Josh’s 1/2 Marathon: Expectations & Motivations
I’m really fortunate in my role as a physio to work for and with some of the fittest and highest performing humans on earth. Unfortunately, I can’t really say that I fit in this category myself (anymore haha…) and it’s something that I probably always carry around as a bit of a chip on my shoulder. Not that I’m trying to make an Olympics or an Iron final at Aussies – but that as a health practitioner I have a responsibility to model the behaviours that I’m encouraging in my patients and in those who I work for.
So, as all good decisions are made, I shook hands with my best mate Sam over the 2023 new years period doing the deal to run the GC half marathon this July. Sam is doing the full marathon, but I’m not an idiot and know my current limitations – a half is plenty to bite off for now. This little blog is an inside into me and into my training. What is good, bad or ugly and the things that as a physio and exercise physiologist I might have a bit more insight into how I prepared for training. By no mean was I ever a distance athlete and nor am I a distance running coach. Running 100-400 meters fairly quick or making a cover tackle was about my sort of distance, so for me now as an unfit human to attempt distance running was fairly daunting. In this edition of this blog is going to talk about expectations and motivations.
Expectations
I guess having a realistic expectation of what you want to achieve is pretty important. My initial thoughts were that running a sub two-hour half was the goal, interestingly as I started running, and puffing, this goal I was quite happy to modify. It’s not to say that I can’t – but it’s to say that it’s unlikely in my situation, my fitness level and my timeframe of training.
Interestingly this thought process made me reflect about telling my patients about their injury prognosis and expectations around their injury. It’s an area I think lots of junior physio’s struggle with – ever optimistic they may be, you can’t cheat physiology. I’ve found as a physio I’m more comfortable having the hard conversations with patients about setting their expectation around how long an injury make take to recover. I distinctly remember as a new grad thinking I’d be able to change someone’s back pain they’d had for over ten years in a few visits and this was also the patients’ expectation from me. What I know now is to find out what the expectation is, and discuss why, or why not and how this timeframe may be achievable or not based on all the things happening in that person’s life. Opposite to this, I see many people with arthritis who think seeing words like degeneration or degenerative changes spells the end of all physical pursuits for them. The evidence is overwhelming for the gold standard in treating and managing arthritis and that’s moving our body. So sometimes it’s a matter of breaking down long held expectations or beliefs and reassuring people that they can expect different.
So tip number one, challenge your expectations both positively and negatively. Sometimes you may sell yourself short. In particular if you’re injured, our goal would be to return you to whatever you want to do as fast as possible – but again, you can’t cheat healing and physiology – so meeting with a physio who is comfortable to set your expectations is good for you and good for your injury.
Motivations
Remembering back to Uni day’s, sitting through some psychology courses and learning about Freud and Jung was always an interesting experience. Of more interest than those blokes though, was sports psychology.
One of the take home things I remember (again, not a sports psychologist here), but there are two types of motivation – intrinsic and extrinsic. Realistically having good intrinsic motivation is desirable because your drive to do things comes from within – most elite athletes, particularly in individual sports, would test highly for intrinsic motivation. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t me! I’m an extrinsically motivated sporting person. I always found team sports more engaging and easier to do well at because others were relying on me and the reward of winning with my teammates was paramount.
If you read anything about extrinsic motivation, it’s not the one you want! Long term it’s less effective. However, it’s still useful to set a goal based on an outcome to try and achieve it. Tip number two that I’m using is to try and shift my thinking and motivation to a more intrinsic style. Things like I’m doing this for my health, I’m doing this to be an active Dad moving into the future and I’m doing this to model good health behaviours for my clients.
In relation to physio, I like to set some goals with patients but then go that step further and talk about what may motivate them to achieve this or what may be a barrier. Once we chat through this we can more accurately plan out an approach to treatment by leaning into the motivators!