SE: Mind Over Muscle — Wren Rebuilds Mental Approach to Find Success for K-State XC
Oct 10, 2017 | Cross Country, Sports Extra
By Corbin McGuire
Two years ago, Emma Wren remembers staggering up a hill and feeling terrible. Then everything went black.
The next thing Wren knew, she was on a training table, mad at herself for passing out in the final mile of the 2015 NCAA Midwest Regional Championships. It would only get worse, as she spent a night in Lawrence Memorial Hospital, where she left without any physical answer to why she passed out.
"That was really hard," said Wren, who described her freshman season as a whole in much the same way.
One of K-State's best runners in practice, Wren could not get her performance to carry over into meets, at least not to her standard.
"It was really frustrating," she said.
Passing out at the regional meet was a culmination of Wren's frustrations and a wakeup call to change her mental approach.
"I had worked so hard to get to the regional meet, be on the regional team, and I got caught up in being in a certain place within my own team, competing against my teammates, and just wanting things for the wrong reasons," Wren said. "It wasn't healthy competition."
Since that day, Wren did some soul searching. She retrained her mind and reorganized her priorities. And it's starting to pay dividends.
On September 30, Wren led K-State by placing 25th at the Cowboy Jamboree Invitational. She finished the 6K race with a career-best time of 21:57.80, about 33 seconds faster than her previous best time. It also placed her 10th on K-State's all-time list for that meet.
"It's definitely been a long process. I'm still not even there yet," she said. "I'm constantly learning. Over the past couple of years, I've been learning about myself and figuring out what works for me and what I need to do for myself."
In order to figure this out, Wren has met with K-State Director of Sport Psychology Ian Connole several times. Through these sessions, she said she learned many ways to keep the overwhelming anxiety she felt that day in Lawrence from manifesting.
Notably, she's worked on staying "in the moment," and not worrying about the end result. Again, Connole was a key figure in this adjustment.
"He kind of talks about how you have a Point A and Point B. You're at Point A and you always want to get to B, but it's about making that A better, making where you're at right now better and eventually you're going to get to that B, and then you're going to have a new B," she said. "So it's about making everything better where you're at right now."
Times and placement goals no longer exist for Wren. Instead, she focuses on her heart rate, which she wants to keep at around 180 beats-per-minute during a race. It's one method head coach Ryun Godfrey has tried to steer her mind toward positive evaluation.
"When she's in the middle of the race and she sees her heart rate in the 180s, she's, like, 'I do this in practice, I can do it now, and it's good for me,'" Godfrey said. "It's been baby steps and you're starting to see the results."
Wren has also tweaked her competitive nature. Instead of thinking about the front of the pack or what pace she is on, Wren now focuses on passing one runner at a time.
This change helped propel Wren to her career-best performance two weeks ago.
"I was in third or fourth on our team going through the first half of the race," she said. "It was just like one girl at a time."
Last season, Wren took a much different approach to her races but it served as a stepping-stone in the right direction. As a sophomore, she would run with Kayla Doll, now a senior, for the first four kilometers of the race, stop, walk for 30 seconds and then finish.
"It would actually help me be a lot more relaxed, step back from the race and not get caught up in, 'I need to be in this place,'" Wren said. "So I was kind of letting go."
Now, Wren views workouts the same as races, and vice versa. Even more, she recognizes how to take the good with the bad, and how to grow from each.
"I don't think I would have had a good day, or had certain good days, if I didn't have other good days leading up to it, as well as bad days, because a lot of how I've been able to grow is I've had really hard or bad workouts or races," Wren said. "Ian's always, like, 'What can we do next time? Why do you think that went wrong? How can we change that?' So learning how to deal with that."
Godfrey said Wren's ability to self-evaluate has opened the door to progress. What he's tried to remind her is that training the mind is like training the body.
"It's not something that you just turn on and turn off and it's over with. It's just something that's continuous. You always have to be working on it," Godfrey said. "It's true what they say, the mind is a powerful thing. Sometimes you believe in yourself so much and you're enjoying things so much that you kind of get into this moment or this situation where you're in the moment and you're not thinking too much about the outcome. You're just enjoying the process and that's been a big hurdle for her is to not worry about the outcome and just be in the moment and enjoy what you like to do."
Lately, Wren has been reading Matt Fitzgerald's "How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle."
One of the chapters features a female triathlete that Wren said, "got so caught up in the results and started failing and just got so frustrated," which hit home for the Wildcat junior.
"She talks about gratitude (in the book), and the gratitude is about letting go of the outcome and loving the sport for what it is," said the native of Portland, Oregon. "It comes back to: I just love to run."
Looking back, Wren remembers Godfrey sending the team a quote during her freshman year. It read: "The journey is greater than the destination." While it may not have registered with her then, it certainly does now.
"You stop at the ends along the road. So our last race was an end, but now we're back on the road, going to the next one," she said. "That's in the past. We keep going."
While moving on from her best race in a K-State uniform, Wren can't help but feel free and appreciative of the support she's had along the way.
"I'm so grateful for all of them — my teammates, Coach (Godfrey) and my family. They've all been really patient with me. Having all of them there has been so awesome and I would not be where I am without any of those people," she said, as K-State competes at the Bradley Pink Classic on Friday for its final tune-up before the Big 12 Championships on October 28. "It's really cool to finally gain some confidence. It's hard to explain, but being able to work through these races and grow, I've just learned so much about myself and also about being a teammate and what that looks like. They've all been really supportive of me and have seen the struggles that I have gone through, and I've seen their struggles, so it's, like, 'We can all do this together.'
"I feel like I'm enjoying it so much more. It was definitely hard the past couple of years. I feel like I'm finally having fun and that's why we're all here."
