In 2009, my mother-in-law flew into Denver on Christmas Eve morning, rented a car at the airport, drove to Boulder, picked me and Brooke up, and then the three of us started the drive to Crested Butte (about 5 hours) to spend a few days for Christmas with my parents.

The rental car they gave my mother-in-law was essentially brand new. It had less than 100 miles on it and had never been rented by a customer before us. Generally speaking, this sounds like an ideal rental car.

However, as I was driving the car along Highway 285 through South Park and Fairplay, I noticed that the car just didn’t seem to drive normally. I don’t remember the exact details, but something about it just did not seem right.

We stopped for gas around the halfway point where Highway 285 and 24 intersect just south of Buena Vista. After pulling out of the gas station, things really didn’t seem right and as I made the left hand to head south, I was pretty sure the car was dying. I managed to veer it on to the shoulder just before the car completely died. The engine wouldn’t start again and we were stuck on the side of the road.

We called the rental car company and told them what happened. They said that the closest office was in Colorado Springs and that they would have a replacement vehicle towed out to us and would tow the broken car back with them.

When we asked them for a time estimate, they said:

About 2.5-3 hours

The actual time it took was 11 hours.

The story of those 11 hours is somewhat interesting, but we’ll save that for another time. The point I want to hone in is:

Why was the time estimate so far off?

Now, the first instinct might be to assume that the rental car company gave us bogus information just to try and make us happy. This is certainly possible, but let’s assume that is not necessarily the key factor at play. Let’s assume saying 2.5-3 hours was estimated in good faith.

Why would someone suggest that it could be done so quickly when the reality is substantially different (almost four times as long in our case)?

One potential explanation lies in a psychological phenomenon first studied by Dr. Daniel Kahneman and Dr. Amos Tversky called:

The Planning Fallacy

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman tells a story about an attempt to create a new textbook to teach judgement and decision-making for high school students. After a series of careful planning sessions with his colleagues, the excitement and enthusiasm around the project began to build, and Kahneman surveyed the attending members to get a sense for how long they believed it would take to complete this project.

The general consensus was that the textbook could be completed in ~2 years time.

Now, in the book, Kahneman reflects on being as equally enthusiastic as his peers and having a similar two-year prediction, but he did happen to have a moment of pause where he questioned whether this estimate was realistic or not (I mean, the book is about thinking fast and slow).

One of the members of the group working on this textbook had experience with the creation of new textbooks. Kahneman asked him to reflect on other groups that had progressed as far as they had and asked:

How long, from that point, did it take them to finish their textbook projects?

The individual paused for a moment.

He then reflected that most groups did not even finish their projects, with maybe 40% actually seeing it all the way through to its completion.

What’s more, he said that the timeline of finishing those projects had taken between seven and ten years to complete.

Now, here’s the thing.

Even with this new information, the group still felt they were capable of completing the project within those two years, including Kahneman. This new information seemingly told them about how other projects went, but it did not change their outlook on their own situation.

Despite their optimism, the textbook ultimately took eight years to complete, and to add insult to injury, it was never even used by any schools as the interest in the subject had waned by then.

So what is going on here? Why didn’t the information about similar projects change their minds?

In 1994, a paper titled “Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy’: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Time”1 was published that looked into the idea of the planning fallacy. The paper included a series of consecutive studies that progressed their findings on how, and why, people make overly optimistic predictions.

These studies used university students as their subjects and assessed their ability to predict their completion times for upcoming tasks.

The first study took a sample of students, asked them to predict their completion dates for an assignment, and then later followed up to find when they actually finished.

Across the board, the actual completion time of the projects was considerably longer than what the students had initially predicted, showcasing the same prediction error as Kahneman and his colleagues and as my rental car agent.

In the second study, the authors were curious if the prediction errors were specific to academic projects so they had subjects make predictions on an upcoming academic project and a personal project that they wished to complete. The results showed that it did not matter if the prediction was related to academics or something else, the bias of predicting an earlier completion time applied to both contexts.

At this point the researchers had found that individuals had been consistently overly optimistic in predicting completion dates, but they had yet to try and find out why these overly optimistic predictions occur so frequently.

The third and fourth studies sought to address this question more directly, by incorporating the subjects’ past experiences and how, or if, the subjects used that context to help them make their predictions.

In both of these new studies, the researchers had the subjects in the experimental groups recall a previous assignment, how long it had taken them to complete it, and then had the subjects make a prediction on an upcoming assignment’s completion timing.

It was hypothesized that by making individuals reflect back on past experiences, it would help the subjects make more accurate predictions about the future.

This turned out to be somewhat true, but not completely true.

When the researchers asked subjects to recall a past event that wasn’t completed on time, and then make a prediction for their current project, they were just as biased towards predicting an early completion date as the control group was (who had not been asked to recall past events).

In other words, recalling past experiences alone was not enough to mitigate overly confident predictions. The more natural instinct was to ignore them.

It was only when the researchers explicitly directed the subject to use the recall information to help formulate their predictions, with the use of two additional questions,2 that saw any reduction in overly confident predictions.

Additionally, in both of these studies, the researchers had subjects speak aloud while making their predictions in the hopes of better understanding what factors were weighing in on their decision-making process.

What the researchers found to be most common in the over-prediction groups was a tendency to talk specifically about the current situation and little else.

In other words, they did not weigh outside factors into making their predictions. They only considered the task at hand.

