ABSTRACT
This chapter is a historical and contemporary overview of the concept of utilising various feeling states to understand, monitor, and regulate athletic pacing during training and competition, tracing back to the seminal study by Morgan and Pollock who first recognised the role of feeling states in pacing strategies. Their work and subsequent research revealed that elite athletes consistently utilise a cognitive strategy during races in which they deliberately attend to bodily feelings in order to regulate pace, whereas less accomplished runners attempt to ignore this information. Recent research has extended these findings and indicates athletes regulate pace by not only processing internal bodily information such as fatigue and effort but also by monitoring external information, involving both environmental conditions and objective information including time, distance, and relative position to competitors. This human–environment interaction is crucial to most sports where real-time adaptations need to be made because of changing circumstances or opponent’s actions. These actions involve both conscious and non-conscious input in addition to goal-directed planning, also referred to as teleoanticipation, where the expected demands of sport task are matched to its anticipated metabolic cost. The chapter will close with a summary of recent research involving deception paradigms in which athletes receive false information about distance covered or time remaining. This work has revealed that both psychological perceptions such as effort and fatigue, and physiological indicators of strain such as heart rate and blood pressure, respond to manipulated beliefs about pace, indicating the process has both feedback and feedforward aspects.
