How to Maintain Short- and Long-Term Motivation

Endurance sports can be a long haul: don’t run out of happiness before your time

Motivation is a finicky beast. There will be times in your career that you can’t imagine ever feeling unmotivated. There will be other times when the reverse is true. Since consistency is by far the most important aspect of endurance training, learning how to ride the wave of motivation can be crucial for long term success. At Campfire, many of our coaches have been chipping away at this game for years or even decades, and they all have tips for different moments you’ll experience throughout your career.

Read on for some tactics to stay motivated even on the tough days.

Different Motivations for Different Moments

As you move through your endurance career, you’re likely to experience different kinds of surges and swoons of motivation. We’ll outline those here and then get into them as we move through the article.

• The honeymoon is over (finished first big race, into second season and “just not feeling it any more,” etc…)

• The mid-career plateau

• Staying motivated when you’re a lifetime athlete

• How to be new again

The Honeymoon is OVER

Your first few hard-earned finish lines are a BIG deal. In this early part of your endurance journey, you’re often accomplishing goals that you never thought possible. You are redrawing your limitations and eying new goals with more confidence and preparedness. The changes that sport participation can affect in your life are transformational, but they aren’t always easy in the long term. Athletes often make big sacrifices in their work and personal lives to fully commit themselves to their early goals, and this is rarely sustainable. Once your race is over, you’re left with the obligations you’ve left unfulfilled and the daunting task of integrating your training into your real life. Give yourself a chance to step back and prioritize the things and people in your life that need attention. Endurance training can become all-consuming, so take the time now to establish some balance. We recommend that you:

• Put off race registrations for a few months and let your body and brain heal from the big effort you’ve just completed. Come back to training with an eye on why you enjoy it and what it means to you.

• Take a realistic look at your schedule and your commitments and pick a few (JUST A FEW) events in the coming year that you can be fully committed to given your available time to train.

• Scale up slowly. We build endurance through consistent training over YEARS not months. Give yourself time to learn new skills and get stronger at a pace that allows you to enjoy the process.

The Mid-Career Plateau 

You survived the motivational slump that we described above after you finished your first big race and you’ve focused on improving your swim, bike, and run for several years. Holy crap, how did this happen—you’ve been a triathlete for over half a decade? You’ve made steady progress up until this point but now, suddenly, things have…slowed down where improvement is concerned. Your race times haven’t budged in a season, and your primary metrics (threshold power, speed at threshold HR, threshold pace in the pool) seem to have stabilized. Is this it? Have you fulfilled your genetic potential?

Almost certainly not.

Physiology (and other skill-based endeavors) experiences something called the accommodation principle, where your body (or brain) eventually figures out what you’re doing and aims to conserve energy and resources while you’re doing it. That’s good for your efficiency, but bad for putting the body under enough stress for it to realize that it needs to change, which is the principle behind all sport training. In order for you to make gains again, you need to alter your approach. This change can be VERY difficult for athletes who believe their success is because they’ve done things a certain way for a long time, and it’s very often a coach’s job to coax something new out of the athlete. This is the time when you may want to play around with focusing on one sport above the others, and altering your approach to each sport. The key here is to dramatically change your approach. Let’s think about an athlete who has swam and ran well during their career but wants to improve their cycling performance. Let’s think about an athlete who is not yet into race season but has left the base period of their season. Here is what they might have done the previous season in a particular week:

Control Week

• Swim: three swims, 2-3000 yards, split into a technique swim, a threshold stimulus swim, and a sub-threshold endurance swim. 2-3 hours.

• Bike: 3-4 rides, one recovery below 60 minutes, one threshold or subthreshold stimulus, one or two aerobic/moderate/endurance rides. 3-6 hours.

• Run: 3-4 runs, one recovery off the bike, one or two easy to moderate endurance runs, and one higher intensity/speed session. 2-4 hours.

Total Training Time: 7-13 (not including strength training)

New Week

• Swim: 2 swims, 1-2000 yards, split into a session that touches technique and threshold and one sub-threshold endurance swim. 1-2 hours.

• Bike: 5-6 rides, one recovery below 60 minutes, two threshold or subthreshold stimulus, one high cadence OR low cadence work, one or two moderate to long endurance rides. 6-12 hours.

