Last week I did Steelhead 70.3 and honestly just had a bad
race. What stinks is the race wasn’t supposed to be a focused race for me but I
wanted to feel good and get some feedback from a block of training I had been
doing. That didn’t happen which leaves me with a choice of continuing what I
had thought I needed to do or make modifications. It’s always tricky because
sometimes you can be doing the right things, and simply not have a great day.
I had Reeven Nathan do what I had been doing last year in
terms of Philosophy and on his 2nd ever 70.3 the 18 year old went
4:09! This reinforces I had figured out a pretty successful approach
previously. T
Here is the reason I am writing about the experience. It is
OK to fail once in a while. Sometimes in order to try to get better, you need
to be willing to take risks and try things you hadn’t before. The stuff I
figured out to get me to a successful last 2 years are things I had not tried
before those times. As a coach I love experimenting with stuff on myself and
seeing how I react. It is one of the ways I learn best as a coach how things
will work for my athletes. Sometimes, I find things I think will work for some
types and not others.
So if you are trying something new, or you and your coach
are trying something new, give it a
chance. I think the one thing you want to do is have an idea of what types of
things you want to see before your races, to make sure you are on track. I admittedly
got away from that, so have been recently figuring out in races what works and
what doesn’t.
Have a few marker sets you may hit a few times a summer that
you can reference.
