Picture the start. It is early and still dark, runners are packed together, and the crowd is singing. Few moments in South African sport raise the hair on your arms like this one.
Now picture yourself hours later. The sun is high, your legs are in pieces, and a hill is rising in front of you. A reasonable voice in your head begins to bargain. Just sit down for a minute. Just wait for the bailer bus.
The race inside the race
The Comrades is an ultramarathon run between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and it is famous for its big hills. Runners like to say that you train your legs for months, and then on the day the race is run in your head.
There may be something in that. Pain science offers a helpful way of thinking about why it feels that way.
Pain and suffering are not the same thing
When your quads and feet are taking a pounding, nerves send messages up the spinal cord to the brain. Put simply, the brain is thought to handle them in two ways. One part of the process registers the plain facts: where it hurts and how much.
Another part, involving the brain's alarm and emotion centres, weighs up a different question: is this dangerous? If the answer is no, the pain is more likely to stay as background information. If the answer is yes, the same signal can become suffering.
This may be why two runners with equally sore legs can have completely different afternoons. One is uncomfortable and getting on with it. The other is uncomfortable and frightened.
Fear is costly over a distance like that. A brain on high alert shows it in the body:
- Shoulders creep up towards your ears.
- Your stride shortens and your feet slap the road.
- Breathing gets shallow and quick.
- You forget to drink, or stop taking in food.
- Your thoughts shrink to one idea: this must stop.
Every one of those uses energy you needed for the road.
The hill does not get smaller. What can change is how loudly your brain shouts about it.
What the steady runners are doing
Picture the runner for whom the kilometres simply tick by. They are aware of the discomfort but not caught up in it. Their rhythm holds, they stick to their drinking plan, and they notice the crowd.
In brain terms, calm absorption of this kind is often linked with alpha, the relaxed but awake rhythm you feel when you are calm, and sometimes with theta, a slower, drifting, daydream rhythm. The links between brain rhythms and performance are not fully understood, so treat this as a simple picture.
The opposite pattern is often described as a lot of high beta, the fast, tense activity linked with worry. Think of the runner doing anxious sums at the bottom of a long hill.
How neurofeedback may help
Neurofeedback is a way of practising a brain state. Sensors on your scalp read your brain's electrical activity and a computer turns it into sound and images. Nothing is sent into your brain. The sensors only read.
When your brain moves towards the calmer pattern being encouraged, the feedback responds. The idea is that, over time, the brain learns the way there. The hope is that the state then becomes easier to reach in daily life and on the road, though that cannot be promised.
Everyone starts with a 19-channel brain map, which takes about an hour and a half. Sessions after that last 45 to 60 minutes. Our what to expect page walks you through it.
For a runner, the aims are that discomfort feels more manageable and that the nervous system settles more easily, which may help with sleep in heavy mileage weeks and with pre-race nerves. Results vary. Brain training supports good preparation and does not replace it.
If your training partners also do strength or functional events, the article on hitting the wall in Hyrox looks at the same idea in a different setting.
Listening to your body still comes first
A calm mind is not permission to push through everything. Some signals must be respected.
See your doctor before a big training block if you have any heart concerns, a history of fainting, or pain that has not settled with rest. On race day, chest pain, confusion, severe dizziness or sharp pain that gets worse with each step are reasons to stop and find the medical team. Finishing next year is always better than not being able to run at all.
For pain that lingers long after the race is over, our piece on how the brain can amplify pain may be helpful, and for broken sleep in heavy weeks, see restoring deep sleep.
Common questions
Can neurofeedback help me finish the Comrades?
It cannot run the distance for you, and nobody can promise a finish. What it may do is help your nervous system stay calmer under long, hard effort, so that discomfort is less likely to tip into panic. Your training, pacing and fuelling still do the heavy lifting.
Does a calmer brain mean I will ignore pain I should listen to?
It should not. The aim is to tell ordinary race discomfort apart from a real warning, not to block either one out. Sharp or worsening pain, chest pain, confusion, dizziness or feeling suddenly cold in the heat are reasons to stop and get medical help on the route, however calm you feel.
When should I start brain training before a big race?
There is no fixed answer. Neurofeedback is gradual learning, much like building mileage, so it makes more sense to think about it during base training than in the last days before a race. Everything starts with a brain map. Every brain learns at its own pace, so no set timeline can be promised.
You will still have to climb every one of those hills yourself. A steadier brain simply makes better company on the way up. If you would like to talk about training yours, please get in touch.
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