There is an old saying that a marathon only really begins around the twenty mile mark. The truth is, no matter how long the distance, there are races where you have problems right from the beginning of a race. From the outset, our body doesn't seem to be moving as well as it should, and you begin wondering how you are going to make it through the next few miles, never mind the end of the race!

The problem is that we identify ourselves with the messages our mind gives us and mistake it for what is actually happening. While you are running and this happens, you need to challenge the negative picture your mind is giving you. With a few races under your belt, you will come to have experiences where the whole feeling in your body will change as a result of some mental realisation - for example, you suddenly feel much better once you realise you are almost home. These experiences make you realise how dependent your bodily state is dependent on our mental state. So don't take the fears of your mind as the last word.
Locate where exactly this bad feeling you are getting is coming from; the chances are it is not so much to so with any bodily pain as a resistance in the emotional part of your being, located around your stomach area. This emotional part of our being is a notoriously bad guide to how we are actually doing, even worse than the mind, and the best attitude to take towards it is to pretend that it doesn't even exist.

Remind yourself of the training you have put in. If you ran twenty miles only three weeks ago, you are most certainly not going to pull out of the halfway stage of a marathon! A favourite trick to play on your mind is to imagine that instead of running the full race distance, you are actually running only half or quarter of that distance and just focus on getting to that point. In this way you can break up the race into stages and just focus on getting to the next stage rather than indimidating yourself with the total length you have to run. Another trick is to focus on the person in front of you and imagine that he is like a magnet just towing you along.

Visualisations can be very useful to focus the mind away from the body on the experience of running. There is a very good visualisation in Danny Dreyer's book ChiRunning in which he asks the runner to visualise a bungee cord attached to his head, pulling him along the road. Danny uses this visualisation to demonstrate his particular technique, but it can also be used to imagine that there is a cord linking you and the finishing line, which is inevitably reeling you in towards it.