Rowers Have Two Brains…But Only One Shows Up in Races
You know the race plan. You’ve reviewed it a dozen times. And you’ve executed it perfectly in practice.
Then the race starts.
By the 1000m mark, the plan is gone. Stroke rate’s dropped. Splits are slipping. You’re not executing what they know. And afterward, you can’t really explain why.
“I just… couldn’t do it.”
Here’s what’s actually happening: You have two brains. And under race pressure, only one of them shows up.
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for documenting what he calls our dual-process cognitive system. He labels them System 1 and System 2. I call them Racing Brain and Training Brain because those names make it immediately clear which one matters when your athlete is at 1800m with their lungs on fire.
Training Brain (System 2):
Racing Brain (System 1):
Here’s the critical piece: When physiological stress spikes (e.g., heart rate at 185, breathing labored, lactate accumulating, every system screaming), the Training Brain goes mostly offline.
It’s not a choice. It’s biology.
Your carefully rehearsed race plan? That lives in Training Brain. And Training Brain isn’t driving when it matters most.
Racing Brain evolved over millions of years to keep us alive. It’s designed to detect threats and respond instantly. See predator → run. Feel pain → stop. Detect danger → protect.
It cannot tell the difference between “this 2k hurts” and “this is genuinely dangerous to my survival.”
All it knows is: high heart rate + labored breathing + burning muscles + stress hormones = THREAT DETECTED.
So it does what it’s designed to do. It sends stop signals.
Not suggestions. Commands.
When your athlete crosses 150 strokes per minute with 500 meters left, their sympathetic nervous system is fully activated:
As exercise physiologist Tim Noakes describes in his Central Governor Model, the brain interprets these signals as potential threats to homeostasis, the body’s stable state. It doesn’t see “I’m racing well.” It sees “Systems are being pushed to dangerous limits.”
Racing Brain’s response: STOP. NOW.
Here’s what makes this so insidious: Racing Brain screams “STOP!” at 85% of actual capacity with the same urgency it would at 100% capacity.
Your athlete can’t tell the difference between the two signals. Both feel catastrophic. Both feel like they’re at their absolute limit.
But one is real. One is a false alarm.
And most athletes never learn to distinguish between them.
Think about a time you knew exactly what to do, but in the moment, couldn’t execute it.
Maybe you were giving a presentation. You knew your material cold. Then someone asked a challenging question and suddenly your mind went blank. Your heart raced. Your palms sweated. You fumbled the answer.
Training Brain had the information. Racing Brain detected social threat and took over.
This is what researcher Sian Beilock calls “choking under pressure.” It’s not a failure of knowledge or skill. It’s the automatic threat-detection system overriding conscious intention.
Your rowers experience this every time they fade in a race despite knowing better. Training Brain had the plan: “Hold 1:48 splits through the third 500.” Racing Brain detected threat: “Danger! Back off now!” Racing Brain won.
It always wins under stress. It has to. That’s its job.
Here’s where this gets interesting: Racing Brain’s threat threshold isn’t fixed. It’s learned.
Over hundreds of training pieces, your athlete’s Racing Brain has been collecting data and building patterns:
Every time they felt that stop signal and backed off, Racing Brain logged it: “Good call. We predicted danger correctly. Stopping kept us safe.”
The problem? For many athletes, these predictions are wildly overcalibrated. Racing Brain is sounding the alarm at 80% capacity and calling it 100%.
Your athlete who fades at 1200m every single time? That’s not random fatigue or a lack of mental toughness. That’s Racing Brain’s learned threat-detection threshold. It’s pattern-based, not physiology-based.
And here’s the truly problematic part: If you don’t address this directly, hard training makes it worse.
Your athletes do thousands of hard strokes. Many still fade at the same point.
Because Racing Brain learns from outcomes, not intentions.
Each time your athlete:
Racing Brain learns: “My threat prediction at 1200m was correct. Backing off was the right call. I kept us safe.”
The alarm gets reinforced. Next time, it might sound even earlier.
You think you’re building toughness through repetition. You’re actually training a more sensitive threat-detection system.
Racing Brain updates its threat threshold through what neuroscientists call prediction error—the gap between what it predicts will happen and what actually happens.
When Racing Brain predicts catastrophe (“If I keep pushing at this intensity, I will blow up”) and catastrophe doesn’t happen, new data gets logged.
One exposure where prediction doesn’t match outcome? Dismissed as noise.
Fifteen to twenty exposures? The pattern updates. The threshold recalibrates.
This is the same mechanism that drives exposure therapy for anxiety disorders. Someone with a fear of heights predicts: “If I go on that balcony, I will panic and fall.” Exposure therapy has them go on the balcony. They don’t fall. They survive. Prediction error accumulates. The fear response gradually recalibrates.
Your rowers need the same thing: systematic exposure to Racing Brain’s stop signals, followed by evidence that the predictions were wrong.
But (and this is critical) they need structured reflection to create that prediction error. Without it, they’re just suffering without learning.
You cannot reason with Racing Brain. You cannot talk an athlete out of fight-or-flight activation. You cannot hand them a race plan and expect Training Brain to execute it under maximum stress.
What you can do:
The Three-Question Protocol I teach does exactly this. After every hard piece:
This creates prediction error. This is the actual training stimulus for Racing Brain recalibration.
Want the complete protocol? Check out the free Mindset Clinic.
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