Best Advice For Endurance Athletes
We have all hit walls before in our training, long swims and triathlons. They are miserable experiences but there are two pieces of advice that I have received that has helped me and several of my athletes over the years with this. Now I want to share them with you to help you reach your life long goals!
Chunk It Up!
The first piece of advice that has helped me along the way is to find a way to chunk up the long swim, run or bike. For example, if you are doing a long swim instead of thinking about that swim as being 6 or 8 hours ,chunk it into smaller time blocks. Doing this will help you mentally cope with what is in front of you! Instead of thinking about having 8 hours to swim, break it up into two hours segments or even 30 minute segments. You will approach your training session with a totally different mindset. That mindset being, “I only have to get through the next chunk” or as I like to think about it “OK I'm going to break up my swim so that it's going to be a long swim so say three or four hours, then I'm going to have a medium swim which is 2 hours and then I'm going to have a short swim which is less than one hour.” Instead of a massive effort, it is now three progressively shorter swims which makes it more palatable and easier for my mind to digest. This also makes it easier for you to handle when things aren't going your way. This leads me to my second piece of advice.
Ride It Out!
The second piece of advice is that you need to just ride it out when the session isn’t going your way. No matter how bad you are feeling or how tired you are, you need to keep pushing. The way you feel in that moment is not necessarily how you feel in 30 minutes or in an hour. At some point you are going to make your way through to the other side and you are going to be feeling good again. Once you have done this, you know there is nothing that can stop you from achieving your goal whether it be finishing a sprint triathlon, an Ironman or even swimming the English Channel!
I recently had a swimmer who had to do back to back five hours swims on consecutive days. She did the first swim and things went fine but woke up the next day and really just wanted nothing to do with the second swim. Mentally she was stuck and really just didn't even want to look at water. I asked her to just get in the water to swim for 30 minutes and see how she felt. If she felt good then move along to the next 30 minutes and if she continued to feel good then do the next 30 minutes. If she didn't feel great, I asked her to give it one more 30 minute block and if at that point she still felt bad then she could call it a day. By taking this approach of chunking the swim up and focusing on riding it out, instead of only doing a one hour swim she made it through the full five hours! She completed her goal of back to back five hours swim days. When I spoke to her after, she exclaimed that she felt great by the end of the second swim which was the swim she didn't even want to do. All she had to do was get in and ride it out! Just because she didn't feel good at the beginning of the swim didn't mean the whole swim was going to be a nightmare. In fact, the opposite happened! Once she got warmed up she was feeling good again and she was able to get the whole swim in. By riding it out you may surprise yourself in what you can actually accomplish!
Next time you have a big goal in front of you don't think about it as a huge goal break it break it up into smaller chunks that you can handle mentally. When things gets tough just keep moving forward and ride it out! You just need to keep moving. Give yourself the goal of just making it to the next feed or aide station. More often than not after 30 minutes or so, you are going to be in a totally different position where you are feeling potentially great again and you are back to achieving your big goal.
Hopefully you found this advice helpful and you will be able to utilize it on your next big swim, training or race day. If there is other advice that has gotten you through some tough times, then please leave it in the comments. We would love to hear it to help motivate others in the same position as you!