The person I was speaking to is planning on doing a running race in a week, however, up until a couple of weeks ago their preparation was being interrupted by an injury. This injury didn't prevent training, but it did disrupt it for a couple of weeks.
Due to these two weeks of disruption the athlete in question has been feeling particularly unfit and a little unmotivated recently. They have still managed to get in a couple of weeks of good training, but they have been having serious doubts about the race and had been struggling to find the motivation to get out the door each day for exercise. Pretty understandable really.
However, when we looked at the athlete on TrainingPeaks today we saw that despite their perception they are actually pretty fit, in fact they are about the fittest they have been for months. This fitness actually isn't a mystery as they didn't stop training during their injury but instead managed to fit in some consistent cross training. However, while the fitness isn't unexpected, it wasn't something that the athlete was feeling.
While the athlete was able to keep training during their injury, they haven't really felt like they were doing the training they needed to be doing, this led to a perception that they hadn't been training and were, therefore, unfit. When we chatted today we looked at TrainingPeaks and the athlete realised that things weren't actually as dire as they thought. The shift in mental perception was almost immediate. They suddenly felt much happier about training and a lot more willing to get out the door for the next session. The race is still in question as there may not be enough running miles in the legs to get through the race risk free, but that is a discussion for another time, with respect to fitness, they have more than enough for race day.
There is a saying that training and racing is 90% mental and today was a great reminder of that. Sometimes it really is all in the head.
No comments:
Post a Comment