Coach Tip Tuesday: Patience, Grasshopper

Woohoo! It’s already time for Coach Tip Tuesday again!

Continuing my theme of “staying motivated with the New Year’s resolutions/goals/intentions/etc., this week I’d like to talk to you all about something completely true, yet completely annoying:

You cannot expect progress or validation from every single workout that you do.

Read that again.

You cannot expect progress or validation from every single workout that you do.

I know, I know.  You WANT that progress.  You’re going to analyze your Garmin data to the max trying to find it.  And some days, you just won’t see it.  So you'll ask your coach.  And your coach (if they are a good one) is going to tell you to stay the course.

Guess what?  That’s 100% okay!

The single most frustrating thing about setting a goal in endurance sports that you won’t reach it the minute you set it.  It’s going to take time, hard work, and some sacrifice to get it.

The reality of endurance training is this: There are going to be days that you feel like crap.  There are going to be days when you swear you’re slogging through, make exactly zero progress.  There are doing to even be days where you truly feel that you’ve regressed, not progressed.  And most importantly, there are going to be days when you do not want to do the work and you are going to have to do it anyway, without any guarantee of a particular success coming from your persistence and toil.

Progress and validation will come at the moments when you least expect it.  It’s going to pop up on a random mid-week workout when you swear you felt like poo, but really swam a 400-yard set 10 seconds faster than you ever have in your life.  It’s going to come in the middle of a race when you realize that you still feel strong and not burnt like you have felt in past races.  It’s going to come as you cross the finish line of your goal feeling strong and able to smile and bask in the moment, knowing that you earned every second of this.

You are going to question yourself, you are going to doubt yourself.  You’re actually going to make progress and swear that it must be a fluke, doubting your true abilities.  You’re going to diminish your accomplishments, saying that someone else out there is better.

Here is the deal, my friends:  YOU are enough.  YOU are strong.  YOU are worthy.  And whether you realize it or not, you are making progress every day.  You can’t see it.  But one day you WILL.  And it’ll feel better than you ever imagined it could.  You’ll realize that all of your sweat, tears, time, and energy was worth it.

Patience, grasshopper. :)