Confidence

It is funny how queries sometimes come to you in bunches.

The other day somebody asked me about confidence in racing, how to combat nerves and avoid self sabotage. Not long after that I was asked a similar question by a couple of other people. The question came up enough times that I thought I might spend a blog pondering it.

This is a topic that I feel a little nervous writing about as I am far from a sports psychologist and if anything I am more guilty of mental self-sabotage than anyone I know. However, I what I can do is write about some of the lessons that I learned along the way during my racing.

In my experience mental self-sabotage usually centers around confidence, the lack of confidence that you can do what you are setting out to do. Once that little voice starts up with doubts it can be very hard to silence, and if you can't silence the doubts then it can be very difficult to race well. That lack of confidence can come from lots of places, comparing yourself to others, uncertainty about your race plan, a lack of confidence in you preparation, the list goes. on. Basically my way of avoiding the doubts and silencing the little voice in my head was to address each of those causes of self-doubt.

The first thing I would usually do when I started to have doubts was to remind myself of all the hard yards I had traveled to get to the start line. Usually by the time I was at a race I had been through a lot of training and all that training gave me confidence that I would be able to achieve my race goals on the day. When the self-doubt started creeping in it was because I had started to lose faith in that training so what I needed to do was think back all the sweat, blood and tears and remember that I had done the necessary work. That would help me relax and head into the race knowing I had done all the preparation that I could.

The other thing I found to be remarkably helpful with silencing doubts was to have a good solid race plan. Regular readers of this blog will know that I love a good race plan and this is one of the reasons why. A good plan helped me have confidence that I could reach my goals on race day. The plan would be built based on what I knew I could do in training and so it was not an aspirational long shot, but rather a realistic reflection of how I thought the day would pan out. Focusing on the plan and visualizing it prior to the race helped me silence my internal doubts and rebuild confidence that I could what was necessary.

One of the last things I found to be quite useful was the concept of staying in the moment. This was a bit of an abstract idea, but one I found quite helpful, particularly during the races themselves. For me the basic idea was to not think to far ahead in the race but instead concentrate on just what I was doing then and there. In every race, including long ones like an Ironman there are things you should be doing at every point of the race. Whether it is holding a particular power, or a certain pace, or taking nutrition, stretching your back etc, there are things to be thinking about at that moment. If you have an adequately prepared race plan then you know what needs to be done at each moment of the race and so you can simply concentrate on doing those things to the best of your ability. There is no need to think too far ahead and worry about what is coming because you will deal with those moments when you get to them. Because you know your race plan is realistic and you have faith in it, then you know you will be able to deal with the moments that are still to come. This helps keep the self doubt under control during the race itself.

So there are a few of the things that I found help keep those doubts at bay when heading into races. I would be lying if I said it was fool proof because I think I experienced as much self doubt as anyone, however, there were certainly occasions when the above techniques worked wonders for me.

If you are interested in a bit more information on how to manage self doubt and maintain confidence heading into races then TrainingPeaks did a great 7 part series of posts on it last year. If you Google Avoiding Mental Sabotage by TrainingPeaks then it should come up.