Goals

I doubt that there’s a person reading this who’s not planning to go faster, place higher, and reach an unprecedented level in his or her triathlon performance this year. It’s only human nature to start thinking in these ways when the holidays are over and one’s focus migrates back toward one’s own wants and desires.

This happens every year, though, right? Nobody ever says, "This year I’m going to sink to a new level, I’m going to wallow in mediocrity." Unfortunately, there is often a gulf between your pre-season goals and your eventual athletic performances.

Today begins a series on how to avoid the setbacks that always seem to keep us from attaining our early-season goals.

There are four things that always seem to get us down: injury, illness, discouragement, and time constraints.

DISCOURAGEMENT
INJURIES
TIME CONSTRAINTS
ILLNESSES

DISCOURAGEMENT

Today I’m going to write about discouragement, and I don’t mean moping around, or getting teary-eyed, or anything like that. I don’t mean clinical depression, or things you need therapy or drugs for. "Disappointment in oneself" is the culprit. It’s what happens when you fall short of your goals. It’s the falling off the wagon that happens when you plan to do one set of things, and you end up looking back and finding out that you didn’t come near accomplishing what you’d intended.

I find with the athletes I coach that a good part of what I spend my time doing is recreating the workout schedule to accommodate the workouts that have been missed. I expect to do that. There’s no sin in missing workouts. In fact, it’s a certainty, and though that’s the case, athletes put themselves in no-win situations. They’re afraid of doing too much—of overtraining—and so they don’t do more than what’s on the schedule. And yet it’s only a matter of time until workouts are missed. Therefore, athletes often execute their workouts at a level below that which is called for by their training schedules.

The trick is in how one deals with this scenario. Often, if an athlete finds that he or she is a chronic "underachiever" when comparing actual training levels against the workouts on the printed schedule, he or she gets discouraged. That often means further missed workouts, and that sets one on a downward spiral that will remain in place. The athlete then at some point screws up the wherewithal to take an affirmative step toward getting back on the wagon.

How much better would it be to know in advance what sorts of things are likely to happen, how human nature deals with set-backs, and how to plan for missed workouts? How much better to say, "I’m going to plan my workout schedule so that there’s room to move in either direction if I feel so inclined. I can do perhaps 25% more than the schedule permits, or I can do 25% less."

A scheme like this might mean that the mileage levels on one’s schedule are decreased by 20%. In other words, if you’d planned to average 10,000 meters swimming, 100 miles cycling and 25 miles running per week over a given period of time, perhaps lowering that to 8000 meters – 80 miles – 20 miles would be appropriate. Then, if you want to do your 10,000/100/25 you can, but if you fall to 6000/60/15 that’s inside the parameters as well.

Training is like anything else. When you realize that everybody falls short then you know you’re not alone. Don’t get discouraged by hearing somebody else’s boast of workout mileage. Almost certainly you’re hearing about that person’s BEST week, and that’s because he or she, like you, feels embarrassed about disclosing the lower level of mileage actually achieved.

When you’re not isolated—when you realize that you’re experiencing the same shortfalls and pitfalls that all your friends and competitors face—you won’t get discouraged, and you won’t fall off the wagon.

INJURIES

There’s the ballistic kind of injury—like when you fall off your bike—and there’s the repetitive-use injury. I’m going to write about the latter, because there’s not much I can tell you about the former (except that ballistic injuries happens to all of us at one time or another).

The great thing about being a triathlete is that with a repetitive use injury you can usually still do something, and that something—whatever it is—will keep you from losing much fitness in the sports you can’t do. Keeping up your cycling will make your return to top running fitness much quicker, and vice versa. Don’t sweat the inability to run or bike, just use it as an opportunity to really make inroads in the other land-based sport.

It is of course best not to get injured in the first place.

I suppose I also ought to throw in a third category of "injury." While they’re not injuries or illnesses per se, many of us deal with the sorts of handicaps and maladies that accompany one throughout life. I’ll tackle this issue first.

Ironically, I have personally found that adversities in my life have actually enhanced my ability to train and race at a higher level. Since childhood I have lived with asthma and then several years ago I lost half of my large intestine to a mysterious malady after competing in Ironman. All this has forced me to more carefully monitor things like sleep and nutrition (during exercise and just in general). If you decide that having a disability can negatively impact your performance then it will. Your mental approach determines your ability to physically perform. If you toe the starting line thinking that you are less than equal to your competitors your race results will reflect that. I am constantly making adaptations in my training to accommodate my physical challenges, and I believe it makes me a better athlete than I’d have otherwise been if I was entirely physically sound.

I can’t imagine that anyone reading this hasn’t already read a dozen articles about how to stay injury free, and that would include sermons on stretching, warm-up, warm-down, and the like. All that is true. But there is always going to be a gap between behavior we know to be best and behavior in which we actually engage. If you aren’t warming up after reading other writers’ entreaties, you won’t warm up after reading mine. So I’ll just give you some examples of how I try to stay injury free and tell you that, remarkably, these tips generally work.

I don’t do that many high-intensity workouts – high heartrate workouts – and when I do them it’s generally in the middle of a longer workout, the beginning and the end of which is slow. In other words, I don’t consciously warm up and warm down. Or to put it another way the whole workout is at a slow, warm-up pace. The exception to that is when my body feels like going fast, and then I’ll engage in some sort of fast-paced effort, either on uphills, or specific timed routes in the middle of my workout, or fartlek. My fitness comes from the fact that I’m out there every day, and I do quite a bit of mileage. Injury is more likely to come to me when I force myself to work on my speed instead of letting these speed sessions come naturally to me.