Two years ago, Emma Wren remembers staggering up a hill and feeling terrible. Then everything went black.
The next thing Wren knew, she was on a training table, mad at herself for passing out in the final mile of the 2015 NCAA Midwest Regional Championships. It would only get worse, as she spent a night in Lawrence Memorial Hospital, where she left without any physical answer to why she passed out.
"That was really hard," said Wren, who described her freshman season as a whole in much the same way.
One of K-State's best runners in practice, Wren could not get her performance to carry over into meets, at least not to her standard.
"It was really frustrating," she said.
Passing out at the regional meet was a culmination of Wren's frustrations and a wakeup call to change her mental approach.
"I had worked so hard to get to the regional meet, be on the regional team, and I got caught up in being in a certain place within my own team, competing against my teammates, and just wanting things for the wrong reasons," Wren said. "It wasn't healthy competition."
Since that day, Wren did some soul searching. She retrained her mind and reorganized her priorities. And it's starting to pay dividends.
On September 30, Wren led K-State by placing 25th at the Cowboy Jamboree Invitational. She finished the 6K race with a career-best time of 21:57.80, about 33 seconds faster than her previous best time. It also placed her 10th on K-State's all-time list for that meet.
"It's definitely been a long process. I'm still not even there yet," she said. "I'm constantly learning. Over the past couple of years, I've been learning about myself and figuring out what works for me and what I need to do for myself."
In order to figure this out, Wren has met with K-State Director of Sport Psychology Ian Connole several times. Through these sessions, she said she learned many ways to keep the overwhelming anxiety she felt that day in Lawrence from manifesting.
Notably, she's worked on staying "in the moment," and not worrying about the end result. Again, Connole was a key figure in this adjustment.
"He kind of talks about how you have a Point A and Point B. You're at Point A and you always want to get to B, but it's about making that A better, making where you're at right now better and eventually you're going to get to that B, and then you're going to have a new B," she said. "So it's about making everything better where you're at right now."
Times and placement goals no longer exist for Wren. Instead, she focuses on her heart rate, which she wants to keep at around 180 beats-per-minute during a race. It's one method head coach Ryun Godfrey has tried to steer her mind toward positive evaluation.
"When she's in the middle of the race and she sees her heart rate in the 180s, she's, like, 'I do this in practice, I can do it now, and it's good for me,'" Godfrey said. "It's been baby steps and you're starting to see the results."
Wren has also tweaked her competitive nature. Instead of thinking about the front of the pack or what pace she is on, Wren now focuses on passing one runner at a time.
This change helped propel Wren to her career-best performance two weeks ago.
"I was in third or fourth on our team going through the first half of the race," she said. "It was just like one girl at a time."
Last season, Wren took a much different approach to her races but it served as a stepping-stone in the right direction. As a sophomore, she would run with Kayla Doll, now a senior, for the first four kilometers of the race, stop, walk for 30 seconds and then finish.
"It would actually help me be a lot more relaxed, step back from the race and not get caught up in, 'I need to be in this place,'" Wren said. "So I was kind of letting go."
Now, Wren views workouts the same as races, and vice versa. Even more, she recognizes how to take the good with the bad, and how to grow from each.
"I don't think I would have had a good day, or had certain good days, if I didn't have other good days leading up to it, as well as bad days, because a lot of how I've been able to grow is I've had really hard or bad workouts or races," Wren said. "Ian's always, like, 'What can we do next time? Why do you think that went wrong? How can we change that?' So learning how to deal with that."
Godfrey said Wren's ability to self-evaluate has opened the door to progress. What he's tried to remind her is that training the mind is like training the body.
"It's not something that you just turn on and turn off and it's over with. It's just something that's continuous. You always have to be working on it," Godfrey said. "It's true what they say, the mind is a powerful thing. Sometimes you believe in yourself so much and you're enjoying things so much that you kind of get into this moment or this situation where you're in the moment and you're not thinking too much about the outcome. You're just enjoying the process and that's been a big hurdle for her is to not worry about the outcome and just be in the moment and enjoy what you like to do."
Lately, Wren has been reading Matt Fitzgerald's "How Bad Do You Want It?: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle."
One of the chapters features a female triathlete that Wren said, "got so caught up in the results and started failing and just got so frustrated," which hit home for the Wildcat junior.
"She talks about gratitude (in the book), and the gratitude is about letting go of the outcome and loving the sport for what it is," said the native of Portland, Oregon. "It comes back to: I just love to run."
Looking back, Wren remembers Godfrey sending the team a quote during her freshman year. It read: "The journey is greater than the destination." While it may not have registered with her then, it certainly does now.
"You stop at the ends along the road. So our last race was an end, but now we're back on the road, going to the next one," she said. "That's in the past. We keep going."
While moving on from her best race in a K-State uniform, Wren can't help but feel free and appreciative of the support she's had along the way.
"I'm so grateful for all of them — my teammates, Coach (Godfrey) and my family. They've all been really patient with me. Having all of them there has been so awesome and I would not be where I am without any of those people," she said, as K-State competes at the Bradley Pink Classic on Friday for its final tune-up before the Big 12 Championships on October 28. "It's really cool to finally gain some confidence. It's hard to explain, but being able to work through these races and grow, I've just learned so much about myself and also about being a teammate and what that looks like. They've all been really supportive of me and have seen the struggles that I have gone through, and I've seen their struggles, so it's, like, 'We can all do this together.'
"I feel like I'm enjoying it so much more. It was definitely hard the past couple of years. I feel like I'm finally having fun and that's why we're all here."
Players Mentioned
/ Cross Country
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