Psychology of endurance sports - confidence through training
You have signed up for an event and have, what seems, the perfect training plan. You are starting your month long preparation and at some point you will feel doubt creeping in.
Are you on the right path, are you doing too much or too little. Can you even execute on your goal?
Today we will cover how you can build confidence through your training.
Confidence
One of the key things in endurance sport is confidence. Confidence that you are able to achieve a goal, confidence that the training will get you in the best shape possible, and confidence that you can stick to the process.
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right”
Pros vs amateurs
There isn’t much of a difference when it comes to the training process of a professional athlete and an amateur in terms of type of training sessions. Both focus on different things during a training cycle and try incorporating sessions to build strength, speed, and endurance.
Where we see major differences is the amount of time they are able to dedicate to training.
“The only difference between a pro and age grouper is that a pro has more time and they are faster ”
Prioritization
Amateurs might not have the available time to train like a pro, but they certainly can adopt a mindset similar to the pros. They should focus on specific parts of their performance that need the most development. Where can they get the best return on their invested time? Then they have to put in quality time in developing these areas.
One thing that it’s easy to fall into is to always to slow and long sessions in the hopes of "building a good base” but a good base will only get you so far. If you want to race fast, you will have to put in some work in the high-end sessions as well.
Once you have identified your priorities and started working on them, it might be time to start looking at some ‘B’ goals that will tell you how well you are doing.
Have a few well defined goals for your training races and pay attention to those goals. Are you looking to see if can race at a certain pace? You might want to see which type of food is the easiest to digest or how well you perform on the hilly sections of a course. There are a bunch of thing that you can try out and make sure are going well during these events. Don’t think too much about the final time you achieve but at individual elements you want to focus on.
The role of a coach
A healthy athlete is a happy athlete and a happy athlete is a fast athlete.
This should be the north start for every coach, especially in endurance sports. More often then not, endurance athletes think that going just a little harder, faster, or longer will give them that small boost in performance they think they need.
The role of a coach is to slow them down when needed in order to prevent injury and derailing all their efforts for marginal gains.
A coach also has to take into account each individual athlete’s psychological profile. Someone might respond well to certain type of feedback while others will fall into a spiral of self doubt and in the end be worse off.
It’s a tight wire coaches have to navigate but if the athlete is focused on the execution and the coach takes care of keeping the training load optimal, an athlete can have their confidence boosted considerably for the upcoming races.
