I consider there to be three stages of
personal development on the way to fulfilling your athletic
potential. All athletes experience these, no matter whether they
are a pro or back-of-the-pack. Athletic development is relative.
Stage One Primary goal is event completion. Participation
and finishing the event brings joy and accomplishment. Just
being there is super cool. This is a low pressure situation as
the goals are "turnstile" goals - meaning you just have to do
them to "win".
Stage Two Now the challenge of being there and finishing
is completed, the next logical goal is to get a little better.
To continue developing you must improve. Goals become
performance based. Focus is on better times, better age group
placing and perhaps overall placing. Now the pressure is on.
Each race must show improvement to validate the
time/money/energy put into the sport and to give value to the
increased effort stage 2 takes over stage 1.You will now
perceive yourself as an athlete and have athlete friends you
must perform for.
Some athletes have a very short stage two
or skip it entirely. Some athletes never get out of stage two
and never truly reach their athletic potential. The athletes who
are stuck in stage two usually perform magnificently in training
and choke on race day. They can't cope with the pressure they
have put upon themselves. Racing loses its joy.
Stage Three This is where an athlete can "transcend" and
allow performance to reach the top of its true potential. Stage
Three combines the pure joy of Stage One with the performance
drive of Stage Two. These two things together produce "flow".
The Dalai Lama says "the purpose of life is to seek happiness
and that the very motion of our life is toward happiness". In
Stage Three the ultimate goal above and beyond any other is
happiness. When you are truly happy and released from external
expectations you can truly perform without any binds holding you
back.
Athletes who reach Stage Three excel. Happiness consists of
going really fast, executing a perfect race, performing relaxed,
pushing to the limits and winning.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Finding Flow” discusses the
difference between joy and pleasure. True joy takes a lot of
hard work, sweat and sometimes tears to reach. Pleasure is
passive, like watching the TV. Value in life is to pursue true
joy and not be distracted by pleasures. Training for mountain
bike racing is an exact analogy of this. You forsake ice cream
and TV time (pleasures) to train for race performance (joy).
This is what you are doing in Stage Three - pursuing joy.
Pressure and expectations are not conducive to joy on race day
or leading up to it.
"The best moments in our lives, are not
the passive, receptive, relaxing times - although such
experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to
attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body
or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to
accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal
experience is something that we make happen. Such experiences
are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur, yet these
could have been the best moments of life. Getting control is
never easy and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in
the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery -
or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the
content of life - that comes as close to what is usually meant
by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
I rode my mountain bike 100 miles yesterday. It took me 8 hours
and 36 minutes. Let me tell you I had a few moments where it was
not pleasurable at all, but dam I enjoyed that ride!
What are your goals this season?
If you have any
training questions, please ask them on my
forum
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