Pre-Race Stress Is Doing More Damage Than You Think
Race morning anxiety is almost a rite of passage for distance runners. The nerves, the sleeplessness, the replaying of every training decision you made over the last four months — it feels like part of the experience. But new research suggests that pre-race stress may be doing something more than just making you uncomfortable. It may be making you sick.
A study from Bangor University, published in late 2025, found that runners who reported higher levels of anxiety and negative mood in the days before a marathon were significantly more likely to experience illness in the weeks that followed. The researchers believe the mechanism is immunological: psychological stress suppresses immune function, and when combined with the physical toll of race-day exertion, the body's defenses are left unusually vulnerable.
This isn't an argument for caring less about your race. It's an argument for taking your mental preparation as seriously as your physical preparation. Most runners have a detailed protocol for the 48 hours before a race — what they eat, when they sleep, how they warm up. Fewer have any kind of protocol for managing the psychological load that builds in that same window.
Some practical starting points: know your course in detail, so the unknown has less power over you. Build a pre-race routine that's familiar and grounding, not new and experimental. Give yourself more sleep time than you think you need — not just the night before, but the entire week leading up to the race. And be deliberate about limiting the inputs that spike your stress, whether that's obsessive weather-checking, comparing yourself to other runners, or reading race forums at midnight.
The physical preparation matters enormously. But if you arrive at the starting line wound tight and running on cortisol, you're starting the race already behind.