Ultramarathoner Shares Her Visualization Secret for Increasing Pain Tolerance
Visualization is one of the most important mental skills an athlete can have. It’s a skill that not only helps athletes prepare with mental rehearsal, it’s also a skill that helps athletes in real time as they fight through adversity.
When it comes to the latter, facing the pain of fatigue is often the first type of adversity an athlete must master. To visualize oneself through the pain of fatigue is no trivial task. However, record setting ultramarathoner Courtney Dauwalter has a visualization technique she uses that has helped her increase her pain tolerance year after year. She calls it the Pain Cave.
In the YouTube clip above, Dauwalter explains that when she experiences pain while running an ultramarathon, she visualizes herself entering a pain cave. It’s at this point where she combines the mental skill of visualization with the skill of reframing.
Instead of viewing the pain cave as a negative, she reframes this as a reward. In this moment she celebrates that she made it to the pain cave. Then, she visualizes herself with a hard hat on and a chisel. Now it’s her job to go to work chiseling away to make the pain cave bigger.
I highly recommend you watch the full clip of Dauwalter explaining this visualization technique with her own words. Obviously, this is not something you can do one time and expect to work. Dauwalter shares that it took her 4 or 5 years to adopt the right mindset to make this technique work.
Developing pain tolerance requires a progression using positive training pain. So, I recommend starting small and being patient as you incorporate a visualization technique like this into your process.