The endurance sports community loves to celebrate grit. Think of Julie Moss crawling across the finish line of the 1982 Ironman World Championship on live TV. Or the marathon race distance being set by a Greek messenger who died at the finish line. Or countless examples of masochism in ultrarunning, cycling, and niche endurance sports. Grit may be sexy, but unsexy restraint is what crafts champion athletes.
This story is an excerpt adapted from Chasing Mastery: 25 Lessons to Cultivate Your Full Potential in Endurance Sports by Matt Fitzgerald.
Endurance Athletes Love Celebrating Grit…
I’ve noticed that when one of my athletes impresses me, it’s always for one of two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with performance. The first is grit. An endurance athlete can’t get very far without grit, and not all athletes have the amount required to master their sport. Consequently, when I see evidence of grit in an athlete I coach, I get happy.
One time an athlete of mine ran a 1-mile time trial in the middle of a city street because the sidewalks were blanketed in snow. A line of cars stacked up behind him during the six minutes it took him to complete the time trial, but he paid them no mind. My lawyers have advised me not to encourage this sort of behavior, but I can’t help myself. I love that this athlete considered his running important enough to get a workout done in such an audacious manner. Anytime an athlete displays this level of grit, I reward them with what I call commitment points. While they lack exchange value, they serve the important purpose of letting athletes know their coach is impressed. Grit is among the “sexier” virtues in endurance sports, I dare say. Everyone is impressed by grit. Angela Duckworth’s book on grit was a national bestseller, and her TED Talk on the same subject has been viewed more than a million times. If you ask me, though, grit is a bit overhyped, which is why I’m even happier when an athlete demonstrates the second of the two traits that impress me as a coach, which is restraint.
…But Restraint Is What Makes Champions
Restraint can mean a lot of things, but what I’m talking about is self-restraint, which psychologist Stephen Schroeder defined as “the ability to control one’s impulses, emotions, or desires.” This type of restraint is extremely useful in endurance sports—indeed, far more useful than most athletes recognize.
Why? It starts with motivation. We know that endurance athletes must be supremely motivated to reach their full potential— motivated enough to literally crawl across the finish line if need be. There is simply no such thing as being too motivated as an endurance athlete. Yet motivation alone does not enable athletes to get the most out of themselves. Crawling across the finish line shows poor judgment as much as it demonstrates motivation. An athlete who ends up in this position ought to have known better than to push as hard as they did, but lacking judgment, they allowed their motivation to run rampant and made dubious pacing decisions that landed them literally on their hands and knees.
Here’s the thing, though: Even when athletes know better than to allow their motivation to go unchecked, they don’t always check it. There’s a difference between having good judgment and making good decisions. To have any effect on a situation, an athlete’s good judgment must be enacted, and enacting good judgment isn’t automatic.
Think of all the scenarios in which a person has a clear understanding of what they should do and fails to do it. The taxpayer who knows they should start preparing their federal return in January but waits until April. The prediabetic who knows they should start exercising but keeps finding excuses not to. The workaholic who really means to spend more time with their family but continues to prioritize their career. It happens in sports as well. Most of the athletes I know who overtrain or blow up in races are fully aware that they are sabotaging themselves by failing to act on their better judgment.
Restraint is the psychological midwife that enables an athlete to act on their better judgment, checking their motivation when it needs to be checked. It might not be the sexiest athletic virtue (in fact, it’s definitely not), but restraint is every bit as important as motivation and judgment in the quest to achieve sport mastery, and that’s why it never fails to impress me when it’s exercised by an athlete I’m coaching.
Restraint as a Predictor of Success
The preferred scientific term for restraint is self-control. You also see it referred to sometimes as inhibitory control. Whatever you call it, research indicates that restraint predicts success in sports, with champion athletes exhibiting greater self-control than lesser athletes. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Physiology found that inhibitory control (as measured by the widely used Stop Signal Task) was strongly associated with competitive performance in a group of more than 100 athletes representing a variety of sports. Simply put, athletes who are good at holding themselves back generally tend to also be good at whatever sport they compete in.
Self-control comes in two flavors: the aforementioned inhibitory form and its inverse, initiatory control. Both entail overriding impulses in pursuit of goals, but they work in opposite directions. As the name suggests, initiatory control enables a person to override internal resistance to commencing or continuing a behavior, whereas inhibitory control helps a person override the impulse to keep doing something when their goal is to stop. A person who wants to lose weight, for example, requires initiatory control to start and maintain a walking habit and inhibitory control to reduce their fast-food consumption.
