What's Your Word?

A friend of mine asked me what my goals were for 2018.  She wisely suggested we write them out, put ourselves out there, make them sticky and give them life. Her note to me was heartfelt. It was only after much self reflection, awareness and inward observations that she did come up with her word to encapsulate her theme for 2018.  Everything would flow from that word, that essence, that feeling she wanted to create for herself day in, day out. 

Contemplations like this always make me think of Brite athletes as they diligently train for races, balance family, be responsible at work and nurture intimate relationships. How do we pull it all together? How do we create the life we truly want to live? How can we live out our passion while being there for all the special moments, meetings, celebrations and people in our lives?  How can we become more present for both our training and everything else that matters?  How can we commit to greatness and all the elements that are part of that ecosystem including failure and letting go? There may not be one simple answer but surely connecting to an essence, a purpose and perhaps a word will set us on our way. 

If we do nothing else in the early days of 2018, we can at least ask ourselves how we can BE more vs. DO more. So may I ask you, what is your word(s)?

"We are far more than what we do...we need to be more...more authentic...more honest...more present...more grounded...let the doing flow from there. When that happens extraordinary things happen." - Dr. Michael Gervais, Sports Psychologist and Entrepreneur (Compete to Create).

Productive Failure & Excellence

Athletes~

Today focuses on two areas that were swirling in my head whilst on a bike ride. Typically ideas are generated from recent athlete interactions, performance observations, training peaks logs or my own experiences. Hopefully you resonate with one of the paragraphs below.

PRODUCTIVE FAILURE

In theoretical terms, I have always understood that when things don’t go to “plan” there are always lessons to take away from it. You’ve been told by many that failure is the best way to learn. But isn’t that true only if we actually understand the lesson and apply it? If you are one of the lucky few that never repeat mistakes twice, I commend you. The failure-lesson paradigm suggests we make smarter decisions and choose differently based on our “failed” experience. 

It’s only when my hair started to turn grey that this “failure as growth” concept started to really sink in at a deeper level. I get it now. Applied to athletics, true learning, authentic skill development and fitness gains come almost exclusively from intense struggle, discomfort and failure. You can apply this anyway you want and you will this is in fact true. 

I was reading about a world class surfer - Nic Lamb. Surfing is a skill and sport I admire and would surely fail at numerous times before competency was even a consideration. He talked about seeking waves that scare him, stepping outside his comfort zone and getting comfortable being uncomfortable.  His mindset is “the opposite of complacency.”  Times when Lamb is supremely challenged (and maybe fails at an attempt) are the most valuable. He is stressed physically and psychologically which magnify areas he needs to work on. 

Another term for all this is called Productive Failure - be highly challenged, maybe fail, examine the problem, figure out a solution, improve next time, acquire the new skill. 

Great quote by Vern Gambetta, one of USA’s top track and field coaches:

"if you fail, fail forward, get up and keep moving. No need to try harder, try different but keep trying.”

EXCELLENCE

Here we are in the thick of the summer. Athletes are racing ferociously, training intently and maybe getting a bit obsessive about having everything just "so”.  Perfection, to me, is frustrating.  Excellence is a great substitute for perfectionists. Excellence means you are doing your best right now. Excellence means you are accepting yourself (your performance, your watts, your pace, your speed) whether or not you are achieving said “outcome.” 

Focusing on excellence is hard work, takes focus and may never get easier.  So maybe the real question is about your ability to excel? How good can you be? How fast can you become? How happy can you live? How responsible? How cultural? How healthy? How authentic? How humble? How evolved? 

TRAINING & RACING in the HEAT

Forecast looks warm for this weekend. Pay careful and close attention to your heat regulation & dissipation, hydration, and output. For those of you racing, keep in mind that by continually cooling the body, you will optimize blood flow to the gut to digest calories as well as to the working muscles to maintain workload. The key is to manage your heat load throughout the day. 

Be the one to take the sponge and ice from aid stations. Wear and re-apply sunscreen (in hair too) - this can be a life saver. Use cool water on muscles, armpits, hands and groin. Keep hands cool by carrying ice or a sponge. Did anyone see Jan Frodeno dunk his entire head in the ice bucket at an aid station in Kona? When asked about how he manages heat in the marathon:

"Walking through aid stations. And taking in heaps and heaps and heaps of liquid. Even stopping at one or the other ice boxes and throwing sponges over myself.”

When recounting his race, he gave much credit to his habit of walking through many aid stations on the run. He explained that slowing down to take in the hydration and nutrition and letting his core temperature cool down was just like his Olympic distance days when he trained running speed intervals on the track.

Athletic Success

Athletes~

You can expect another two or three emails like this - athlete-centric and performance-based - over the next 6 days. 

Then I’ll spare you all more emails however I do hope you can all take away a nugget of information that sticks and helps ground you in the heat of the moment.

