Let me tell you about the worst I’ve ever felt before the best race of my life.
The morning of my IRONMAN win, I felt like a blob. My body felt swollen, puffy, heavy. Arms and legs like jello. If you’d asked me in that moment how I felt physically, “ready to win” is not the phrase I would have reached for. I felt soft and strange and not at all like a finely tuned machine about to go the distance.
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t worried. Because I’d felt exactly that way before, on the morning of a previous PR race. That swollen, jello-like feeling wasn’t a malfunction. For my body, it was a signature. It was what “ready” actually felt like for me, dressed up in a costume that looked a lot like “falling apart.”
That’s the whole game, and the science backs it up.
Everyone Feels It. That’s Not the Variable.
We tend to assume the athletes who perform best on the big day are the ones who feel the calmest. Steady hands, quiet mind, ice in the veins. It’s a nice story. It’s also wrong.
Researchers Graham Jones, Austin Swain, and Sheldon Hanton studied 97 elite and 114 non-elite competitive swimmers in the period before an important race, measuring both the intensity of their anxiety and how they interpreted it.1 The finding that matters for you: there was no meaningful difference in the intensity of cognitive and somatic anxiety between the two groups. The elites felt just as nervous. Their hearts pounded just as hard. Their thoughts raced just as much.
What separated them was direction: whether they read those signals as facilitative (helping them) or debilitative (hurting them). The elite swimmers interpreted their nerves as a sign their body was getting ready. The non-elites interpreted the same sensations as a threat, evidence that something was wrong.1
Same symptoms. Opposite conclusions. And in the non-elite group, the swimmers who read their anxiety as debilitating actually carried higher anxiety intensity, the fear feeding on itself.1 The elites didn’t have that problem, because they weren’t fighting the feeling in the first place.
So when I stood there feeling like a swollen blob, the elite move wasn’t to panic about it. It was to recognize the signal: Oh. This again. This is what my body does when it’s about to go fast.
Why “Just Relax” Doesn’t Work
Every nervous athlete has been told to calm down. Most have said it to themselves. The problem is that trying to suppress a feeling usually hands it more power. You end up monitoring the very sensation you’re trying to escape, checking in on it again and again, which keeps it front and center.
This is why the goal was never to make the blob feeling disappear. I couldn’t have if I’d tried, and the effort would have just made me more aware of how strange I felt. The feeling was coming along on the ride no matter what. My only real choice was what to make of it.
Your Interpretation Changes Your Actual Physiology
Here’s where it goes beyond mindset and into your bloodstream.
Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues at Harvard ran a study where participants facing a stressful task were taught to reframe their arousal as functional and helpful rather than harmful. Compared to controls, the people who reappraised their arousal showed measurably more adaptive cardiovascular responses: more efficient cardiac output and lower vascular resistance, meaning their blood vessels stayed more open.2
The physiology splits two ways. A challenge response is marked by increased cardiac efficiency and vasodilation, your vessels opening up so more blood and oxygen move where they’re needed. A threat response activates the same arousal system but constricts the vasculature and reduces cardiac efficiency, the body bracing for damage rather than reaching for performance.2
Read that again, because it’s remarkable: the racing heart can be the same, but whether your vessels open or clamp down depends in part on whether you’ve decided this feeling is help or harm. Your brain is essentially placing a bet on how it needs to prepare, and your interpretation tilts the odds.
That swollen, full feeling I had on IRONMAN morning? That’s a body flooded and primed. I just happened to have learned, through a previous PR, to read it as readiness instead of dread.
How to Build This Before Your Next Start Line
The elite swimmers weren’t born reading their nerves correctly, and Jamieson’s subjects learned the reframe in a single session. This is trainable. Here’s how I coach it.
Learn your own signature. Your “ready” might not look like calm. For me it was the blob feeling. For you it might be a sour stomach, cold hands, the urge to pee every five minutes, a brain that won’t shut up. Start logging how you feel before your best workouts and races. Over time you’ll spot the pattern, and what once felt like a warning sign becomes familiar territory.
Practice in training, not just on race day. Every hard interval, every tempo that makes you want to quit, every session where doubt creeps in is a rep at reading discomfort correctly. Don’t wait for your goal race to attempt the reframe for the first time under the most pressure.
Name the signal honestly. When the nerves hit, tell yourself the true thing: this is my body getting ready for the demands it’s about to face. You’re not lying. The physiology genuinely is preparation. You’re just refusing the fearful reading.
Take it along for the ride. You don’t have to love the feeling. You just have to stop treating it as the enemy you must defeat before you’re allowed to perform. The stress isn’t going anywhere. Let it ride shotgun.
The Bottom Line
On the biggest morning of my racing life, I felt like a blob. Swollen, soft, jello-limbed. And I won.
Not because I conquered the feeling, but because I’d learned to read it. The nerves, the strangeness, the keyed-up body, none of it was the problem. The only question that ever mattered was what I decided it meant.
You’re going to feel it too. The pounding heart, the doubt, the body doing something weird. So is the athlete next to you. The difference on the day won’t be who feels calmest. It’ll be who looks at all that energy and thinks: good. I’m ready.
Footnotes
Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K., & Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind over matter: Reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 417–422. ↩ ↩2
Jones, G., Swain, A. B. J., & Hanton, S. (1994). Intensity and interpretation of anxiety symptoms in elite and non-elite sports performers. Personality and Individual Differences, 17(5), 657–663. ↩ ↩2 ↩3