This article originally appeared on Triathlete

Every athlete has a love/hate relationship with their sport. It's not all rainbows and butterflies, and often, at some point in the season, training sessions become a drag. When we look back, we realize that the tough stuff is worth it, but when we're in the middle of it, it can be really difficult to find the motivation to work out. Why do we hit these walls? Why does our enthusiasm fade as the season goes on? Why do we have days (or weeks) when we dread that 2,500-yard main swim set or long run?

From a broad, neuroscientific perspective, the brain actually views these long workouts as a threat to its homeostasis (natural state of balance). Think about it: The brain's entire responsibility is to control bodily activities, such as sleep cycles, temperature, food digestion, etc. It controls these systems in an attempt to keep the body steady and balanced. When you do something like challenge the body in a tough workout, the brain has a lot of adjustments to make. It prefers for everything to be steady and normal, so it minimizes threats and classifies any sort of effort as a threat.

But growth doesn't happen in our comfort zone. That’s why we do wild things like participate in triathlon. We start out strong, but then our motivation can fade, especially if we’re not proactive about building a burnout-proof training plan. Let's examine motivation and the brain chemistry underlying it.

We typically think about dopamine as the pleasure molecule. It's certainly involved in the reward pathway, but another critical role is that of the motivation molecule. It gets pumped up when we're motivated to act in a certain way (like when we really want something that we know will help us feel pleasure and avoid pain). When dopamine is high, we feel motivated. When it's low, we don't. So, in the case of dreaded workouts, the key is to tackle the dopamine problem. Here are six ways to trick your brain into actually liking your workouts. (Hint: almost all of them target dopamine.)