Do you need a mental training plan?
I’ll never forget the race where everything should have fallen apart. It was the middle of the night, I was many hours past my goal time and somewhere deep in the back half of a 100km ultra with not another person in sight. My headlamp cast a narrow cone of light through the bush… I was worried the headlamp’s battery would go flat soon. The course was lonely and eerie, creepy Australian animals making all sorts of rustling noises. Oh, and I’d torn my calf earlier in the race — every step felt like fire. My body wanted to stop, sit down, wait for dawn, call for help.
Yet somehow, I didn’t stop. Because in training, I’d deliberately put myself through darkness runs, solo missions, and sessions when I was exhausted and sore. I’d practiced being uncomfortable. And in the moment, when my brain started saying, “This is too hard, you can’t do this,” I already knew what to do. I focused on my breathing, shortened my stride, and kept moving forward. That night was the moment I understood just how powerful mental training can be — and why I now plan it as carefully as my physical training.
When we think about training for a big race or event, most of us instinctively think about the physical work: mileage, elevation gain, intervals, long runs, strength training, and recovery. We plan it all out carefully, or hire a coach to progress week by week, building consistency, adding overload, optimising recovery, and then peaking at the right moment. More and more people are entering the sport and experiencing the lifelong benefits that endurance sports and big adventures offer.
But… that type of training can only take you so far. If your goals are for continuous progression (longer races, steeper climbs, pushing far past training and into adventure), then your training needs something other than just this physically-centred plan. After all, endurance sports are all about your ability to resist fatigue, and mental fatigue plays a huge part in the systemic fatigue that is felt by your body. This fatigue leads to signals (both to your muscles and brain) telling you to slow down. So why not actively train the resistance to mental fatigue in the same way we train muscular fatigue?
If you feel like your mind is actually holding your body back, you might want to consider a mental training plan — something intentional and structured that sits alongside the physical plan, designed to help you move closer to the big scary goals you're too scared to say out loud.
Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
This phrase has been around in endurance sports for years, but too often it’s treated like a cliché rather than a skill that can be developed. Mental fortitude isn’t something you either have or don’t have. Like endurance, strength, or speed, it can be trained, stressed, and improved through deliberate practice. It’s not as simple as being tough and pushing through everything. It’s about setting yourself up to make strong decisions, to know when you can push, and when to pull back. To be able to adapt to your environment and evolve race after race, project after project.
The goal is not simply to “suffer through” hard moments, but to become comfortable enough in discomfort that you can stay present, make good decisions, and keep moving forward when everything in you wants to stop.
Build Mental Fitness Like Physical Fitness
When I write training plans for athletes, I think about three key principles: consistency, overload, and progression. These apply just as much to the mental side as they do to the physical. Let’s take a look at what a mental plan addressing these three key areas might include.
Consistency
Mental strength doesn’t switch on magically on race day. It’s built over time through frequent, low-level exposure to challenges. Training mental consistency might look like:
Regularly running early in the morning, even when motivation is low.
Finishing the last rep of an interval set even when you feel done.
Practicing nutrition when your stomach feels off, so you know you can keep eating on race day.
Small, repeated exposures create a baseline level of mental resilience.
Overload
Just as we stress the body to encourage adaptation, we need to stress the mind. Overload means occasionally seeking situations that really stretch your mental capacity.
Long solo runs with no music or podcasts.
Running in all conditions.
Trying new routes and getting into remote areas.
Overnight on your own, knife-edge ridgelines, scrambling with climbing holds.
Try a new discpline so you have to deal with a range of new things on the fly.
If it makes you a bit nervous, you know you're on the right track. The goal isn’t to crush yourself, but to create controlled opportunities where your mind learns: I can do hard things and keep going. This is not only going to set you up to be ready for it on race day, but learning you can do hard things helps you take it to the mental places you need to go during you primary objectives.
Progression
A good mental plan is progressive. Identify the most challenging parts of your goal event and work backward to design training that leads you there.
If your race will have a long night section, practice running in the dark, with headlamp and full nighttime race/event kit.
If your race’s biggest challenge is a brutal climb 80 kilometres deep, plan runs that put you on hills late in a long day so you know what that feels like.
If you struggle with boredom or negative and spiralling thoughts, gradually extend your solo training runs without distractions and practice techniques to stay present.
By the time you hit race day, you won’t just be hoping you can handle those moments — you’ll have rehearsed them.
Mental Training Isn’t About Tricks
When I talk about mental training, I’m not talking about “mind games,” fancy visualisation apps, or motivational quotes on your wall. Those can all be helpful, and there is actually some interesting things coming out about them, but they don’t replace real-world practice.
Mental training is about deliberate exposure to a diverse range of difficulties and pushing the envelope of your comfort zone, using the same controlled and progressive paradigms that we know and trust on the physical side of things. It’s about learning that you can stay calm, stay focused, and stay moving toward your objective when the easy choice would be to stop.
It’s learning to trust yourself when things get dark — because you’ve been there before.
Building Your Own Mental Training Plan
Here’s a simple framework you can use:
Identify Your Weak Points: Think about the last race or big training block you did. Where did you struggle most? Was it physical pain? Fear of the dark? Getting your nutrition right? Emotional lows?
Design Targeted Sessions: Plan training that exposes you to those weak points in a safe, controlled way. You want to make it goal-focused just like your normal training: for example, “once every two weeks I’ll run at night.” Or maybe “At least once a month I’ll go out on my own overnight.” Crucially, you have to be very careful about how and when you place these sessions, as they are fatiguing both mentally and physically and therefore need to be considered strategically as part of your everyday training load and recovery. Think of these as your ‘quality sessions’: a few key sessions like this during a block can sharpen you up and give you the confidence that you need when putting on your race bib or loading up your summit pack.
Reflect: After each session, take five minutes to write down what you felt, what worked, and what you want to try next time. Revisit this writing when designing your subsequent targeted sessions and when assessing to what degree your weak points have improved. Think of this written reflection as a sort of qualitative metric that you can use to track progress, a Training Peaks for your mental state.
Progress Gradually: Make the challenges just a little harder over time — longer runs, tougher conditions, pushing that next step outside your comfort zone. Just like how your workouts progress through a block, these sessions should “tighten the screws” toward the mental headspace that you’ll need during your goal event.
Integrate Recovery: Just like physical training, mental training can be fatiguing. Think about how you will relax and recover mentally as well as physically. Pizza and ice cream, maybe?
A mental training plan will benefit from all the same systems your normal training plan does, so write it down, schedule it in, plan it out, and track it.
The Payoff
When you train your mind with the same structure and intention as your body, scary goals become achievable. It’s not merely that you are ready for adverse conditions, but all aspects of your training and adventures can come together better. Goals you would never have put on the list can become a reality.
Barkley Marathons legend John Kelly talks about how the best goals sit right in that beautiful space between ‘might be possible to achieve’, and ‘not actually sure you can do it.’ These are the ones we want to strive for, but these are also the ones that need more than hill repeats to get us there.
Mental strength is not an afterthought. It’s a skill, one that can be built, refined, and sharpened. The sooner you start training it deliberately, the more powerful it becomes — and the more it will support everything else you do as an athlete.
But first, pizza and ice cream.