The turning point, for me, was Eliud Kipchoge’s smile. In the late miles of his 2017 sub-two-hour marathon attempt at a racetrack just outside Milan, as the effort mounted, he kept flashing a beatific grin. It was a deliberate tactic to help work through the pain, he later explained. Kipchoge’s reputation as the Yoda of endurance was just taking off, and I was torn between wide-eyed admiration of his mental game and my own long-standing skepticism of anything you can’t easily measure. Then, a few months later, sports psychologists in Northern Ireland published a study in which they asked runners to smile and measured a 2 percent drop in energy consumption. Kipchoge was right—and by extension, I reasoned, sports psychology was a real and measurable thing.
Since then, I’ve become a booster. I’ve written enthusiastic articles about sports-psych topics like mindfulness, self-talk, and mental focus, touting the emerging evidence that they really can enhance athletic performance. In parallel, I’ve grown ever more skeptical of conventional sports science—ice baths, compression socks, ketone drinks, and so on….
