How the quirks of the human brain can sabotage your training – and what to do about it!
By: Heather Wurtele, Ex-professional triathlete, now coach and outdoor adventurer

Did it even happen?
You’re out for a long run. The pace feels good, the weather is perfect, and you’ve found that clarity of mind that comes with focusing solely on your exertion and moving dynamically through space. Life is GOOD! You love this shit! The endorphins are popping and you feel positively brimming with good will and happiness. You pause to cross a road and glance to check your total run time – but you didn’t start your watch!
Your stomach drops. You feel deeply disappointed. It’s as if the past glorious hour of running doesn’t count for anything because you don’t have a record of it. “Strava or it never happened”. But it did happen, and you enjoyed it. So why this shift in emotion at all? Why are our brains so primed to discount actual experiences over memories or records of these experiences, and what can we do to fight against this to get more joy from our training, and from life in general?
Memory V’s Experience
It is easy to want to dismiss ‘caring too much about Strava’ as an individual failure to focus on what really matters (tsk tsk), but research in cognitive psychology, has shown that the human brain is bad at distinguishing memory from actual experiences and that we tend to operate as two almost completely separate people – the experiencing self and the remembering self.
Imagine eating an exceptionally delicious meal but finding a long hair in your food on the final bite. “Ugh, that ruined the whole experience!”. But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. Your experiencing self had an experience that was almost entirely good, and the bad ending could not undo it, because the enjoyment already happened. But your remembering self assigned the whole episode a failing grade because it ended badly – effectively ignoring the previous 15 minutes of scrumptious taste sensations.
“Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion – and it is the substitution that makes us believe that a past experience can be ruined.”[1]
[1] Daniel Kahneman. Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. (2011): 381
Memories can be wrong…
The experiencing self answers the question “How am I right now?”. The remembering self is the one that answers the question “How was it on the whole?”. Since memories are what primarily inform our decision making, the perspective that we tend to adopt when we think about our lives is that of the remembering self. The remembering self can be wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living.
So what?

Not all data is helpful
Three things that stand out for me are:
We need to be very choosy with the training tools we invite into our daily routines. Tracking metrics over time is useful to objectively measure improvement. Paying attention to watts and pace can absolutely help you get the most out of focused training sessions. Tracking everything, all the time – especially during easy sessions – is a good way to completely overwrite your ability to listen to your experiencing self.
When you feel good after a nice aerobic run but Strava AI spits out an “Athlete Intelligence” summary that says “several splits slower than recent efforts” can you ignore this or are you likely to think “oh really, I was slower than normal?” and proceed to waste time over-analyzing, or worse: internalize a good run in a negative way?
It can be surprisingly difficult to ignore the useless feedback of a bot, or enjoy an easy run when the pace is so much slower than it feels. But guess what?! You don’t actually need to record any data! You can just run and feel good about that run from your subjective experience. There is truly value in this (and why self reported RPE paired with other training metrics is so much more valuable than numbers alone). It is easy to sway the overall conclusions of your remembering self so don’t invite unnecessary feedback into your life. Workouts without data do count. Indeed, they can count for more when you are free to internalise the work positively.

The tales we tell matter
Knowing that our brains like memorable experiences, not necessarily summarily positive ones is pretty handy for enjoying challenging things like endurance sports! In depth studies on pain from voluntary immersion in cold water[1] to surgical outcomes from colonoscopies[2] have shown that people tend to ignore the total duration of pain and focus more on peaks and end points. This has merit for coaches when designing hard workouts. Peak pain is usually more memorable than the total duration of suffering, so athletes may be willing and able to do more quality total work (e.g. more intervals) at a slightly lower output. A gradual, social, warm down can help make the end point memory of the session positive. The joy of a finish line erases much of the pain of getting there.
In addition, while commiserating with others about how hard or painful a race/workout/life event was can make for interesting conversation, the narrative that we focus on is what we remember, and how we shape our future perspectives, so it’s better to bond with friends about the positive aspects of things. The tales we tell ourselves matter. Part of why stoicism works as a response to challenging situations is because it gives the remembering-self limited space to dwell
[1] Daniel Kahneman, Barbara L. Frederickson, Charles A. Schreiber, and Donal A. Redelmeier, “When More Pain is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End.” Psychological Science 4 (1993): 401-405
[2] Donald A. Redemeier and Daniel Kahneman, “Patients’ Memories of Painful Medical Treatments: Real-time and Retrospective Evaluations of Two Minimally Invasive Procedures,” Pain 66 (1996): 3-8

Listening to your body is a very important skill for long term athletic success, but so is listening critically to your mind!
Positive reflection
Being aware of the human inclination to swap memories for experiences (the tyranny of the remembering self) can help you actively focus on the quality of your actual past experiences, not only the memories of them. It can take conscious effort (e.g. “I am falling victim to duration neglect: I’m giving the good and bad part of that workout equal weight even though the good bits lasted 10 times longer”) but truly taking the time to reflect on, and give accurate weight to, positive moments can help shift your focus to appreciating your day-to-day achievements rather than making negative summaries.

Listening to your body is a very important skill for long term athletic success, but so is listening critically to your mind! It seems obvious that the way you talk to your experiencing self (“you can do this!” vs. “you suck”) has clear implications for performance. It is equally important how you reflect on the things you do, and how well your remembering self answers the question “how was it on the whole?”. It is empowering to know that we can create better, more accurate, stories for ourselves. We can enhance positive experience and potential for growth simply by being aware of some of the quirks of the human brain!

About the author
Heather Wurtele is a retired professional athlete who now spends most of her time adventuring off-road in the mountains of British Columbia. She coaches using Xhale.
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