Book Report: Mental Training

Notes on books that inspire me: Do Hard Things & Let Your Mind Run

I used to love reading as a kid, but somewhere between high school and grad school it became all about textbooks and assignments. I got so burned out that it took a while after graduating to finally pick up a book for fun again. Well, maybe burned out is the wrong phrase. Reading for fun had been a habit, and after a decade or so of not doing it, I’d lost that habit and it seemed almost daunting to start again.

One of my goals in 2024 was to read a book (or listen to an audiobook) each month. Once I got back into it, I remembered how much I like books and that goal turned out to be quite easy. I plowed through everything from sci-fi and fantasy to history and biographies. Long solo runs (there are a lot of them) turned into audiobook feasts.

Many of my friends like reading too, but I had to be careful around Finn whenever I mentioned a book I had just finished because I knew the next question would be something along the lines of, “What are your main takeaways from it?” This question made me painfully aware of how much I was mindlessly consuming rather than thoughtfully processing what I was reading, and I rarely had a good answer for him. A book read is not a book absorbed. This year I want to utilize occasional “book reports” here as a way to extract lasting meaning from some of the content I’m often force-feeding my brain.

Deena Kastor’s Let Your Mind Run and Steve Magness’s Do Hard Things have started off 2025 for me on a running/mental strength/self-help theme. That wasn’t really intentional, but I tend to get on kicks where I read similar books together and then skip around to other genres, so I’m going to group them together here under the “Mental Training” umbrella. And to answer Finn’s question, here are some of my top takeaways:

1. Deena’s book very much focuses on the importance of a positive mindset. She works with her coach to learn to rephrase things like, “I hate running in the wind, this sucks” to “This wind is a challenge for me to overcome, and getting out for a run in it will make me stronger.” That’s great, and I agree it’s important, but it was overemphasized to the point of getting pretty corny sometimes. Maybe that was the intention though, because it certainly drilled home the point that things are what you make them. If you choose to look at things as challenges and tests to make me stronger, rather than complaining or avoiding those things, you’ll build up a greater tolerance to them and more readily be able to push through discomfort. Maybe that’s why Courtney’s always smiling?

2. Steve Magness makes many comments about confidence, which has been a topic I’ve been interested in lately. Confidence doesn’t need to be outward. Internally, do you understand what is about to happen and do you have a sense of how to deal with it? Being confident isn’t thinking or saying that you’re the best, it’s having the experience and self-awareness to know how to respond to a challenge, and knowing how hard you can push in that situation without breaking. I also liked Steve’s idea of setting a floor goal rather than a ceiling. He suggests,

   “Instead of going all-in for the massive breakthrough, set a minimum expectation. When you raise the floor, it allows for those days when everything is clicking to exceed expectations. It’s not that we are lowing our ceiling or playing it safe, it’s that we are developing confidence to know that x performance is repeatable. As long as we do what’s in our control, we can achieve a certain standard.”

   Rather than going into a hyper-competitive race, for example, with only the ceiling goal of winning, I could set the floor goal of being in the top 5 (or podium, or finishing, or whatever fits where you’re at) of each race I do, building confidence as I reinforce that those sorts of results are an attainable baseline.

3. Get comfortable in your own head. This was a theme touched on in both books, and Do Hard Things went as far as to offer up suggestions of mindfulness exercises you could do to practice eliminating distractions. Many of my daily habits are often accompanied by music, podcasts, or scrolling on my phone. I have a hard time being bored and like to keep my mind busy, but I want to get better at resisting the urge to seek out distraction each time I have a free moment. This could mean doing more of my runs each week without media, driving to a trailhead in silence, or not grabbing my phone right when I wake up each morning. I’m confident that being able to spend more time paying attention to what I pay attention to when my mind isn’t distracted will help me be more tuned into the things that matter, increase my ability to endure discomfort, and boost my creativity.

With all that said, I didn’t really love either of these books. They were decent, but I didn’t think they were extremely entertaining and I probably wouldn’t read them again. But they did make some good points that are worth remembering, and as I build up a collection of these hopefully some of the insights that popped into my head as I was reading will stick.