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Beyond The Clock: An Elite Runner’s Mentality

tbdomann
5 minutes ago
8 min read

From Pro Mindset® Podcast  featuring guest Eric Avila, former collegiate champion, Olympic Trials competitor, and Track Beast founder.


Eric Avila was ninety-five pounds and five feet tall when a high school coach watched him run a PE mile and asked him to try cross country. He had no idea what cross country was. He only agreed because his soccer coach said it would keep him in shape. A few years later he won the California state meet. Then came a handful of collegiate national titles, three Olympic cycles as a professional sponsored by Hoka and Adidas, and a spot in the 2016 Olympic Trials final.


Along the way, he spent six or seven years working with a sports psychologist. When he joined Pro Mindset® Podcast host Craig Domann, he made a claim that most coaches would rather not hear. On an Olympic starting line, the twelve athletes are all the same fitness; the difference is their mind.


What followed was a practical conversation about racing, doubt, effort, and identity. Every idea Eric shared works in a mile, in a football game, in the classroom or in a boardroom.


"At the Olympic trials final, those twelve guys on the line are pretty much the same fitness. The difference is their mind."

– Eric Avila, Coach & Elite Track Athlete 


Stay Present: The Lesson That Outlasted Everything

Asked for the three lessons from his sports psychology work that he still teaches, Eric started with the one that matters most. Stay present. His psychologist called the opposite habit projecting. A team is down twenty at halftime and decides the game is lost. A runner is behind pace after a lap and decides the race is ruined. Both are predicting a future that has not happened yet.


A mile is four laps. When an athlete tells Eric they messed up lap one and lap three will go badly, he gives the same answer every time. You are on lap two. Execute lap two. Craig has a name for the alternative: time traveling. Saying "here we go again" mid-race drags the past into the present. Picturing the podium while leading drags the future in. Neither one helps you run the next hundred meters.


Burning Matches and Racing Without the Clock

Eric explained racing strategy with a metaphor every runner understands. Each athlete carries a limited number of matches. Your base pace is free. Every time you shift gears to pass someone or answer a surge, you burn one. The smart runner saves at least one for the final curve, where the sprint kick lives.


How Matches Mess With Your Head


The Move


You rev the engine to pass a runner. That is one match gone, and it never looks as hard on TV as it feels in the legs.


The Panic


You burn the match and you are still in fifth. Now the race is not playing out the way you pictured it, and doubt starts talking.


The Reality


The athlete you tried to pass may have burned two matches to hold you off. You do not know. Stay present, finish the lap, then reassess.


Eric also bans the clock. His athletes do not look at it during a race. The only people who care about the time are the media. Medals go to the first three across the line, and Olympic team spots go to the first three at the Trials. In middle distance you are not racing a stopwatch. You are in a boxing match with the person next to you, and every surge is a punch you must answer.


What the Clock Really Reflects: Craig added a layer. The time itself does not matter, but what it reflects does. Did you run with everything you had that day, or just enough to keep your coach quiet or to place? "All you got" is a different number on a day when you slept four hours or your parents were fighting at home. Eric confessed he once gave up two tenths of a second as a professional when a Nike runner passed him. He kept moving, but he quit. That is what full perceived effort protects against.


No Negotiating: Training for the Day You Do Not Feel Good

Eric runs what he jokingly calls a dictatorship. Once a workout starts, it is the workout. If a high school athlete has a side stitch and asks to pivot, the answer is usually no. His reasoning is simple. Athletes who negotiate in practice learn to negotiate with themselves in races.


He gave a recent example. An athlete in the Bay Area texted that she was tired and wanted to move her workout. She was not sick or hurt. She simply had not slept. Eric told her the state championship is at five in the evening on June first whether she feels good or not. The Olympic final does not care how you slept either. She did the workout, then called him with her dad on FaceTime, thrilled at how well it went.


Train Only When You Feel Good

The Fragile Athlete

  • Only knows how to perform on a great night of sleep

  • Panics when race day feels bad

  • Negotiates with pain and fatigue

  • Lets emotion make rational decisions


Train Through the Bad Days

The Prepared Athlete

  • Has already performed while tired and doubtful

  • Knows the first ten minutes often feel the worst

  • Discovers the feeling usually flips

  • Saves emotion for the tipping points of championships


"The race is at five p.m. whether you like it or not. You don't get to pick if you feel good that day. And the Olympics don't care."

– Eric Avila, Coach & Elite Track Athlete 


The Nothing Box and the Doubt That Breaks In

Eric teaches his athletes to think in boxes. History class has a box. Racing has a box. When the race starts, they are supposed to go to the racing box. When kids ask what goes in it, his answer is that nothing does. At the 2016 Olympic Trials final, he experienced it himself. The stadium was deafening, yet he heard nothing. People asked afterward whether he heard them cheering. He had not heard a thing.


