Curiosity inspired training
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A discussion focused on the key mindset's related to achieving and sustaining high performance in endurance sports... which is chased by a few key training reminders from the physical perspective.
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Curiosity inspired training
- 1. Curiosity Inspired Training Choose to have an adventure! Will Kirousis MS, CSCS, CISSN | @willkirousis | will@tri-hard.com | www.tri-hard.com
- 2. Awareness: What Jelly Beans Teach You About Racing!
- 3. Your Response Is A Choice Perspective
- 4. Slide Modified from Jim Radcliffe
- 7. 100 % of WHATEVER!
- 8. Gratitude… This, Is A Gift! Con Petire!
- 9. I Double Dog Dare You… To Fail!
- 10. Athletes:
- 11. Group think “My friend is doing X kind of workout…” Quiz…
- 12. Easy On The Data…With Qualifications…
- 13. Just Do It Enough Understanding to recognize and experiment Enough understanding to analyze, track, assess, modify with intent and meaning Understanding deep enough that you can let go, allowing full immersion and acceptance of the experience.
- 14. Decision to perform Muscular work / Energy Production (ATP) Increases in: HR, Respiration, Temperature, H+… Brain sum’s internal environment, past, current, future. Anticipatory Regulation and pacing Adjustments to specific workout/race OR training overall Intensity Metric Triangulation The Science Measured as power / pace Measured as change in HR (bpm) Felt as change in RPE
- 15. Not going easy enough, when you should!
- 16. RPE: 4-6 On 10 Point Scale Swim 90 % MLSS Pc / 85% MLSS HR Bike 75% MLSS W / 85% MLSS HR Run 85% MLSS Pc / 89% MLSS HR
- 17. Please SLEEP! 7.5+ Hours / Night!
Editor's Notes
- Lessons from 20+ years… curiosity
- My lack of awareness about Jelly Bean sales lead to 40 bucks in beans that lasted 5 years. Had I recognized what was going on, curiously pondered the possibilities, then made a decision… I probably would have walked out of the store having not just purchased over 10# in beans! Racing, training, life, work… Same deal. Allow yourself to be aware of what is occurring and seek answers. Racing/training examples – learning pacing, POE approach.
- Oh my gosh! My buddy Pete is about to fall into the pit of despair! Wait. What’s that? He’s laying down in a tunnel holding the edge and his wife took a pic so it would LOOK like he was falling? Whoa… that changes my perspective! Perspective, it’s the first mediator of stress response, and it’s the tone setter for your experience. It goes with embracing failures, remembering you choose your path, that being aware helps performance, that gratitude is vital, that getting 100% of whatever is key… See where I’m going here? Working to shift perspective to one which is possibilities based vs limits based is huge when it comes to performing. It’s not easy. Work at seeking an open, expanding perspective!
- Why? How are you going to make the most of this possibility? If you approach training with a mindset focused on what’s possible, what you can do now, it not only helps you build a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness with those on your team, it ensures you are positively stimulated and excited by the process at hand. That makes you more durable long term – emotionally and physically. That also helps you enjoy the process most!
- Autonomy, that sense of destiny control… coupled with gaining skill and experience while doing something is a hugely empowering thing. Technically, this is why self determination is such sustenance for motivation. When you put your flag in the ground, when you know it’s YOUR process… the long term progress and enjoyment are at their best.
- It’s easy to see roadblocks popping up all over the place and miss possibilities. But that’s where we need to be – looking for possibilities. So, when challenges occur, when friction starts… Do you contract away or expand into the situation? Work to expand into it. Contracted – we don’t learn Caught up in the frustration, or the challenge Negative self talk “what the hell am I doing” “I must” “I have to win” Expanded – we do learn Divert energy to what can be done and done well Curiosity and excitement “Oh wow! Let me see what I’m doing.” “This is fun” “What can I do?”
- Training and racing are challenging. That, is a big part of the point! During them, you will become tired. That’s normal. But when you have 80% in the tank… Do you let it eat at you and contract away, only giving 60% or the 80%... Or do you expand in and give 100% of the 80%? What about when you feel good, and you are racing or doing a workout… Do you make the best of the possibility at hand? Doing that, which does not mean working full gas all the time, it means getting the best of that moment out of yourself, is a sure way to maximize your experience and long term progress.
