Marathons: all in the mind?

Distance: 5K (3.2 miles, with backpack) Time: 31 minutes (lots of pedestrians); Surface: road

Last month a friend finished London's Run to the Beat half marathon in 1 hour 46 minutes, an excellent time by most accounts. What's more, it was her first half and she hadn't trained much - her longest run prior to the race was only eight miles. At dinner last night, I asked her the secrets to her speediness. She said that she was baffled by her time and put it down to having competed in running events at school, ten years ago. Not even cross country, but sprints (800 metres). Her conclusion was that having had a smattering of athletics training, “I know how to go through the pain. I sort of just pushed myself round”.

Topically, given my blog's rather lofty title, I’ve been fascinated by the link between endurance sports and the mind ever since I interviewed a tremendous athlete (I'm a journalist) called Katie Spotz - see pic, left - last year. The wonderful Spotz, a 22-year-old from Ohio, takes endurance sports to a level most of us wouldn't even have dreams/nightmares about – purely for fun (and for charity – she’s raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for clean drinking water). Katie has run 62-mile ultra marathons, crossed the Mojave desert solo and unsupported, cycled across America, become the first person to swim the 325 mile-long Allegheny river in the US (there were crocodiles, allegedly) and last year became the youngest person to row the Atlantic (www.rowforwater.com). It's enough to make you reach for the chocolate biscuits and crawl back to the sofa.

What is interesting about Katie is that she doesn’t see herself as a star athlete. She claims not to be fast, not a racer, and even that she was the archetypal “last to be picked for the sports team” kid at school (KATIE, ME TOO!). Instead, she credits her success to extreme mental resilience, telling me that endurance is 90% in the mind. Before swimming the Allegheny river she says she barely put on a swimsuit - yet pulled out distances of 22 miles on her longest day, the same as the English Channel, for 30 days.

To improve her mental strength and stop negative thoughts from derailing her, Katie goes on meditation retreats for up to ten days at a time, without books, conversation, eye contact or The Wire. Jesus.

Does anyone have any thoughts or know of any studies about the physical-mental split required to be an endurance supremo? If so, I would love to hear them.