We're All Olympians Now: How to Raise Your Eyes to the Horizon
Olympian and 2008 Olympic Trials champion Matty Reed
by Chris Bagg and Amy VanTassel
“The time I really focused on my training was exactly one year out from the Olympic Trials. That was the hardest and most focused I have ever been: it was training, nutrition, recovery, massages…every aspect had to be planned and executed. I set goals to run under 30 minutes for 10k, ride 53 minutes for 40k, and swim 16:30-16:45 for 1500m. By the time I toed the line at the trials, I had reached all those goals. I went on to win the race. I was in the shape of my life after that year of work.”
—Matty Reed, 2008 Olympian, 2008 Olympic Trials champion
We already know what you’re saying: “It must be nice to focus 100% on your training—even during quarantine that’s not possible for me.” You’re right that few of us will ever be able to do so, nor would it necessarily be enjoyable, but Big Matty Reed’s keen sense of focus is what we hope you take away from the quote above. Beginning a year out from the trials, which took place almost five months before the Olympic Games, Reed set aside short-term goals and focused on preparation. You’ll notice that he didn’t target a certain time at the trials—he trained to hit certain benchmarks, which put him in a place where victory drifted into reach.
All of us have that opportunity right now.
No, again, not to put 100% of our focus on training, but to put 100% of our training focus on improvement, rather than achievement. Recently, CBCG athletes made up for cancelled races by putting on their own 70.3’s, both conventional and the shortened “metric” versions (for those of you that use the metric system and are currently scratching your heads, a metric 70.3 replaces the imperial distance numbers with the same values, but metric: so 1200m swim, 56k bike, and a 13.1k run, resulting in a 3/4-mile swim, 35-mile bike, and 8.1-mile run), or participated in the virtual events which have popped up all over. Unsurprisingly, many of these athletes PR’d the distance or posted performances that outstripped their normal racing performances. Why?
First of all, many of us perform better in training than we do in racing. This is normal, if regrettable. Lacking a focus on mental strategies leads to events where we let competition get in our way. Competitive sport is nothing more than putting your ego on the line in a public setting bounded by shared rules (as good a definition of competition as I’ve ever heard), and that ego threat tends to get the better of most of us. We forget that racing is simply an expression of current fitness, and we worry, worry, worry. That worry leads to mistakes made on course, and mistakes cost you time. In the comfort of our training routines, or isolated from other competitors, we usually just “press play,” hitting our numbers or moving effectively on feel. As a result, we make fewer mistakes and rise to the level of our training.
We reached out to some other Olympians we have the honor of knowing, Kikkan Randall and Gwen Jorgensen, to get their perspective, and we hope that their experience provides some context and perspective about your own goals. Randall is an American, Olympic gold medalist cross-country skier. She has won 17 US National titles, made 29 podiums on the World Cup, made five trips to the Winter Olympic Games including the United States' first ever cross-country skiing gold medal at the Winter Olympics in women's team sprint at Pyeongchang in 2018.
Randall, at one of her MANY gold medal-winning races
“As a young ski racer I dreamt of winning an Olympic medal in women’s cross country skiing, but at the time no American woman had even cracked the Top-10 and my coaches were estimating it could take over a decade to build up the capacity and experience to be competitive at the world’s highest level. With such a daunting road ahead and no clear path to follow it could have been discouraging to pursue that lofty goal so far in the distance. But I was inspired and motivated by the possibility and the challenge! With the help of my coaches, I took the goal and broke it down into smaller and smaller goals until I had something to chase everyday and a way to measure my progress. The motivation was the dream but what kept me going was the small successes every day. As I ticked-off one goal at a time, I progressed, I learned, I built. Suddenly, ten years passed and I had become one of the best skiers in the world. It still took another six years to make the Gold Medal happen, but along the way I had an incredible, enriching, rewarding and satisfying journey that made me strong on and off the ski tracks.
“Right now we aren’t able to go after the goals we had planned. It may feel hard to stay motivated and measure progress. But keep doing what you CAN every day. Little goals build small successes, small successes build the pyramid. When you can get back to racing and chasing your goals, your foundation will be stronger than ever! You will probably even surprise yourself because you’ve not only built fitness, you’ve built grit, resilience and gratitude. Get out there, the best is yet to come!”
If you’re not ready to get out and focus on process after reading Randall’s thoughts, here’s more: she’s also a cancer survivor. Having battled through a rare blood-clotting disorder in 2008, she survived a breast cancer diagnosis in 2018. This past year at the American Birkebeiner, injured and coming back from chemotherapy, she placed 12th overall in the women’s field.
Randall, booted up but still ready for action
Finally, we also chatted with Gwen Jorgensen, often known as the G.O.A.T. in triathlon. A gold-medalist in the sport and two-time world champion, Jorgensen simply dominated the sport during her time in it, just running away from everyone time and time again. She presently focuses on running, aiming for the 2021 Tokyo Games in the marathon, and here is what she had to say about process versus outcome.