- When you train and race… Be grateful for the experience and opportunity. Even the most challenging of days are ultimately a gift. When you line up on the start line… Stand in front of a board room or pitch a sale or concept or other challenge a work… do so with gratitude. Why? Because that, is the ultimate spirit of competition. The latin root of competition is Con Petire, meaning “To Search Together”. The idea of competition, originally, was not to prove value above another or vanquish others etc… It was to seek our best through the help of our peers! What a difference in how we see a race! When you toe the line, it’s with a bunch of like minded folks who, unknown to them (perhaps), are there to help you grow and get the bet out of yourself on that day… You are there to return that gift to them! What a big shift in “race” thinking. This gratitude based mindset towards racing / training / competing (anywhere) is also very, to quote the book, anti fragile. Sure, a singular performance can be fueled with anger, but that anger is really hard to sustain over the long haul, and quite honestly, living mad is not the best way to experience life. A gratitude based approach, is durable, and helps improve all areas of life. Give it a shot.
- I really do! Embracing failures realistically, humbly, and with gratitude if a great tool to help you learn and grow consistently over the long haul. In endurance sports, we fail all the time. Constantly. And if we are basing our success on X and O level failures… well… It’s either going to be a pretty draining or unfun or both (and short) career. Every failure is a reason to look at what is possible. I was once on a long interval ride and bumped into a fellow racer. I was about to start my last interval, and he asked if he could sit on (draft) and then enjoy the rest of the ride with me – GREAT I said. So I did my interval, and then we chatted. He was older, more race years in the tank, and noted something that instantly felt true, but I’d never articulated well based on my experiences: You never learn anything when you win. When you win, he noted, you assume you did everything right, and you move on thinking all’s good. You don’t look enough at what could have made it/you better. When you lose, you have lots of motivation to seek out what could make you better. He sooooo nailed it! Failures are literal signs of what you can do to improve and where you are developmentally. What else is possible? Shift your mindset regarding what failures are. Sure, if it stinks, feel it, own it, sit with it. You have 1 night to sleep on it. Then it’s gone. Time to use it as fuel to grow and evolve!
- “Its not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the Most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin I used to have near panic attacks when athletes drifted off course. “How can they expect to reach their targets if they don’t stay the course” I’d think… Well… ironically, my attempt to keep them on the tight and narrow likely hurt there progress more, and may have lead to burn out – more readily. Ugh. Being wrong is hard… But it helps you grow! Life happens faster than the internet, so athletes need to be willing to adjust and modify. If they are sticking to the spirit of the session/s targeted over that time frame, things will be fine. The key’s here are 1.) pre week assessment of what’s on tap, what are the keys, and what’s life look like. Do I see areas to adjust now? I know I need to make those 3 workouts happen – the rest is gravy. Set that initial modification in place. 2.) execute, modifying further if need be during the week. 3) review the week at it’s conclusion to see what you accomplished, how your mod’s worked out and what you may be able to adjust to do better. Repeat. Repeat. Over… And…. Over… Week in…. And week out! If you are coached, communicate often – it’s huge! If you are not, communicate with your “team” – training partners, family, friends, and use that to help ensure you are making the best choices to get the most of yourself week to week… And that you are staying flexible. Evolution builds redundancy for a reason. Evolution builds multiple paths to success for a reason. It helps you get to your best level – not despite road blocks… but because of them!
- You are you. You have unique desires, dreams… and those are layered on your lifetime of experiences. While two people training for a half marathon will have some similarities in durations and perhaps intensities… how those tie together, flow, and fit into the big picture for each is different. Don’t let social media, or media or friends dictate what you do and pull you off the trail.
