Listening Hard

I had an interesting conversation with an athlete this morning regarding knowing your own limits.

This particular conversation was around injury and returning from it. The crux of the chat was about knowing just how much exercise you can do without doing too much. It was a hard concept to put a finger on. Usually the best idea is to have some expert guidance and stick to it. This guidance will mostly likely be conservative and will be aimed at returning you to training while also keeping you safe. Following the guidance there is a pretty good bet that you will successfully recover from your injury and eventually return to full training.

But beyond that advice there is also an element of knowing your body, knowing when one twinge is okay and when another twinge is telling to stop and go home. Unfortunately in my experience there is no good way to teach this, it really just has to come from time and experience. The longer you have been training generally the better you get to know the messages of your body and how to translate them.

Of course the other trick with knowing what messages your body is giving is also actually listening to those messages when they arrive. It is one thing to know your body well enough to recognize when it is warning you, but it is another thing all together to act on that message. Athletes, and in particular triathletes love to keep pushing, to work through adversity. This can mean that triathletes ignore messages from their body when they really should be listening hard. This was the basis for the conversation with my athlete this morning.

With this particular athlete I know she is experienced enough to hear what her body is telling her, however, I am not sure she is particularly interested in listening to that message. For her to really pursue her racing goals she needs to avoid injury and train consistently, which means resisting the urge to train harder and harder and instead holding back, training conservatively and pulling the plug if her body is telling her too.

 I suspect this could be a bit of a challenge for her. Much like it is for all of us.