How Bad Do You Want It?

Book excerpt: A guide to mental toughness from the author of 80/20 Running: “Fitzgerald’s research will help you become your own sports psychologist.” —Joe Friel, endurance sports coach and author of the Training Bible series The greatest athletic performances spring from the mind, not the body. Elite athletes have known this for decades and now science is learning why it’s true. In How Bad Do You Want It?, coach Matt Fitzgerald examines over a dozen pivotal races to discover the surprising ways elite athletes strengthen their mental toughness. Fitzgerald puts you into the pulse-pounding action of epic races from running, cycling, triathlon, XTERRA, and rowing with race reports and revealing post-race interviews with the elites. Their words reinforce what the research has found: strong mental fitness lets us approach our true physical limits, giving us an edge over physically stronger competitors. Each chapter explores the how and why of an elite athlete’s transformative moment, revealing powerful new psychobiological principles you can practice to flex your own mental fitness. The new psychobiological model of endurance performance shows that the most important question in endurance sports is: How bad do you want it? This fascinating book will forever change how you answer this question and show how to master the psychology of mind over muscle. Discover new psychobiological findings including: Mental toughness determines how close you can get to your physical limit * Bracing yourself for a tough race or workout can boost performance by 15% or more * Champions have learned how to give more of what they have * The only way to improve performance is by altering how you perceive effort * Choking under pressure is a form of self-consciousness * Your attitude in daily life is the same one you bring to sports * There’s no such thing as going as fast as you can—only going faster than before * The fastest racecourse is the one with the loudest spectators * Faith in your training is as important as the training itself Featured athletes include: Sammy Wanjiru, Jenny Simpson, Greg LeMond, Siri Lindley, Willie Stewart, Cadel Evans, Nathan Cohen and Joe Sullivan, Paula Newby-Fraser, Ryan Vail, Thomas Voeckler, Ned Overend, Steve Prefontaine, and John “The Penguin” Bingham “Fitzgerald has been writing about the psychology of endurance performance for more than a decade now and is really one of the pioneers in terms of trying to take this body of research out of the laboratory and into the field for everyone to try.” —Runner’s World