- Ok – now we shift to more directly focused on training issues that come up and which relate to our mindset. We are going to start, with the overload of data that we can encounter today…
- Ok, so Nike was right. Just do it. Well, sorta. When you are a new athlete, or new to any skill, your developmental level is such that “anything will help you grow”. That’s true to a point and for a while. As you learn more and gain more experience to contextualize that knowledge, you start to see that you can experiment a bit, that you can organize a bit and that shifts in approach lead to changes in outcomes. INTERESTING! This developmental shift trends us to higher levels. I’d argue those levels are holarchy based vs hierarchy based – that is, what you do early on, is different from later for many reasons – a big one being, you cant even imagine what you could be experiencing or understanding later. Early on, your experience is all new. It’s like a 3 year old shown a colored ball. Show them it has two colors, but then ask what color you see, and they will tell you the color they see – how could you ever see anything else. They literally are not developed enough to even suspect you see the other color! A few years later, more development, wham – what color do you see – and they answer correctly. Development as an athlete, professional, person, none are really all that different. You can not unknow, what you experienced… You simply have more experiences, more truths if you will, from which to create a new whole. Cool! So as you train, at first, you just do it. And it works. Then you start to experiment, formalize, and recognize the input output fundamentals… Now you edge into data land. Well, not really… But you reach a level of knowledge deep enough to really understand what you are trying to do, some ways to do it, ways to measure and track it, and how to use that to both keep on track and perhaps motivate you. This is awesome, but, it can get you some what trapped. The analysis can take over, and suddenly you are not a runner, a cyclist, etc… You are a set of data. You are a number. You are not an experience, you are an outcome. And while these things are important to fully developing, the stiction they can create can really challenge your development. That said, if you recognize that you can let go and draw what is valuable from the data… But still experience the moments on all levels. That feel is what verifies what the data says… Well Now you are cooking with grease, so to speak! THAT, is when performance fires really take off – when you open yourself to experiencing yourself in the moment without externally generating validation for it, or objectively verifying it/your value. You stop trying and start flying ! May add data adventures with Carl here…
- I don’t want to short circuit your development. You need it all to have the most fulfilling long term experience. I do, however, want to simplify training data use, when in the momement. The system I describe to do this I call intensity metric triangulation. The idea, is that we cross reference HR, RPE, power/pace and use those to validate what we are doing, and to adjust on the fly. https://www.slideshare.net/willkirousis/intensity-metric-triangulation that link will help explain more of the modifications this approach helps you see. If you know those metrics, even just a few of them, you can modify workouts and training on the fly very well. For example, you observe that your ability to hit the same HR and RPE while at a given power/pace has faded. IE, your HR is low and your RPE high at X power / pace… It’s likely that you are fatigued acutely, and quite possibly that low glycogen (fuel) is a key player. Increase carbohydrate intake rate and back off the intensity for a bit and see if you kick into gear, if not, shut it down and go home easily, refueling aggressively. Say HR is very high, RPE a little high, relative to power/pace and you feel hot… likely you are over heating or dehydrated, slow it down, hydrate aggressively and finish it up easily. So we have just a few variables here, but with a bit of work to understand how they relate, we now become more adaptable during workouts and can perform as well as possible. We also, are not removing ourself from the VALUE of feel. We are embracing it as a key player in our execution of workouts.
- Now, while workouts are not magic… there is something an endurance athlete can do which, from a training response perspective is, well, kinda magic – about as close as we are going to get. Make your light training days… LIGHT. It’s so easy to think the harder I work the more I get… But we forget that the harder we work, the longer it takes to recover to get the reward (more fitness). Most endurance athletes with the life stress of jobs etc can only handle 2-3 workouts with intensity per week. But they could do many more which are lower intensity. How about elites? Ill get to them in a second – but they can handle more of everything, but just a little more intensity and a LOT more duration. Going to hard “to get a little more” or “to feel like I got a workout in” creates more fatigue – which lingers. More fatigue means all workouts feel harder… increasing odds of burnout. Workouts feel harder because, well, you are more tired… That leads to higher odds of injury. Add to that, you trigger aerobic adaptations at very low intensity levels 60-80% of “threshold” (say roughly the intensity you could go in a 50-70’ long time trial)… the same ones you trigger at higher intensities… So. When it’s a lower intensity steady day, let the guy with a basket on his handlebars pass you on the climb! KEEP IT LIGHT! You will go faster for it.