If you care to read or re-read any of last weeks’, please visit http://brite.coach/new-blog/ (People, Pods & Reads).

I continue to add more athletes to this list so please do visit my website for the back log of entries.

———————

Monday, July 24th

Athletic Success

The greatest challenge I face as a coach of endurance athletes is managing ‘athlete fatigue' levels and how it directly impacts and relates to consistency in training. What I have noticed is that athletes who successfully manage fatigue are more consistent with their training (and happier) and ultimately experience overall athletic success. By athletic success I mean their capacity to do the workouts as intended (volume and / or intensity) in training as well as having the ability to execute during races with a performance they are proud (usually fostered by confidence, self-belief and sans ego).

Whether your athletic career is built on the next 6 days, 6 weeks, 6 months or 6 years, every day presents an opportunity to develop constructive athletic behaviours. The ultimate goal is to manage the influx of stress load (fatigue) with sufficient recovery thereby allowing your true and honest fitness to rise (growth).

I’ll be brief on a few of the points that contribute to athletic success…

Chasing Fitness. 

Strava has really helps us out here, right? If you find yourself always chasing trophies, KOM’s or QOM’s, segment wins, personal bests in workouts or comparing yourself against “faster” athletes in a workout, save your energy. Rewards will be short-lived and completely delusional. If comparison is your game of choice, consider how little you truly know about that person and their training, athletic history, sleep patterns, life stressors, sacrifices, nutrition, family and genetics. Instead of chasing (that action alone is a stressor), focus on consistency in repeating efforts (back it up day in day out) and zooming out when the minutiae of irrelevant details cloud your vision. What actions, behaviours and efforts really affects your long-term goals? Focus there.

Training Partners. 

Choose your training partners wisely. Really consider who you are spending those long training hours with and what it is about them that brings out the best athletic behaviours in you. Think of the energy they create in your body and even in a group dynamic. Over the years, I have had a small handful of people would be considered as my go-to training partners. I gravitate to them because they are mentally strong, fun, can sometimes go with the flow, don’t race me and rarely try to change my focus for the day. In return, I offer them the same respect.  Whether we train side by side or just share the road together, we are in sync and equally committed to the work we have to do. 

Surround yourself by those that bring out the best in you. You will undoubtedly return the favour. 

Chasing Averages.

If you follow Hunter Allen’s Power-based Training Handbook to plan workouts or exclusively use numbers in the absence of what your body gives you on the day to direct your training (and then add 5-10% to the intensity), you will crack at some point.  This is speaking to those that use a power meter on their bike [or pace in running]. Prior to knowing what your average was for a ride or run, athletes tend to think they are always riding or running harder than they actually were. When we chase, our perception of effort is off kilter and usually inflated. 

This concept is especially important in racing longer endurance events. If you chase an average watt range (say 180-190watts), the majority of your ride will be well over that range and you’ll fail to notice the power spikes you are using to manipulate your average.  In other words, you are burning costly matches. At some point in the near future, your legs will shut off and watt averages won’t be the deciding factor for a performance.  I would rather hear you report that while your watts were steady, your perception of effort was much lower. That’s economy.

Use this week, to set up your devices so the readings give you all the information to mange your effort. Remove all the punchy, testing, ego driven spikes (unless they are planned into your training). Pay close attention to how you feel at what effort. Feel is an invaluable sensation…especially if the power meter drops out or garmin dies….the road is still there for you. The same road you may’ve ridden a billion times.

Be Deliberate.

Purpose feels good. Intention feels right. Very fit athletes have insatiable capacity to train a bit too hard. When done over and over and over, the recovery requirement increases dramatically and the training benefits are reduced significantly. 

If this is race week for you, your “training” is done. It’s time to let the fitness rise to the surface. If this is an important training block for you, color inside the lines of the workout, more is not always better. If you are recovering from a race, be deliberate with your recovery techniques. In all cases, your body will get stronger with consistency.

The final three points are maybe obvious but must be mentioned:
 

    • Sleep (see http://brite.coach/new-blog/20162017/047/0720/having-the-courage-to-rest). 

    • Life stress. Consciously choosing to do less in order to achieve more…thank you Seth Godin:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/01/more-and-less.html

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/12/the-more-or-less-approach-to-getting-and-keeping-a-job.html

    • Nutrition. Eat real food with minimal ingredients. 

Caring is Cool

Today I learned who graffiti artist, political activist, and filmmaker Banksy is. His tweet…
 
“Our generation thinks it’s COOL NOT TO CARE. It's not. Effort is cool. Caring is cool. Staying loyal is cool. Try it out.” 

Athletes often pretend or say/suggest they don’t care about their “race” or how they do. I rarely believe them. It’s a safe front to use however. Let the world know that you are just “doing it for fun” or haven’t really trained for it so “going easy” or like to focus on the “comfort-zone” of race participation. There is an ever growing number of people that are “finishing” marathons or jumping into mass participation endurance events (in fact the slower you go the more fun and comfortable it is!). Surely we will all agree that anything that gets people moving is a very good thing. But is it really true that they don’t care? Or is it cool not to care? What happens if you do care? 