• Run: 3 runs, split into a short fartlek run, a hill workout, and a long run that finishes with some short but fast intervals. 2-4 hours.

Total Training Time: 9-18 hours (not including strength training)

That’s a big uptick in cycling, and it’s important to remember that you wouldn’t be able to do the same kind of uptick if you were focusing on swimming or running. HOWEVER, you could work your way up to doubling the volume in those sports, so maybe 4-6 hours/week of swimming for someone who needs to stimulate their swimming, or 4-8 hours/week of running.

It’s important, too, to change the style of your workouts. If you’ve been doing steady intervals, maybe try over-unders, or Tabatas or 30/15s on the bike, or more fartlek running, or different length intervals in the pool. Big message—change whatever you’ve been doing for two to three months and see if you don’t rediscover some joy and some development!

Staying Motivated When It Is Cold/Dark/Raining/Lonely/Early/Hard

Convincing yourself to get on your trainer in the early hours of the morning so you can quietly suffer in front of a bunch of Zwift strangers can be really tough. Endurance athletes do a lot of hard things in the name of consistency, and sometimes it just isn’t easy to do the thing you know you need to do. Here are a few recommendations to consider when motivation is hard to come by:

• Phone a friend. Training alone is convenient, there is no doubt about that. However, you may really benefit from adding in a weekly run with a training partner or a drop in with your local masters team. Our community is big and varied; put some work into figuring out whether a little friendly support (or competition) makes a tough workout fun again. 

• Treat Yourself. We don’t necessarily recommend #newbikeday every time you struggle to get out for your sweet spot intervals, but where can you make a positive change in your setup to make training more appealing? Gummi worms instead of gels? Nice new socks? Gravel instead of road? Zwift Avatar Overhaul? New paincave playlist? Keep things fresh and fun whenever you can.

• Stay focused on the big picture. Each little workout is insignificant, but they’re the building blocks of your goals. What is it you are training toward and WHY is it important to you? Knowing the answers to these questions can help send you out the door on the thousandth cold and rainy run.

How to Be New Again 

So you’ve been in the sport for a long time, and you’re beginning to think about something new. That’s wonderful—endurance sports in general, and triathlon in particular, makes it possible for you to pursue pretty much anything (especially if you’ve consistently done your strength training throughout your career) active that you set your mind to. One of your authors is in the process of transitioning from focusing on triathlon to a real obsession with cross-country skiing. The first rule is to change less than you might imagine. Take a moment and think about triathlon—there’s one of the disciplines that…you just don’t care that much about. Maybe cycling’s not your thing, or running hurts, or you yearn for a life without the black line of the pool. That’s the sport that should go. Don’t get into a scarcity mindset and desperately try to cling to your identity as a triathlete—that will simply siphon your joy about sport from you. That sport you don’t like, channel Frozen and simply let it go. Now, unbuckled from that ball-and-chain, what ARE you interested in? Mountain biking? Swim-run? Uphill skiing? Biathlon? First things first, GO AND TAKE A CLASS OR ATTEND A CLINIC. Go in knowing that your endurance will make it simple for you to deal with the discomfort of the sport, but try as much as you can to simply be a beginner. Be curious. Ask questions. Whatever you do, though, DON’T tell everyone about your history as a triathlete, as that can short circuit the relationship between teacher and student. If an instructor hears you’ve been riding your bike consistently for twenty years, they may assume that you don’t want to hear about fundamentals, and believe us—you WANT to hear about fundamentals. Those are the little details that will keep you interested and—yup—sometimes frustrated. Frustration is part of learning something new, because it gives you a puzzle on which to work, and that is the joy of being a beginner again. So, to sum up, subtract one sport, pick up another one, attend a clinic, and leave your triathlete identity at the door!

CONCLUSION

Our hope is that athletes will stay in the sport for a lifetime. In order to do that, it is important that you recognize that your levels of commitment and participation will likely vary. You are not your fastest finish time, your place on the podium, or your position in the lineup. You are a valued and important part of our community, and this community has room for you no matter how you are able to show up. One year you may be hoping for a KQ and another you may be happy to finish. Both goals have significance and value. You are most likely to stay in the sport when you step back and enjoy the process, not just focus on the outcomes.

What works for YOU? Drop us a line here and let us know how you stay in the sport long term.