2024-08-13
Host: Allan Misner (aka Coach Allan), author of The Wellness Roadmap
Guest(s): Matt Fitzgerald, an endurance sports author and coach, I was like
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