The Tipping Point

Kevin O’Connor, Psy.D

Imagine this scenario:

You’ve trained for months, maybe even years for this. Day in and day out, you’ve pushed your body to its limits. You’ve trained in tears; you’ve trained in pouring rain; you’ve probably trained through the middle of a work meeting (or fifty). Tomorrow, it’s finally here: Race Day. Your plan is dialed; you’ve mapped out your target Zones and Splits. You know what you need to do to hit your PR or make the podium… And then the forecast changes. Strong headwinds are predicted for THAT stage of the race; you know, the mile marker you circled in red Sharpie as the spot where your brain starts screaming at you that you’ll die if you don’t stop. Suddenly, your best laid plans are on the fast track toward an early collision with your tipping point.

Competitive endurance athletes may not have to work all that hard to imagine a scenario like the one above. The tipping point is about as reliable a moment in time as the moment the sun peeks over the horizon each morning. A good training regimen, one that likely includes some form of lactate threshold training, can lengthen the runway before and during the tipping point, but it rarely prevents it. After all, the human brain is wired for survival and threat detection. The same internal mechanisms that make your hand recoil from a hot stove or pan also activate at your perceived physiological tipping point. Fight-or-flight brain kicks in and forcefully plants road flares in direct line-of-sight, signaling, “Danger Ahead!”

The old school way of thinking would assert that the ability to push through the tipping point is innate; you either have it or you don’t. That’s old school, though; what elite athletes and experienced Sport Psychologists know is that the mind can be trained much like any physical skill. In particular, mental training around the skill of Mindfulness, a practice that involves cultivating present-moment awareness and nonjudgmental acceptance of thoughts, emotions, and sensations, has demonstrated robust benefits across countless performance arenas (Wang, Lei, & Fan, 2023) and in the context of pain management (Zeidan & Vago, 2016), such as:

1. Enhanced focus and attention

2. Increased awareness and emotion regulation

3. Stress and anxiety reduction

4. Increased pain tolerance

Oftentimes, such benefits constitute the 1% edge that differentiates between good and great or between great and elite. They can be the difference between overcoming or succumbing to the tipping point. Those who train the mental game in the same way they do the physical game reap the benefits of that training when physical battles become mental warfare.

 In a competitive performance arena like endurance sports, some level of pain is what we sign up for. We know it’s coming, and, in a twisted way, many of us even enjoy it. But next time the tipping point shows up, we can rest assured our brains will try to convince us otherwise. How do we respond in those moments? How do we prepare for those moments? That remains up to each of us. You’ve undoubtedly heard the quote, “Adversity doesn’t build character; it reveals it.” With all due respect to the late American novelist, James Lane Allen, it seems more apt to say that adversity doesn’t just reveal character, it reveals how well we trained for it.

References

Wang, Y., Lei, S. M., & Fan, J. (2023). Effects of mindfulness-based interventions on promoting athletic performance and related factors among athletes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trial. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(3), 2038.

Zeidan, F., & Vago, D. R. (2016). Mindfulness meditation-based pain relief: a mechanistic account. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1373(1), 114–127.