Joanne Smith ran three consecutive 100-mile ultramarathons by mentally rehearsing races with vivid imagery. She explains how visualization calms the nervous system and argues that targeted visualizations work better for pain than generic beach scenes.
A really dramatic example was the 100-mile ultramarathon that I completed. My first ever one was in 2022, and then I did another one in 2023 and 2024. But I spent a lot of time actually visualising that, like, kind of seeing it. You can get a lot of training done when you're supposed to be sleeping and relaxing. So that's kind of how I went about getting to doing that. So, and when your mind is actually settled into the visualization, the nervous system goes calm. If the visualization is not being put in front of catastrophic things, like in that particular research experiment, I wouldn't recommend that, but if it's more about taking you to a nice place, Um, whatever that might be. That's why, um, I like the— some of the curable stuff, because it's not like, let's take you to a field full of whatever. Like, that might not be a nice relaxing place for some people, but it's quite specific with focus towards, like, reduction of pain and symptoms. So they're more specialized towards that rather than a generic being on a beach or whatever else like that, because that's not focused purely for symptom reduction or anything. They're just more general.
