But what are you doing to make sure you get the most out of your training? That is, are you training your best, and learning from/about what you're doing? Or to put it another way, are you an athlete or a thinking person's athlete?
Most often you'll think of training as the grunt work. The effort, sweat and tears. Go out and do the training session and surely good performances will result? Quite often they will, however it may be a little hit-and-miss of putting more faith in hoping things turn out well rather than tipping the odds in your favour by influencing and controlling your own performance from what you've learned about yourself during training (and racing).
Training should never be a mindless activity. Managing your performance comes from knowledge about yourself which you learn - and continue to learn - during every single training session you do, and race performance you achieve. Your race performance is based on how you train. Over time you'll build a database of training experience from which you can call upon, but it will only be populated if you're aware of and interpreting what you're experiencing.
Let me give some examples:
- You train through all kinds of weather experiences...from which you can learn about technically handling the conditions (equipment choice, dealing with wind, balance and turning in wet, etc), physically handling the conditions (heat, cold, humidity), and more.
- You train in all kind of physical states...from which you can learn how to read how your body is feeling. Sometimes lethargy masks a great performance once you get started. Other times you might be sleepy but not too physically tired. Or you could be on the borderline between being tired (from a recent hard training) and fatigued (a more chronic state close to over training). Experiencing these in training will help you interpret them in a race, or when good training performance is needed in your preparation.
- Similarly, you train with all range of emotions...and knowing how to manage your emotions, arousal level, anxiety, and more will make a big difference not just in sport but in life.
- Tactically you'll learn your strengths and weaknesses during training, and be able to practice different strategies to see what are the most optimal tactics for you in various race circumstances you encounter, eg, when you use your strength, or defend your weakness.
- Preparation for training will vary and differ in terms of timing, location, circumstances and more, which has a big impact on your training effectiveness. Over time you'll learn what is the best way for you to prepare for training, whether it's the routine upon getting out of bed or avoiding coffee for 2 hours before an afternoon session. Then you can follow the same lessons for races.
So you can see that each training session will present a new opportunity to learn about your body, evaluate it against what you've experienced before - and what happened in those situations - and add a new record in your database of training experiences to call upon. Review your session later on, write a journal, discuss it with your coach - these are all ways to digest what you've just completed.
Don't ever breeze through a session without tuning into your senses and acknowledging their feedback, in this way you'll get the most out of each training session by being able to execute it with maximum effectiveness, and be in more control on race day by knowing how to 'tune' your body based on learned experience. Training experience will tell you how to control the controllables, which mostly relates to yourself.
When you hear people describe a performance as something like 90% mental and 10% physical, it can often relate to how much - or how well - they use their experience from prior training or racing as part of their performance. The people who train their best, and get the most from every session, are best placed to maximise what their body can achieve when it matters most.
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