Quotes from Fitzgerald Matt

More often, they insist that their advantage lies not in having more to give but rather in being able to give more of what they have. Past

Sian Beilock, a psychologist and leading expert on choking, defined the phenomenon in her book Choke as "poor performance that occurs in response to the perceived stress of a situation." The

The most successful endurance athletes over the age of 40 are so similar in personality it's almost uncanny. What we see in all of these men and women is a limitless passion for sport and for the athletic lifestyle that stems from a positive, life-embracing personality (i.e., a non-neurotic, open, extraverted, conscientious style of coping with life). A

Well-trained athletes have an easier time achieving flow because they are less physically self-conscious.

One cannot improve as an endurance athlete except by changing one's relationship with perception of effort. Even

Bracing yourself—always expecting your next race to be your hardest yet—is a much more mature and effective way to prepare mentally for competition.

Any athlete who experienced race-level effort completely out of context would instantly regain full respect for its awfulness. If a runner were to suddenly experience the same level of effort she felt during the last mile of her hardest marathon while climbing a flight of steps at home, for example, she would probably fall to the floor and call for help, believing she was dying.

Self-belief cannot be manufactured through obsessive yearning toward one's goals or through the elimination of all "distractions." In fact, it requires the opposite: an empty mind and total immersion in the process that builds the proof of potential that is the only solid foundation for true self-belief.

Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition. Mental

The scientific name for this pacing mechanism is anticipatory regulation. Its output is a continuously refreshed, intuition-like feeling for how to adjust one's effort in order to get to the finish line as quickly as possible. Its inputs are perception of effort, motivation, knowledge of the distance left to be covered, and past experience.

may have resulted from abnormal wiring in the serotonergic system of his brain. Other