Are You on Track to Reach Your Goals?  The Value of a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review

Most endurance athletes are familiar with the concept of setting a goal, and many - if not most - athletes do set goals.  (Spoiler: Even the athletes who say they aren’t setting goals likely are setting goals; they’re likely just setting secret goals.)  

I’ve observed that - often unconsciously - athletes deploy a bit of a “set it and forget it” strategy when it comes to goal setting, meaning that they set a goal and neglect to actually assess whether the goal continues to be reasonable and achievable along the path to it.  As such, athletes don’t discover (or, perhaps more accurately, admit) that they aren’t on track to reach the goals they’ve set until their inability to hit the goal is literally staring them in the face.  (In my experience, this confrontation point most often happens right in the middle of an athlete’s A-Goal race, which causes a bit of a crisis for the athlete.)

In contrast to the “set it and forget it” method, a much more effective (not to mention enjoyable and reduced stress) strategy is to conduct a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review to assess ahead of time if you are on track to reach your goals.  This allows you to recalibrate your training (and perhaps your goals) as needed based on where you actually are in your training so you have a higher probability of reaching the outcome you desire.

What is a Goal and What Does it Mean to Set a Goal?

Ask any athlete what a goal is, and you will receive a seemingly endless number of different answers.  But in my experience, the answer to the question “What is a goal?” is actually quite simple:

A goal is a thing that you have deemed to be a higher priority than other things.‍

Whether you’re conscious of it or not, setting a goal means that you are ranking and prioritizing the activities in and the things that make up the fabric of your life.  In my humble opinion, you cannot actually call something a goal or set a goal if you are not willing to give it a higher priority over other things that you could be doing in your life.

There are an infinite number of things you could actually be doing in your life, life is a zero-based budget, and you are already spending each of the 24 hours available in a day.  The hard truth is that you cannot do everything, and thus, it’s best if you choose what you’re doing (and by extension, what you’re not doing).  To set a goal means that you’re going to have to reallocate some of the time you are already spending on other things and spend that reallocated time on the goal you set for yourself.  So, by definition, that thing - your goal - should be (and really needs to be) a higher priority than most of the things you are already doing in your life and it needs to be a higher priority than the things you could be doing in your life.

The things we choose to do and spend our time on - such as training for endurance sports goals - are meaningful and valuable precisely because we are not doing an infinite number of other things that might be of value to us.  This prioritization is exactly what should make us cherish and covet what we’re actually doing.  Instead, what many people do is wish they were doing something else, fear that they’re missing out on something else, and/or attempt to multitask (which cannot be done) all in an attempt to shirk away from the truth that when we choose do a given thing, we are actually choosing not to do everything else.

If you set a goal in endurance sports, this means that an endurance sports goal is a thing that you’ve determined to be important to you, and it’s important enough that it’s a higher priority to you than other things.  This means that you need to be willing to allocate your most valuable and your only non-renewable resource - your time - to it.

Additionally, setting a goal requires quite a bit of bravery because setting a goal on its own does not guarantee that you will successfully reach that goal.  By setting a goal, you are making yourself a bit vulnerable; while there is a chance you will succeed at reaching it, there is also a possibility that you might not.  Accepting that both outcomes are possible is a critical aspect of goal-setting.  All too often, I watch athletes and coaches alike talk about goals like they are “sure things,” as if just the mere setting of a goal and the determination to work for it will manifest into the goal being realized.  And while hard work, consistency, and dedication can certainly go a long way, the hard truth is that they might not be enough.

What is Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review?

A Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review can also be called a Mid-Season Check-In or a Mid-Season Evaluation.  Its premise is relatively simple: Evaluate where you currently are in your training relative to the goal(s) you’ve set for yourself.  Then, recalibrate your training as necessary based on how things are actually going and how you’ve actually responded to and adapted to training.  However, like so, so many of the things I discuss and recommend, just because this is a simple idea does not mean that it’s inherently or automatically easy to do.

A Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review requires high amounts of self-awareness and honesty.  For it to be effective and successful, it’s imperative that you be able to see where you actually are, which may very well be the exact opposite of where you hope or you wish you were.  You need to have the ability to recognize some things about yourself that you may not want to see and/or that might be unattractive, and you also need to have the ability to resist the urge to be defensive and instead have the willingness to do something about them.

Why is a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review Valuable?

In my experience as both an athlete and a coach, the only way to successfully achieve goals in endurance sports is to be honest about where you are relative to where you want to be.  Having a true understanding of this enables you to plan training that imposes an appropriate stimulus and therefore elicits desired adaptations.

A Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review encourages athletes to engage in a pragmatic thought process and discussion with themselves (and with anyone who is supporting them, such as a coach), which drives their self-awareness.  As I’ve discussed so many times over the years, a high-degree of self-awareness is necessary for people to reach their full potential in anything, and that includes athletes who are seeking to achieve goals and reach their full potential in endurance sports.

While I recommend that athletes conduct at least one “formal” Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review for themselves each season, the truth is that it’s very valuable for athletes to evaluate their training, performance, and where they are relative to their goals more frequently than once per year; I find that once a month seems to be a good cadence for these check-ins.  

As a coach, I’m constantly doing this and evaluating the performance of the athletes I work with.  Sometimes, this means that I initiate very hard conversations with athletes, and have to “break” the “bad” news that they aren’t progressing as much as they thought they might when they initially set their goal.  While these conversations are challenging (and athletes sometimes get defensive in response to what they’re hearing), this ability to have these conversations is what allows me and the athletes I work with to have a higher chance of developing a plan that helps the athlete successfully reach their goal(s).

How to Conduct a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review

The first step in conducting a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review is to review the goal(s) that you set for yourself in a given season.  As always, I advocate for writing goals down with actual pen and paper; keeping them in your mind alone and not writing them down reduces the probability that you will reach your goals significantly.  Athletes who write their goals down are 1.5 times more likely to achieve them than those who do not take the time to write them down.  (This is yet another reason why secret goals are so harmful.)  

So, hopefully you did write your goals down with actual pen and paper.  If you didn’t originally write down your goals, I encourage you to start your Mid-Season Athletic Review by writing them down (better late than never).  Then, read them (preferably out loud).  I’ve found that sometimes just the mere reading review of written goals can throw things into perspective for athletes.  Seeing and/or hearing what they wrote in writing makes it more “real” and often, athletes do actually have some instinct that is telling them whether they’re on track or not.

Once you have taken stock of the goals you set for yourself, take a look at your workout logs and review your training since the time that you set the goal.  It can be really helpful to ask yourself the following questions as you are reviewing your training and workout logs:

• How much training did you actually complete?
• How have you been feeling (mentally and physically) in your workouts? 
• Did you rearrange workouts or did you stick to the planned sequencing of your workouts?
• If your goals are performance-based (time-based), what have your paces/speeds been in your recent (within the last four weeks) workouts?
  • How much of a gap is there between your current paces/speeds and your goal pace/speed?
• How much time is there left before your goal race or the event where you hoped to achieve the goals you set?
  • Is there enough time left before your goal race to actually gain enough adaptations to achieve the goals you set?
• Are you making excuses for why your training has gone the way it has? 
  • Remember, even if there are valid reasons about why your training has gone the way it has, it takes what it takes to achieve a goal, and if you don’t do what it takes, the simple and hard truth is that you won’t hit your goal.
• What things are different in your life now from when you originally set your goal?
  • Have things unfolded in a way that makes it challenging or easier to do what it takes to accomplish this goal?

Asking these questions can be really challenging because the answers may very well not be what you want to hear.  That being said, denying the truth about where you are relative to where you want to be will not serve you well, and it certainly won’t magically make it so you are where you want to be.  Have the courage to both ask yourself these questions and answer them  honestly.

