Singing to a different tune

With my training for the long course triathlon now tapering, I'm turning my attention from training my body to training my mind.

You see, I have no doubt that my body can make it through the 2km swim, 83km cycle and 20km run but my mind will constantly try and interfere. "This, hurts, it's hard, it sucks, is that a blister, my back hurts  etc."

So, I'm trying to find ways of distracting myself from the mammoth task in front of me.

One method I'm trying is singing. I usually train (or at least run) with music, but no music is allowed in the triathlon. So I've been training without and, whether I'm cycling running or swimming, I've found that my mind gets stuck on one particular song.

During my 120km cycle I couldn't get Lorde's Royals out of my head. Problem was I only knew one line. "We'll never be Royals (Royals)" which, when it's sung, over and over and over and over for the five hours it takes to cycle that far, gets kind of repetitive.

So, I'm trying to learn the words to any songs that might randomly get stuck in my head, starting with Lorde, possibly moving on to Miley, and maybe taking in some Billy Bragg on the way (it'll be an eclectic collection). If each song is roughly 3 minutes long and the run takes me 150 minutes, I'll only need to learn the complete lyrics of 50 songs to get me through the entire run, or, alternatively 5 songs sung ten times each.

Alternatively, I could just stick with Royals and sing it 50 times ...

'I've never seen a diamond in the flesh ...'