Segment 4: Not PR’ing this season?
When your season isn’t going as planned…
In the last segment, we discussed daily habits and how small daily habits can create major shifts in how we think and operate in practice and on the field of competition. If your season isn’t playing out as you planned, there may be more than fitness that isn’t showing up at the start line. Confidence takes time to build, as does fitness. If you spent all summer training and the results aren’t showing up - you have to ask yourself if the courses, weather, and conditions have allowed for a PR performance.
Remember that a PR is a best-ever performance, early in the season - chasing a PR vs. sharpening your racing skills is a dangerous prospect. You’re rusty and it’s been 3+ months since you’ve taken on any serious racing, points on the line, expectations, and a team atmosphere where you’re fighting for every place add in the heat, racing after school, stress from tests, homework, and keeping up with friends. These demands all come into play on race day.
Worry About What YOU Can Control
#1 - Worry about what you can control!
#2 - What do you need to focus on to improve?
Quite often people confuse a lack of performance on race day with one thing and one thing only - fitness. There is a departure from logical thinking after a race, especially when you don’t have the performance you wanted. There is always more at play on race day than simply showing up, executing, and leaving.
Think of all the factors that can play into your performance and your ultimate success here are the 5 most common:
Nutrition, Hydration
Temperature
Course + Course Conditions
Pacing
Pressure (Internal and External)
Create a system to bring a sense of control.
You can truly only worry about what you can control. The majority of the other pieces that frustrate athletes are often uncontrollable external factors that all athletes must face on that day. These uncontrollable factors are weather, course conditions, and other athletes. The rest can be controlled or at the very least contained and managed with a system. Pre-race routines are often touted as one of the best ways to contain and manage your emotions and dial in your presence. A routine is a system, your self-talk, and mantra - that’s a system. Taking time to visualize or journal, that’s a system. Being intentional about when you eat, what you eat, and how you hydrate is paramount to your success, it’s a fueling system. James Clear shared a little more about systematizing other parts of your life and I think it’s pretty easy to make the connections to running.
Pillars of Season-Long Improvement
Let’s talk a little about training. Are you sticking to the basics that have proven successful? Season after season - I see people overworking and underperforming because they refuse to trust the basic pillars of continuous improvement. They think that they are the exception to the principles and rules that govern human performance. Trust me, you might have broken the mold in your pottery class last year but when it comes to human performance - the Pillars of Performance move for no one.
Pillars of Performance:
Do not overrun your easy days. Harder does not equal better performances sooner.
Do not skimp on your long run. If you’re not getting 60-75 minutes every 7-10 days, you’ll plateau too early in the season.
Do not try to complete every workout at a 5k race pace. Understand the goal and intention of the session. If your coach can’t tell you - you have bigger problems.
Get enough sleep. 7 is a minimum. Overclocked with to-do’s? Did into what makes the priority list.
Keep your strength in place. Regular strength and mobility work is what allows you to run mileage and bigger workouts. Structural weaknesses are one of the leading causes of injury.
Nutrition + Hydration. Eat plenty, and hydrate properly. An under-fueled body will underperform every time.
Be your own critic. Self assess your performance and be honest about what 100% every day looks like.
Be Consistent. Last on the list but it’s the #1 thing that will take you from good to great.
Racing Self-Assessment
The soft skill of self-assessment is one that is often left on the table when we consider how to improve our season or race outcomes. Young athletes are often black and white when they assess their performance after a race. I will ask “How did your race go?” and the majority will throw back a one-word answer - “good” or “not great”. Save for the exceptional moment when they do get the PR they’ve been striving for; when that moment does come - 90%+ of athletes cannot tell me how or why they achieved that PR other than “I had a good day”. Why? What did you do to make it a success?
If you aren’t spending time digging into each race for 5-10 in the 24 hours after a race, you will continue to make mistakes. You will also find that the first couple of times you walk through self-assessment - you will find that you have likely been making many small mistakes, or small bad habits that can have a huge impact on your race outcomes. Self-assessment has the power to unlock better race strategies, and fueling strategies. Self-assessment is a crucial to that can help you narrow down and create powerful pre-race routines and systems.
What went right? That’s the first question I ask my athletes after every race - good or bad - PR or last across the line. Digging in and asking athletes to self-assess is a major part of the pre-race and strategy phone calls I conduct with athletes all over the US. We are hard-wired to look for the bad in our performances and most athletes struggle to self-assess and find what they did well and what they are proud of themselves for. The best athletes I’ve coached over the years would finish a race and they would talk to me after and they knew where improvement was needed.
The power of self-assessment begins to transcend behavior adjustment and systems creation when you don’t punish yourself for your mistakes. The majority of professional athletes got where they are by making mistakes, often on the biggest stage. Think about the 2023 World Champion 1500m star Josh Kerr at the Zurich Diamond League, he has just been crowned the world champion - outkicking Jakob Ingebritsen in a pressure filled final. Less than a week later, Yared Nuguse sneaks inside Josh Kerr at the line at the Zurich final to win a diamond league title upsetting the newly Kerr, the newly crowned world champion. I would love to see what Yared thought of his race in Budapest, and what Kerr would have changed about the Zurich Diamond League. Could Kerr have had a better position in his lane in Zurich? Did Nuguse come in more recovered in Zurich after racing rounds in Budapest? Does the fatigue built over rounds change how Nuguse trains leading into Paris 2024?
You might be thinking: These are professionals, I’m not going for Diamond League titles! Not yet you’re not. Right now, you need to understand how to master the top level of where you are right now. Understand that training and racing isn’t linear and your fitness will make jumps when you figure out all the little pieces, and even then - there is piece of racing that is left up to luck, timing, and many factors outside your control.
Recap:
Worry about the factors that you can control
Develop a way of adjusting your language and habits when you’re met with frustration with factors outside your control
Focus on the basics of season-long improvement. Make these habits a core part of your training system
Take time to self-assess after a race. This will help you find areas of improvement.
