The hotel room feels different during nationals week. You know the feeling—that electric mix of anticipation, pride, and yes, anxiety that seems to hum just beneath your skin. Your body knows something big is coming. Good. That activation means you’ve chosen to pursue something that matters deeply to you.
As athletes prepare for this weekend’s NCAA DII Cross Country Championships, I want to share something different than the usual “stay calm and visualize success” advice. This isn’t about mental toughness—it’s about building something deeper. As I explore in Beyond Mental Toughness: How Top Athletes Build Unshakeable Belief Systems, true championship mindset comes from psychological flexibility and self-trust, not from white-knuckling through discomfort.
Your Anxiety Is Information
Let’s map out what you might experience over the next 48 hours and reframe it completely. You’re not trying to survive this pressure—you’re learning to thrive in it. Champions understand this distinction (which I detail in How Champions Train Their Brains to Thrive (Not Survive) Under Extreme Pressure).
The Day Before: Your nervous system is beginning its preparation. You might notice your thoughts racing, reviewing the course map for the hundredth time, or feeling restless energy in your legs. Instead of trying to calm down, try this: Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down every worry, every “what if,” every fear. Don’t judge or evaluate them—just let them exist on paper. Then ask yourself: “What do these fears tell me about what I value?” Usually, they reveal how much you care about your team, your growth, and honoring the work you’ve put in. That caring is your superpower, not your weakness.
Race Morning: You wake up with that immediate awareness—today is the day. Your stomach might feel tight, your heart rate elevated. This is your body preparing you for excellence, not betraying you. When you notice yourself starting to overthink—analyzing every sensation, questioning your fitness—use what I call “The Zone Switch.” This 4-second reset (from The Zone Switch – Your 4-Second Secret to Clutch Performance and How to Stop Overthinking) helps to get you out of your brain’s analyzing mode and into performance mode. The P.E.A.R. Protocol is a mental reset sequence that moves runners from overthinking to race-ready focus. Start with a sharp Physical trigger (like shaking out your arms or slapping your thighs), lock your Eyes on an external target (the runner ahead or the trail 20 meters out), take one Rhythm Breath through your nose (2 counts in) and double-pulse exhale out your mouth (3 counts—”huh-huhhhh”), then settle into your optimal running form with a power cue word like “FLOW” or “CHASE”. Practice it during tempo runs so it becomes automatic when race-day nerves hit.
Final Hour Before the Gun: This is when the activation peaks. You might feel like you need to pee for the fifth time, your hands might feel shaky during your warm-up. Perfect. You’re exactly where you need to be. Your body is flooding you with the energy you’ll need to run at the edge of your capacity. This is thriving, not surviving—your nervous system showing up fully for you.
From Pressure to Purpose
Here’s what changes everything: Stop trying to run away from pressure and start running toward your values. Your belief system isn’t built on avoiding discomfort—it’s built on knowing you can feel uncomfortable and still execute.
When you line up, you have a choice. You can focus on not failing, on all the ways things could go wrong, on comparing yourself to the runner next to you. Or you can focus on expressing—expressing your fitness, expressing your love for this sport, expressing your commitment to your teammates. You can recognize the tendency to want to shrink, fight, or avoid, or you can expand and open up.
One of my teams developed a pre-race ritual that embodies this perfectly. During their final team huddle, each runner shares one word describing what they want to express in the race. Not achieve. Express. “Power.” “Gratitude.” “Joy.” “Grit.” “Love.” This shifts everything from outcome to process, from expectation to expression.
Rewiring Your Internal Dialogue
Right now, pay attention to the story you’re telling yourself about nationals. Is it “I hope I don’t blow it” or “I can’t wait to see what I’m capable of”? As I discuss in The Negativity Instinct: How Negative Self-Talk Undermines Athletes and Team Culture, our brains are wired to focus on threats—it’s an ancient survival mechanism. But you’re not trying to survive a tiger attack; you’re trying to express years of training.
Here’s a quick reframe exercise for this week: Every time you catch yourself in negative prediction (“What if I go out too fast?” “What if I’m not recovered?”), pause and ask: “What if everything goes right?” Not in a toxic positivity way, but genuinely—what if your body shows up exactly as prepared? What if your pack runs brilliantly together? What if this is the day everything clicks? Then, identify a couple of beliefs about yourself that are true regardless of circumstance. Examples include “I’m prepared for this race; I’ve done the work.” “I can respond to adversity.” “I have no expectations, I am prepared for anything.” You begin to transcend circumstances.
The Pack Mentality: Your Secret Weapon
Cross country is unique. You’re running your own race while simultaneously running for something bigger. Use this to regulate your nervous system and combat the negativity instinct. When the discomfort hits—and it will—instead of retreating into your own suffering and the negative self-talk that follows (“I’m dying,” “I can’t hold this,” “Everyone’s pulling away”), expand your awareness to include your teammates. Find them with your peripheral vision. If you can’t see them, “feel them” and imagine for a moment their strength. Match their rhythm for a few strides. Remember that they’re choosing the same discomfort, pursuing the same expansion.
Here’s a technique I call “Threading the Pack”: Designate connection points on the course—the 2K mark, the biggest hill, the 4K split. At these points, make intentional contact with a teammate. A word of encouragement, a fist bump, even just intentional eye contact. These moments of connection interrupt the negativity spiral and remind you why you’re out there. You’re not just managing your own internal dialogue—you’re contributing to the collective belief system of your team. If you’re alone, take these moments to sense their connection to your and their belief in you, and yours in them.
The Vulnerability of Excellence
Here’s what nobody talks about: Pursuing excellence requires massive vulnerability. It’s so much safer to hold back, to save something, to protect yourself from the possibility of giving everything and it not being enough. But you didn’t come to nationals to be safe.
This vulnerability is actually the foundation of an unshakeable belief system. Not belief that you’ll win, but belief that you can show up fully, feel all the feelings, and still execute. Belief that you’re the kind of athlete who chooses expansion over protection.
Your Only Job This Weekend
Release yourself from the burden of outcomes. You cannot control who shows up, how they run, or what the results will say. Your only job is this: Show up as the fullest expression of the runner you’ve become.
Stop trying to survive the pressure and start thriving in it. Use the Zone Switch when overthinking creeps in. Catch and reframe the negativity instinct when it whispers lies about your readiness. Build your belief system in real-time by choosing expression over protection.
When that gun goes off, you’re not running away from anxiety or toward some fixed outcome. You’re running as a living expression of every morning run, every hard workout, every moment of doubt you’ve overcome, every teammate who’s pushed you, every coach who’s believed in you. That’s not pressure. That’s privilege. See you at the finish line—however you get there, get there completely.
Dr. Trent Claypool is a sport psychologist and founder of Summit Sport Psychology in Colorado Springs, specializing in mental performance for endurance athletes. He works with NCAA teams and individual athletes, integrating mental performance, culture building, and the latest in mental performance research to help you be at your best when it matters the most.