By Kelly Guest
May 17, 2007 -- Triathlon takes a lot of time. There are all the hours of training, traveling to races, cleaning your bikes and endless hours thinking about training and racing.
I am always amazed when I hear someone say, “ How are you feeling?” And the response entails “Oh, not very good, the (fill in the blank with your excuse), so I am just going through the motions today”.
For all of the time we put into the sport, we seem to give ourselves so many excuses not to perform to our potential. It just doesn’t make sense to pour hours upon hours into training, missing out on backyard BBQs because you have an early session the next morning, or maybe even missing time with your family to train, and then give yourself an out.
Of course, I am guilty of doing this as well.
The other day I was getting ready for a race and I caught myself spouting out justifications to under-perform. As I realized what I was doing, I also realized that it was easier said than done to change my attitude.
With the young athletes that I coach, one of my objectives is to try to over-ride this human instinct by instilling an expectation of success into their preparation. One of the ways we approach this is by asking them to pack their race bag early in the week and bring it to practice. At practice we unpack all of the bags and go through the contents of each one. One item that is usually missing, is what I call “Podium gear”. Podium gear refers to the clothes that you are going to wear on the podium. It can be a sponsor’s gear, or just your favorite shirt.
So as I was chatting with my youngest group of athletes (ages 9-10), I brought this point up, by saying, “I want you guys to dress for success…what do you want to wear on the podium?”
To this question I got the best response I’ve ever heard. One of the young boys said, “I’m going to wear a tuxedo”.
Right on! He got it and classed it up!
I do find it amazing that we give ourselves these excuses and sometimes we still manage to have good days. Now imagine if we didn’t allow ourselves an excuse to under- perform. Imagine if we went into each race with a realistically high expectation for our outcome and held ourselves accountable to that success. This may mean having a smoother race, or it may be as simple as being more focused throughout the entire race, and for others it may mean a World Championship.
Until next time, this is the Mountain Man saying, “Dare to dream and believe in yourself!”
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Kelly Guest is sponsored by Giant Bicycles
and Brooks. He is coached by Competitive Edge Training.