Summon the courage to start and stick with it
Initiatory control is the more familiar flavor of self-control, justly appreciated by athletes and coaches alike. A study of 398 teenagers and young adults training for a marathon found that those who started out with higher levels of initiatory control (which in this case manifested as the ability to get out the door and run when they really didn’t want to) tended to perform better on race day, and that those whose initiatory control declined in the course of training performed worse.
It’s important to note that the runners in this study were mostly first-time marathoners involved in a fundraising effort. Hence, they likely weren’t as intrinsically motivated as the typical competitive runner. Initiatory control is most valuable when motivation is low, supplying the oomph to do something you’d rather not do.
When motivation is high, there’s not much need for initiatory control because there’s little or no internal resistance to overcome. A 2020 study led by Ian Taylor of Loughborough University found that, within a group of 40 athletes, those who scored higher on a measure of autonomous motivation reported “lower temptation to reduce effort and higher value of goal pursuit” in a 10-minute cycling task and also performed better. These athletes felt less tempted to quit because they were more motivated, and because they felt less tempted to quit, they didn’t need to exercise much initiatory control to keep pushing.
Harness your drive to finish like you started
By the same token, higher levels of motivation demand more inhibitory control (i.e., restraint) from athletes. A 2015 study by Italian researchers measured inhibitory control in a group of ultrarunners. Those who recorded higher scores in a test of inhibitory control performed better in a trail race than their less restrained counterparts. Although pacing was not analyzed in this study, it’s likely that superior pacing partially mediated the relationship between inhibitory control and performance, as it is well established that higher finishers in ultramarathons slow down significantly less as the race unfolds than do lower finishers. In other words, they do a better job of holding themselves back.
Be a Master of Restraint
I’ve spent a lot of time around elite endurance athletes in my career, and I can tell you that, by and large, they are masters of restraint. In fact, it’s been my observation that the most striking psychological difference between elite and non-elite endurance athletes is that the former are much better at holding themselves back when appropriate. Whereas non-elite athletes tend to try to beat their target times in interval workouts, elites try to nail their times. And while non-elite athletes are prone to gutting their way through disastrous workouts, elites are quick to abandon them in the spirit of living to fight another day. The same goes for dealing with niggles, those painful warnings of potential injury, which non-elite athletes often ignore and try to push through, in contrast to the elites, who almost always heed these warnings with responsive adjustments to their training.
Similar caution is shown by elite athletes at broader timescales, where escalating fatigue is interpreted as a sign of working too hard and not—as many non-elites see it—a sign of working hard enough. An example is middle-distance runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway, who by the age of 24 had won six Olympic and World Championship medals at 1500 and 5000 meters, four of them gold. In training, Ingebrigtsen relies heavily on blood lactate testing to regulate the intensity of his workouts, which are often done on a treadmill for further control. But while fans fixate on the lactate tests, they’re not really the point. “The real differentiator and guiding principle,” wrote former elite miler Kyle Merber in an analysis of Ingebrigtsen’s approach, “is that no individual session should ever be so hard as to risk injury or compromise the next. It’s a tempered and long-term-oriented approach that relies on stacking general fitness versus bombing a Hail Mary at the end of the season.”
My message for you is this: To reach your full potential, you must take a cue from Jakob Ingebrigtsen and embrace restraint, despite its unsexiness. Make it your “thing”—a special advantage you hold over athletes who focus on grit and other sexy virtues at the expense of judgment and restraint. Model your training after that of the great Eliud Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic Marathon champion, who said in a 2021 interview for Outside, “I try not to run 100 percent. I perform 80 percent on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and then at 50 percent Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.” When a lesser runner passes you on the bike path, take pride in resisting the temptation to show them who’s boss. Ignore the self-sabotaging pseudo-competition of Strava. Give yourself a pat on the back when you bail out of a workout that isn’t going well and are rewarded with a strong and healthy performance in your next workout. Smile inwardly when you see other runners fail to exercise restraint, and feed your special advantage. Tattoo your brain with the motto, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
CHASING MASTERY FROM PRINCIPLE TO PRACTICE
Restraint is a signature trait of endurance mastery, enabling athletes to make decisions that are consistent with their best judgment. Here is a strategy for turning this principle into practice on the path to mastery:
Reflect on the type of situation in which you most often fail to exercise restraint as an athlete. Is it not slowing down when you know you’re pushing too hard in a low-intensity training session? Not resting when your body is clearly telling you it needs rest? Snacking on energy bars instead of having a proper lunch? Whatever it is, devise a plan for holding yourself back the next time you encounter the same temptation.
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Chasing Mastery shares five essential processes for runners, triathletes, and cyclists to cultivate their full potential in endurance sports.