Are Olympians better at focusing on process instead of outcome?
“I'm not sure that's correct. I think many athletes focus on the outcome, and that can be OK. We focus and want the outcome to be good, but in order to be successful we fail. In those moments of failure having the process and bigger picture to focus on is what gets me through the tough times. I know if I am doing the process right then the outcomes will eventually come.” Jorgensen echoes the findings of Stoeber et al who found that striving for perfection is positively associated with goal attainment (outcomes), but negative reactions to imperfection is negatively associated with mastery-attainment goals. In short, Jorgensen aimed for an outcome goal, but didn’t let it bother her when she fell short in training, knowing that failure is a part of the process.
Do you feel you were able to set aside short term goals in favor of long term?
“I think focusing on the long term is important, but we also need short term goals along the way to help keep us accountable and to help give gratification that we are on the right track. I keep a daily journal where I write three things I've done daily that are process based that were good, and that I could improve upon. For instance, today I wrote: ‘I hydrated early, I counted my cadence when fatigued, Kept shoulders back.’ For the things to improve I wrote: ‘Need to activate glutes pre-run, stand tall, let arms come through when fatigued instead of crossing over.’ Having these daily goals that are process based has allowed me to keep engaged in the short term in order to succeed in the long term.”
For many of us, we’re going through a period without racing or competition that is longer than many of our off-seasons. We’re fidgety, spoiling for any kind of race. At CBCG, though, we see this moment as an opportunity to improve, to put in huge consistent blocks of training, unfazed by the sharpen/recovery/build cycle that a competitive season brings. High level athletes know that their real work is done in the offseason and early season, and once the competitive season starts you can really only sharpen a little bit (recovering from races is nothing more than coming back from a self-inflicted injury, and injury interrupts consistency). Well, welcome to the eternal offseason. Here are some ways to make it work for you.
Focus on strength and mobility. Yup, that old chestnut. But honestly, that work is the first to go in a busy triathlete’s life, and now you’ve got the time. Follow our Strength at Home program, or start attending on the of the seven weekly Endurance School strength and mobility classes. See a PT and get an assessment of how you move and how you could move better.
Set benchmark goals, and move confidently in that direction. You don’t have any races, so instead of saying “I want to win my AG at blankety blank race in Sacramento,” set a process goal, such as running faster over a repeated training loop at a lower heart rate over a three month period. Set goals to improve your power at different durations, knowing that by attending to these benchmarks, you’re becoming faster and more complete over all. Figure out your weakest
Figure out your WHY. Our friends at Why Racing Events always ask “what’s your WHY?” celebrating the broad spectrum of reasons that motivate athletes to race. If you’ve only been racing because you like to beat strangers and gather dust-trap trophies, then 2020 will be particularly brutal on you. Take some time and return to your original enthusiasms for the sport, the things that made you so excited about this in the first place.
Go exploring! As an endurance athlete, your whole thing is about moving as quickly and efficiently over large outdoor spaces. Get out a map, dial up Our Mother the Mountain, plan a long point-to-point river swim, or run longer than you’ve ever run before. You’ve got the fitness, so spend it! But guess what? By spending fitness, you only get MORE fit. It’s the classic Obi Wan Kenobi paradox, but you’re the beneficiary.
Get better at resisting the marshmallow. Say what? Astute readers will recognize the allusion to the famous Stanford psychology experiment (no, not THAT one) in which children were offered a small immediate reward, or a bigger award if they could wait for a longer period of time. Compounding the kids’ stress, the researchers left the room during the testing period. In follow-up studies, the children who could delay gratification tended to display better life outcomes across a series of measures (SAT scores, BMI, educational attainment, among others). What the hell does this have to do about racing and training? Well, if you can hold off on chasing Strava segments (a short term but utterly meaningless treat) and focus instead on the boring work of long achievement, you may discover (a year from now!) that you are a different athlete than the marshmallow-crazed person you left behind.
Don’t get lost in minutiae. Great athletes know that perfect is the enemy of good, and that if you hold onto something too tightly, you just end up killing it. Rather than demanding your workouts be perfect, focus on the spirit of the session instead, and you may find that the session went better than you could have hoped for.
So what does this really have to do with being an Olympian? In our experience of knowing a few of them, they are all remarkably chill people. They tend to move slowly, until pressed into motion, and then they move faster than anyone we’ve ever seen. But they never have trouble resisting the marshmallow, they focus on their ancillary strength work, they have their WHY nailed, they focus on benchmark goals as Reed, Randall, and Jorgensen all did, and they always always always seem to love the actual act of swimming, cycling, or running. They’re down to run, ride, or swim somewhere new, placing the experience effect first and the training effect second. As a result they experience less burnout and more joy in their training and racing, and who doesn’t want that?
CBCG athlete Kris Ullman, after finishing the “Mocktoria” 70.3 race organized by CBCG coach Juliet Hochman. Ullman PR’d her 70.3 distance.
CBCGer Aly Wilson, another “Mocktoria 70.3” finisher (with a run PR)