How to Adjust Goals and Use the Information Learned from a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review

As valuable as conducting a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review is, the true value of this process comes in the choices you make for your training after conducting this check-in.  Doing a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review isn’t enough; you need to engage with what you learn and utilize that knowledge to help you reach your full potential.

If you discover that you are not on track to reach your goals, the adaptations that you make to your training as a result of what you learn in the check-in are the most valuable part of engaging in this review process.  The mere knowledge of where you are is not sufficient; you need to adjust your training for where you are and continue to recalibrate it as needed so you can remain on a trajectory toward your goals that gives you the highest portability of successfully achieving them.  And truthfully, this is true whether you discover you are where you expected you’d be and are on track to reach your goals or whether you discover that you are not where you expected you’d be and you are not on track to reach your goals.

As previously discussed, setting a goal means that you have to be willing to take the risk that you might fail at achieving it, and acknowledging this reality is so important.  In fact, it’s so important that I would make the case that the ability to truly acknowledge this possibility separates great athletes from average ones.  It’s entirely possible that you may not adapt to training the way you imagined you might.  If your goal is time-based, you may not get faster at the rate that you want to (and it’s for this reason I often recommend that athlete’s do not pick races first).  You may have any number of things happen in your life that were not on the horizon when you initially set the goal.  (A family member could get a chronic illness, you could have to take on more projects at work, your kids may need you to be physically present more than you thought, you could get sick multiple times, etc.)

If you are faced with the realization that you are not on track to reach the goals you set in the timeline you originally projected, you have a few options.  If you want to keep your goal race on the calendar, you can adjust your goals themselves.  (This often means that you are relaxing the goals that you’ve set for yourself.)  If achieving the goals themselves as you originally set them is more important to you, you can adjust the timeline, which may mean forgoing races (yes, including those that you may have already registered and paid money for) and/or delaying registering for a goal race until your training indicates that you are imminently able to achieve the goal you set.  

If your Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review indicates that you are on track to reach your goals, it’s important that you review what has been working and consider why it has been working.  Then, use that information to help motivate you to keep doing what has been working for you.  

All too often, when things are working or going well, athletes seek to change things (often by leveraging the More Monster and increasing their volume and/or intensity in training), and that can cause the tables to turn in the wrong direction.  It’s so important to remember that if things are working, they are working because of what you are doing, not in spite of it.  (The things that are working in your training can include, but are not limited to: volume, intensity, workout sequencing, and training phase planning.)  As the old saying goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  It’s very okay if things are going well; things going well doesn’t mean that you need to change anything.  If you’ve found the right formula or recipe for you, keep leveraging that same formula so you can continue to make adaptations and progress toward your goals.

Here are some practical things you may do with the information learned from a Mid-Season Athletic Performance Review:

• Keep progressing your training the same way you have been
• Adjust the timeline for an attempt to reach your goal (aka adjusting when your A-Goal race is)
• Keep your A-Race the same and adjust the goal that you’re seeking to accomplish at it
• Change the sequencing of your workouts within a training week
• Adjust the volume and/or intensity of your workouts
• Adjust the types of workouts you’re doing (i.e. perhaps include more cross-training or more strength training or reconsider the number of different sessions you’re doing in each discipline if you’re a multisport athletes
• Adjust the structure of your workouts (i.e. consider whether Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE), heart rate, power, or pace is the best basis for your workouts)

The Bottom Line

While having an optimistic view of things can be helpful for many reasons in our lives, when it comes to setting goals in endurance sports, having a pragmatic view is what serves athletes best.  One of the best ways you can engage with a pragmatic mindset when it comes to goal setting is to conduct periodic check-ins with yourself about your training and performance relative to where you want to go and the goals that you’ve set for yourself.  Doing this will allow you to adjust and recalibrate your training appropriately to keep you on your desired trajectory to reach your full potential and achieve your goals.