Eric Avila's Racing Box

What is in the racing box? Nothing.

It sounds easy and it is brutally hard. It takes practice, which is why Eric asks his athletes to go to the nothing box on hard workouts. Craig noted that when an athlete is in the zone, they cannot even hear their coach. They only hear the coach when they are struggling and searching for answers.


Craig pushed the idea further with his performance bubble. The box is empty until it is not. Then a runner you have always beaten passes you, and doubt walks in. Over a four or five minute race, corrupted thoughts will show up several times. The skill is having a trigger to clear them out. Craig suggested a finger snap that says not today. Eric shared his own version from college: his coach told him to count down from ten, again and again. It felt like torture at first. Soon he did not notice he was counting, and it worked like a form of meditation.


Championships Are Made in Repetition

Eric borrowed a line from Mike Tyson. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Athletes do not freeze because they do not know what to do. They freeze because they have not rehearsed the punch. Instincts come from reps, which means athletes must be allowed to make tactical errors.


After every race, his athletes write three things that went well and three they messed up, even when they won. Maybe they did not cover a move because they got nervous. Maybe doubt crept in when someone passed. Naming it without judgment is how it gets fixed.


"Racing instincts and championships are made in repetition. At some point you were not good at walking either."

– Eric Avila, Coach & Elite Track Athlete 


The Countdown Card and the P5 System

One of Eric's favorite tools is the countdown card. If the gun goes at nine in the evening, his athletes write out a backward timeline: a shakeout jog six hours out, a meal four hours out, a warm-up, a blowout sprint thirty to forty minutes before the race. He learned the idea from reading about Michael Phelps, who repeated the same warm-up for twenty years until it flipped a switch in his mind. Eric found the same thing. After a while the routine ran itself, and his brain knew it was time to go to war.


Craig connected this to his P5 system, which sorts everything an athlete needs into five categories.

P

Preparation

Getting ready to train and compete.


P

Practice

The training itself.


P

Pit Crew

Parents, coaches, trainers, medical people.


P

Preview

Racing it in your mind first, good and bad.


P

Process

Sleep, nutrition, homework, everything else.


Eric tied it to his own breakthrough. As a senior in college his confidence went through the roof, and the only change was that he started doing everything on the schedule. Every gym session. Every evening jog. His fitness improved, but the real jump was mental. He told himself, why not me? I did everything. Confidence comes from consistency.


Identity: Your Time Is Not Your Worth

The conversation closed on the point both men felt most strongly. Craig separated belief from confidence. Belief is who you are, and it stays at a hundred percent no matter what. Confidence moves with sleep, weather, and tactics. A golfer who struggles around the green is simply holding a to-do list. It does not change who he is.


Eric said the line hit a nerve. High school runners often believe their value as a person tracks their time, and he called that false and dangerous. Records get broken. Injuries come. Father Time wins. So at La Jolla High School he gives his athletes jobs that have nothing to do with speed. On Fridays the boys wear ties and the girls wear silk neck scarves, and the captains enforce it. One captain is not the fastest girl on the team, because that is not why she leads. When a runner gets upset about a personal best that was not big enough, he points to the wins that matter, like covering a move without panic or running across the field to cheer for a teammate.


"You're coaching people, you're not coaching tracks. You're developing young people, and you're using track and cross country to do it." 

– Veteran NFL Agent & Pro Mindset® Keynote Speaker & Mindset Coach, Craig Domann


Track Beast: A New Purpose After the Podium

What Track Beast Is: After the Paris Olympics, Eric started a sports marketing company, which led to NIL work and then coaching, which led to Track Beast. Athletes enter their grade year and personal bests, and the platform matches them with colleges using active roster counts, budgets, coaching staffs, and past recruiting classes for universities across the country. With the new NCAA roster caps, strong athletes who cannot make a team like Oregon now trickle down to other programs, which is exactly where the platform helps. It also has a training and academy arm with Olympic athletes coaching remotely.


Eric admitted that racing used to feel like a drug, and he worried he would never find anything that excited him as much. Then he started coaching. He gets as nervous watching his athletes race as he ever did racing himself, and he gets more satisfaction when they win than he did from his own wins.


Present in the lap you are running. Empty in the box you are racing in. Anchored by who you are, not what the clock says. That is the mental game of a runner, and it works for everyone else too.



Listen to the full conversation here or here. Connect with Craig for coaching opportunities on how to build your Pro Mindset® Performance Bubble™ at Craig.ProMindset@gmail.com.


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For more information about Craig, his keynote speaking, coaching, or NFL or NIL athlete representation, go to ProMindsetRep.com or contact him at Craig.ProMindset@gmail.com. 

Craig or Pro Mindset Rep advisor will get back to you promptly. 

 
 
 

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