Psychological Aspects of Training Distance Runners - Building Mental Toughness
- Austin Tobelmann
- Apr 7, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 25, 2025
Distance running is a grueling endeavor that utilizes an athlete's complete physical and mental capacity. While the physical characteristics needed to become a great distance runner have been tested for over a century, sport psychology is a younger field with much to explore regarding how mental characteristics affect performance and which psychological tactics work best in different situations.
What is Mental Toughness?
Mental toughness can be defined as confidence in one's abilities, and resilience under stress and pressure. In order to achieve a performance-enhancing mindset, runners must develop a high degree of personal mental toughness.
Developing Mental Toughness
Building Confidence
Confidence stems from consistently putting in the required work each day and allowing yourself to witness the progress. When you see yourself being better than you were, it is easier to be confident in knowing that you can be better than you are.
Cultivating Resilience
Resilience is developed in almost the opposite fashion as confidence. It comes from enduring failure and hardship. These challenges are not here to make you hurt; they are here to help you learn and grow. Accept them as they come and move through them with grace. You cannot always control when they arrive.
However, there is something you can control that will help improve both your confidence and resilience: developing mindfulness and psychological skills.
When you see yourself being better than you were, it is easier to be confident in knowing that you can be better than you are.
Why Develop Mindfulness and Psychological Skills?
Athletes with inherent mindfulness show high levels of:
Motivation
Coachability
Concentration
Confidence
Peaking under pressure
Coping with adversity
Aside from these quality traits, mindfulness has also been shown to lead to better running performance. This is due to having the ability to be aware of each moment, accept what is occurring without judgment, and re-focus after losing concentration.
Mindfulness is not only proven to help runners and athletes perform better, but it brings a better quality of life at large. It has shown to lead to significant decreases in negative thoughts, mental stress, and self-doubt.
Can Mindfulness Be Trained?
Yes! Mindfulness is not something you are simply born with or without—it is trainable. Further, mindfulness training that focuses on present awareness, acceptance, and commitment has proven to be more effective in sport performance than general psychological skills training alone (goal-setting, imagery, self-talk, etc.). However, it should not replace psychological skills training. Both should be used together to realize the highest potential in personal mental toughness.
In order to build proper habits and cultivate true mindfulness and psychological skills, they need to be practiced often—just like running!
How to Train Mindfulness and Psychological Skills
There are many ways to train mindfulness that can provide great results. Just as there are many physical characteristics that a runner needs to train to reach their potential, all mental components should be incorporated into your training:
Core Mindfulness Techniques
Cognitive Association means bringing focus and awareness to the task at hand. For runners, this can be focusing on breathing, form, pace, or how you are feeling at any moment during a race or run.
Cognitive Dissociation is the opposite: putting focus on something entirely different than the task at hand, such as singing a song in your head, counting, or paying attention to external stimuli.
Thought-Stopping helps curb negative thoughts, find an approach to push them away, and replace them with more constructive thoughts. It shows us that we are not our thoughts—we are the ones that choose which thoughts to continue thinking.
Relaxation is the ability to keep our body and mind calm. Great ways to work on relaxation are deep breathing and meditation.
Body Scan (Progressive Muscle Relaxation) involves tensing and relaxing each muscle in your body, one by one, working from the head to the toes. It is great for bringing our attention to our bodies, feeling where we are tense, and letting go of that tension.
...we are not our thoughts, we are the ones that choose which thoughts to continue thinking.
Additional Psychological Skills
Goal Setting helps us decide on a destination. However, half of knowing what you want is knowing what it takes to get there. The true goals lie in the daily habits we need to develop in order to reach that destination.
Self-Talk is about how you talk to yourself. Developing positive mantras and treating yourself the way that you would treat others goes a long way!
Visualization is practicing all of the above skills in a race-like scenario—in your head. Play out the race with all of your senses, being aware of each moment, accepting it as it is, and committing to give your best effort. Re-play the race in multiple ways so that you are ready for anything to happen when you get to the real thing.
...treating yourself the way that you would treat others goes a long way!
The Power of Gratitude
There is one final trait to mention that will bring everything together: gratitude. Developing a "get to" instead of "have to" mindset, and appreciating the journey as it comes will make everything much more worth it!
Mental toughness is not an innate quality reserved for elite athletes—it's a skill that every runner can develop through consistent practice and dedication. By incorporating mindfulness and psychological skills training into your routine alongside your physical training, you'll not only become a better runner but also cultivate a more fulfilling relationship with the sport and with yourself.
Resources
Bulğay, C., Tingaz, E. O., Bayraktar, I., & Çetin, E. (2020). Athletic performance and mindfulness in track and field athletes. Current Psychology, 41(7), 4482–4489. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00967-y
Hagin, V., Gonzales, B. R., & Groslambert, A. (2015). Effects of cognitive stimulation with a self-modeling video on time to exhaustion while running at maximal aerobic velocity: A pilot study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 120(2), 491–501. https://doi.org/10.2466/26.25.pms.120v18x5
Jaenes, J. C., Wilczyńska, D., Alarcón, D., Peñaloza, R., Casado, A., & Trujillo, M. (2021). The effectiveness of the psychological intervention in Amateur Male Marathon runners. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.605130
Jones, M. I., & Parker, J. K. (2015). A conditional process model of the effect of mindfulness on 800-M personal best times through pain catastrophising. Journal of Sports Sciences, 34(12), 1132–1140. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2015.1093648
Wu, C.-H., Nien, J.-T., Lin, C.-Y., Nien, Y.-H., Kuan, G., Wu, T.-Y., Ren, F.-F., & Chang, Y.-K. (2021). Relationship between mindfulness, psychological skills, and mental toughness in college athletes. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(13), 6802. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18136802
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