- given we are getting into spring training loads tend to climb as the season approaches as well… And that means it’s a good moment to consider sleep – and refresh our thinking on this subject. Look, with the possible exception of bringing a positive “can” vs “cant” outlook to your training, nothing impacts performance more than getting great sleep. Actually, since sleep impacts our ability to control mood… I’m not really accurate there – sleep is the most important thing you can do to maximize your fitness in the coming months! Keep in mind that sleep is heavily related to decreases or impaired performance. Literally everything from our ability to recognize sarcasm, to consolidating our memories to acquiring new motor skills. Heck, sleeping to little can even decrease our cognitive skills and psycho motor skills in everything from practicing medicine to driving to work to learning scholastically. Hey, our bodies are amazing masters of adaptation, and they have developed the ability to sustain some gross abilities when sleep deprived, but studies looking at sport specific performance consistently sow being low on sleep hurts. Some science even shows that light sleep disturbance could decrease you mood and reduce reaction times… that’s not good when you are training or racing! How important is it to sleep well – some recent research actually shows that injury odds are 1.7X higher for athlete who sleep fewer than 8 hours per night compared to those who sleep more. Yep – if you sleep 8 hours, you are 170% LESS likely to get hurt. That’s huge for an endurance athlete who’s sports certainly come with a solid risk of overuse injuries! While this is true, sleep quality is a factor as well. It’s not as well researched in the athletic arena, but in terms of cognitive ability and workplace performance or academic performance, it’s been measured quite well. And with that, it’s consistently shown to be a factor in those arenas, which means at worst it’s a factor in controlling your mental performance in life, and likely training and racing as well. So, what can you do here? Get to bed as early as possible. Sleep is often broken into what’s called non-rapid eye movement (nREM) or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep cycles. The most restorative sleep occurs during cycles of nREM sleep. These nREM periods tend to occur early in our nights sleep pattern, and for folks with normal circadian rhythms they most often occur between 10 PM and 2 AM. So, if you don’t get to sleep until midnight or 1AM, you are reducing the odds of good restorative rest. With that in mind, do the best you can to get to bed early. My take home message for you: you are better off waking early, than going to bed late! Amazingly, there is research that takes sleep duration and quality and shows how this relates to career longevity. Regrettably, it’s not textbook endurance sports, so I could be viewed as taking a “leap” here… But both in the NFL and MLB, athletes who experienced more sleepiness during the day experienced greater rate of physical decay – that only makes sense given what I’ve noted above. But it’s a good reminder that your long term enjoyment of sport may be short circuited when you skimp on rest. Basic sleep hygiene is the simplest starting point that I encourage you to explore the next few weeks: Create a consistent bed time routine and do your best to stick to it. Minimize exposure to “blue” light prior to bed – no cell phone/tablet/computer surfing for an hour prior to bed and no TV if at all possible. Decrease brightness of lights prior to bed. Just use enough light to do what you need to, or to read (a great relaxing activity). Turn your alarm clock so it’s not facing you while in bed (created greater darkness). If you use an alarm, consider investing in a “light” alarm which ramps up a light over a few minutes to wake you vs a jarring alarm sound. Consider a light background noise like a fan or fan based humidifier (fosters sleep). Keep your sleeping space cool and as dark as possible. Make your goal 7+ hours per night. Yes, 8 is better. But I’m a realist. If you can get 7+ we are in good territory. If you have a chance to go longer – DO IT! Look, given life, work and training… fatigue is going to happen. What we want to do, is minimize it so we can recover consistently well, and so we can be as happy and mentally well as possible. Sleep is natures biggest PED (Performance Enhancing Drug) for that reason – it’s massively effective at improving recovery rate and mood state! So outside living well, eating well and training consistently, lets really focus on improving sleep over the next several weeks. It’s a habit, that can have a profound impact on your training and racing – and every other part of your life as well! Appropriate sleep – compared to poor sleep – improves: Endurance Speed Quickness Accuracy Decreases RPE Increases positivity towards tasks Natures PED Massive gains in performance when slept debt balanced – both in endurance, speed, quickness, motor skills. If you are not falling asleep smoothly, or waking smoothly, and if you have trouble staying asleep, you may need less training load, and more recovery time. Changes in sleep pattern/duration Improve sleep hygiene. Darker room Cool temps Soft white noise No light in room Minimize light in the hour prior to bed Minimize pre bed time stimulus Consistent sleep wake cycle
- That was a lot of info to drop on everyone! It’s been fun to hit on these key points. So I’m going to give you one more. When you train… Finish wanting more. When you set up your training plan… set it up, wanting a bit more. Long workout, hard workout, strength, bike, row, ski etc… Any session, any time. Finish wanting more. It’s great now and then to do a changer and be totally blown out. It can change your set point and belief of what is “real”. That’s awesome. But it’s really, really powerful. Doing it more than a few times a year can leave you over tired, flat, stale and burnt. On the other hand, if you are finishing wanting a bit more, you are tickling the system. You are stimulating change. You are sending your body a signal which says: “lets grow”… But you are not sending the signal that says: “I have to adapt to WHAT now?”! That’s the goal here – stimulate to create. Don’t make every session a test of every bit of mettle you have. That’s not training, it’s fatiguing. And to quote Vern Gambetta: “Anyone can get tired”… That’s not the goal. The goal is growth. Stimulate. Finish wanting more! Not just in training… But in all areas. Finish seeing the possibilities that help you get the most, out of you!
- Again, thanks folks! I’m really excited you all came out today and this has been a blast. Please ask questions later on, and if I can get you additional info, please reach out – I’d love to help! Tri-Hard | www.tri-hard.com