Perhaps I should stop here and say that my approach is not going to work for everyone, it’s just that my strength, physiologically, is in my endurance ability. There is a saying, "race your strength and train your weakness." Yes, that’s true, but it’s more true in a skill sport. In an endurance sport, you’ve got consider how it is your body makes improvements – what it responds to. My body responds to a lot of mileage. My body’s response to forced high-intensity workouts is to break down, become tired, and get injured. That’s why an athlete, or that athlete’s coach, must be sensitive enough to discern what training theme an athlete will best respond to. I’m writing here about my own experience because I suspect there are a number of athletes who’ve had more than their share of repetitive use injuries because their body responds the way mine does. Perhaps, though, you (and/or your coach) hasn’t yet "heard" the message your body’s sending, if you find yourself frequently injured.

Maybe because my body responds to higher mileage at a lower heartrate, I have to make sure my miles are traversed in the least impactful way. I’m doing a lot of running now, and it’s extremely important to me what shoes I run in, that my orthotics be sound, and that I do the bulk of my running off-road. I can greatly increase my running mileage if I do most of it on variable terrain, and on trails. It appears hard to injure myself if the bulk of my running is performed slowly, and on trails. But I can get very fit that way, and I find that my speed in a race is generally there when I try to tap into it.

Likewise, doing a lot of mileage on the bike means starting and ending the ride slowly (if not doing the whole ride slowly). And, like running, it’s best to keep one’s cadence up. Riding a slow cadence, like overstriding on the run, is a recipe for injury. Also as in running, equipment is important: making sure your shoes are comfortable, that your cleats are properly mounted, that your saddle height is properly adjusted and your bike is properly fit to you. (All that is discussed on Slowtwitch).

Remember, you have goals, and those goals are going to be met not by whether you run a very hard, very fast workout today, or next week. They’re going to be realized by doing your swims, rides and runs on a regular basis, week in and week out.

Out of all the tools in your toolbox—Computrainers, race wheels, training logs, heart rate monitors, fancy clothing—the best new high-tech secret weapon for training is free. It’s called "patience." If you can acquire that, you’ll go a long way toward staying injury free and you’ll have a much better chance of setting your personal records and qualifying for your national team, or whatever it is you intend to do this year.

TIME CONSTRAINTS

Many triathletes work in a high-powered corporate environment, or are self-employed, or are in one way or another stretched to the gills when it comes to available time.

I’ll bet that when you consider a new work project one of the things you ask yourself is, "Do I have the time for this?" We’ve all met people (or been people, at times) who’ve overcommitted. Nobody wants to promise something that can’t be delivered. It’s something you guard against in your work life. But in setting personal goals we often do not attach the same rigor to the process. We somehow think it’s okay to break our promises to ourselves although we’d never be so frivolous when promising something to others.

When setting your training and racing goals we ought to look at the panorama of our lives. We ought to take into account our families, and whether we’re able to budget time for everyone who’s got a claim on our schedule.

Look at your busy work schedule. Consider your travel. It’s not that difficult to plan a training schedule around all this, but plan you must. If you leave yourself adequate room for everything, you’ll be fine. Don’t set yourself up for failure right from the start by planning to do more than you’ll reasonably be able to do.

ILLNESSES

This can feel like the most insidious of all the things that can keep you from your goal, because there’s nothing you can do when you’re sick. You can’t say, "Well, at least I can swim," or, "All this paperwork will make me miss my bike ride, but I’ll get in a short run this afternoon instead."

No, when you’re sick, you can’t do a thing. The best thing you can do is just not get sick to start with. There really are things you can do in that regard.

As for me, I almost never get colds or flu (knock on wood). I’m pretty severe in how I go about my day, however, perhaps more than you are.

Don’t ask me about TV shows that air after 9PM, because I’m usually in bed by that time. I haven’t seen 11PM in many years. I’m adamant about getting my sleep.

I don’t drink at all, except water, which I drink a lot of. I’m very healthy in my eating habits. I do take a daily regime of vitamins, minerals and other immune boosting supplements. I don’t eat out much.

I don’t spend a lot of time in crowded places. I do spend a fair amount time outdoors in clean, fresh air. I don’t shop in malls. I stay off airplanes as much as I can, since I am not competing all over the world now. In fact, I know a former pro triathlete—a very successful one—who actually flew wearing a surgeon’s mask during the flight (airplanes are germ incubators). It may have looked funny, but because he was from New Zealand he almost always had to take a long flight to get to an important race, and he rarely got sick.

I keep my surroundings very clean and disinfected. I don’t sit around in sweaty workout clothes. In other words, I take a little extra care of myself to make sure I don’t get sick. I eliminate as much as possible all the unnecessary stressors in my life—I view stress, lack of rest, and poor diet as the three evils which allow illnesses to take hold.

I surround myself with positive individuals, and I get regular therapies such as massage, chiropractic adjustments and acupuncture.

If you do think you’re getting sick, there is a school of thought—to which I belong—that says you can do some things right in the beginning to stave off a long infection. If I get a scratchy throat or a sniffle, I immediately start taking echinacea and drink a lot of fluids. I almost never take antibiotics. It’s just about always the case that taking care of myself early seems to help me rid myself of whatever’s trying to invade.

One last thing. If you do catch a bug, it’s not the end of the world. You lose a week or two. Yes, it would be better to be outside training than indoors drinking chicken soup. But if you take care of yourself this won’t happen to you very often, and a couple of weeks won’t set you back much at all.

Further information about JulieAnne's coaching services, contact julieanne@semicolon.org. or visit, Semicolon.org.