My response to many of my athletes that say they are nervous before a race is “yes, it’s because you care and caring is a good thing. It means this experience matters to you. You worked hard for something so nerves are a good sign. It means you care.” If nerves are generated from saving face and self imposed [unrealistic and pressure cooker] expectations, we are having a different conversation. 

This will be my final year racing as a professional triathlete. And I too am lining up on July 30th for Ironman Canada in Whistler, BC. I want to be in the trenches with the athletes and feel what they feel, see them on the course and hopefully exchange a few high fives. With that decision comes exposure, effort and a lot of caring. The easy route would be not to race and roll out this year until my pro license expires and avoid dealing with vulnerability, stepping into the arena with competitors some 15-20 years younger, feeling the discomfort of racing and risking failure. But I would rather care and jump in than pretend not to and watch on the side lines.

For those of you training hard, racing, preparing daily, opting out of destructive behaviour so that you can opt into constructive behaviour and elevating your game daily, go back to Banksy’s reminder. 
CARING IS COOL. The personal rewards for caring will propel you and those around you far more the impact of any one race or athletic endeavour. 

My all time favourite quote is by Theodore Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. 

It’s a bit long to tape on your handlebar for inspiration but read it before your next race. 

Or tape this one (my second favourite):

Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.
- John Wooden, Coach. Winning 10 NCAA National Championships in a 12 year period while at UCLA - still unmatched by any other college basketball coach.
 

Effort

This is day three of my writing short (ok moderate) posts of some random yet important topics that role through my head.

If you didn’t get Day 1 and Day 2 and would like to, I can forward to you or check my website www.brite.coach 

All will be posted there.

Since many of you have races or events coming up, I will spend another week reminding you and hopefully educating you on some nuances of endurance training. 

Like Sleep (Monday) and SmartPhones (Tuesday), the topics will hopefully surprise and enlighten you.

Today is about effort and our nature to go hard.

Most days, as an endurance coach, are spent asking athletes to ride smooth, minimize surges and use gears to flatten hilly roads. Whether a roadie, mountain biker, triathlete, runner, doesn’t matter…if you are an endurance athlete and 96.9% of your goal events are based on the development of your aerobic system and optimizing sustainable power, then maximizing your ability to hold a steady output is the skill we are after. 

Developing outstanding endurance is the starting point and with that comes exceptional aerobic economy (which I have written about this past winter).  If all your training is interval-based V02Max or Threshold efforts in place of aerobic base training, we are neither training endurance or economy. We are just getting tired. Now, that’s not to say you should never ride hard and do intervals. There is certainly a time, place and appropriateness for hard work (athlete dependent and training phase related) - blending aerobic development and intensity into an athletes training program is both an art and a science (and highly individual). For criterium riders, roadies, mountain bikers and even some triathletes/runners, you need the ability to change pace, recover and go again and maybe again and maybe again. A crit race often demands a rider to “accelerate” through corners 160+ times in the span of an hour! Intensity for these folks is critical! But they back it up with a ton of endurance work!

In long endurance races or multi-day stage events, success to the finish (aka: a strong finish) will only come from careful pacing and steady output. In cycling terms, every time we exceed our aerobic threshold we burn a match. Once the matchbook is all used up, we will have no fire in our legs for the later stages of the race, the run off the bike or the days following in a multi-day stage race. I find it most fascinating that despite many athletes knowing about this concept, they choose to ignore the consequences of it. Until they have buried themselves in a race, a training ride, or walked an entire Ironman marathon, the impact of burning matches or exceeding their aerobic threshold multiple times in dramatic fashion, the levity of this concept is lost on them. Some athletes learn the first time but more often than not it takes a few good reminders. 

This line of thinking and dialoguing with athletes led me to ask myself what is it about athletes/humans always pushing beyond what is sustainable? 

Self sabotaging their rides or training days but going out so hard? Surely ego is involved but there is something more natural and innocently naive about this behaviour.

I read a great thread that magnified our very nature. 

It went like this…

Why we go to hard is because our very evolution (to standing on two feet) has ingrained a certain ‘resistance reflex’ into us. Try this -- stand facing a person. Ask them to hold up their two hands to you. Place yours against them and then gently apply increasing pressure. They will push back with the same pressure. This is reflexive. That's why our natural instinct is to go harder up a hill, into the wind, surge to the front, etc. Part of ultra endurance training is unlearning that reflex — to keep constant effort rather than constant speed. 

Pacing yourself steadily and evenly, in ultra endurance, will pull back anyone and everyone that went out too hard. Be a champion at the end, not in the first 1/4. 

And, if you don’t reel in others you thought went out too hard, then they were in fact faster/stronger than you. So move on.