Kahneman wrote about this directly when reflecting on his textbook project in his book. Despite being told that most textbooks only became a reality 40% of the time and that they took 7-10 years to complete, he and his colleagues still believed they were capable of completing it in two years.

Kahneman described his group as having used best-case scenario planning when making their prediction as opposed to having used average-case scenario planning.

I also think of it as using This-Time-Will-Be-Different Thinking. This not only entails a bias towards believing in best-case scenarios, but also includes one of two things:

• The dismissal of evidence that would suggest otherwise, or

• The dismissal of collecting any evidence or information about similar cases

In developing the concept of the planning fallacy, Kahneman and his colleagues eventually described this dichotomy as existing by having either:

• The inside view: where only the situation at hand is being used in making predictions

• The outside view: making predictions based on the totality of similar cases

Now that we have been on the planning fallacy journey for a while, we can start to think about how it applies to the realm of sport and performance.

The Planning Fallacy in Sport

There are two things that immediately come to mind when thinking about how the planning fallacy exists in sport.

First, is when athletes believe they can complete higher training loads, such as average weekly volume, that is considerably higher than either 1) they have ever done in the past, or 2) that is reasonable given the potential constraints in their lives.

The second aspect that comes to mind is a belief that training should produce fitness gains on a scheduled basis. I have described this before when athletes believe that they should be X fast by Y date and that anything below that combination is unacceptable.

The problem with the planning fallacy phenomenon in sport is not that the athletes may make overly optimistic predictions that ultimately fall short, it is that the overly optimistic prediction creates a major expectancy gap, and when athletes fail to meet these expectations, it can lead to a lack of faith in their preparation, which can snowball into decreasing adherence to training and a lack of agency in their progression.

So even if an athlete has progressed at an average-case scenario rate, they feel disappointed because they have held themselves to a best-case scenario standard.

Now, it might sound like I am of the position that athletes are incapable of doing more than what they may have done in the past.

This is not true.

When I was racing, I never took for granted the fact that an athlete who may have raced at a certain level in the past will continue to do so in the future.

I always said that my assumption is that everyone in the field is trying their best to get better.

What I am saying is that a common mistake athletes make is making predictions without facing the facts first.

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins came up with the concept of the Stockdale Paradox, named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, who said:

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.3

Collins’ concept of the Stockdale Paradox was introduced in the book to describe a common trait amongst some of the best leaders, but I think it also works well in pushing back against the planning fallacy by forcing you to…

Defend Your Position

As Kahneman studied the planning fallacy more deeply, he eventually came up with the following strategy to mitigate its prevalence:

1. When embarking on a new project, you must begin by gathering information on the timelines of similar projects and how long they took to complete.

2. The average completion time is your baseline prediction.

Additionally, I suggest that:

If you want to make a more ambitious prediction, you must define the specific challenges and roadblocks to doing so, and then describe the strategies and reasons you will overcome them.

In other words, if you make an overly optimistic prediction, you must defend your position of why you have chosen to disregard the average.

For example, if an athlete wants to train 15 hours/week, but has never averaged more than 10 hours/week in the past three years, they must be able to define the challenges of what it would take to make this increase in volume and then describe the strategies they plan to use to overcome them. Moreover, I would inquire if these challenges existed in the past and why they would suddenly be different this time.

Final Takeaways

Regardless of the circumstances, we all seem to have a tendency to see our own situations on their own instead of one piece of a bigger picture, and for that reason, we become overly optimistic in making predictions.

To help deal with this tendency we can use the following three-step process:

1. Collect information on similar circumstances and how long they took.

2. Use the average of other circumstances to create a baseline prediction.

3. If you then want to make a comparatively optimistic prediction from the average, you must defend your position by defining the challenges to the prediction and the strategies that will be used to overcome them.

   Thank you for reading. Please subscribe to receive my latest posts. For further information on my work, please see: all-ofit.com. Additionally, throughout the summer I will be recording my weekly training for the Ötillö SwimRun World Champs which can be found HERE.

For a number of years, I was coached by Cliff English, who was based out of Tucson, Arizona and in early February each year he would get as many of his professional squad to come down to Tucson and train together for several weeks.

The second year I attended the camp, in 2012, a contingent of three athletes from Portland, Oregon came to the camp, one of whom was Chris Bagg. I thoroughly enjoyed having the Portland crew on the team. They really seemed to bring a different perspective on life and sport and all had very interesting backstories. One had been an English teacher, one had been a basketball player for LSU, and one had grown up on Kodiak Island in Alaska.

Some of my favorite training partners have been individuals that I can talk to about things outside of sport, and Chris could certainly do that. Even though we only got to train together for a few weeks a year, I really appreciated the miles we got to spend together.

Today, Chris runs a successful coaching business out of Bend, Oregon called Campfire Endurance, hosts two podcasts (one of which I recently appeared on called the The Infirmary), and writes on Substack: .

Our discussion on his podcast mirrors many of the conversations we had over the years while training on the roads around Tucson.

Some of the highlights of the conversation include:

• Mental toughness lessons from The Great British Bake Off

• How a high school journal entry I wrote included “completing an Ironman triathlon”

• The importance of culture for athletic success

• Longevity vs. High Performance

Spotify & Apple:

Apple podcast Link: Episode 47

A special thanks to Chris for having me on the show and for all the conversations over the years.

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When I was racing, one of the strategies I used in different contexts was the use of routines; routines helped create a level of comfort and familiarity to apply to situations that might not feel that comfortable or familiar.

I think there is no better example of this than waking up on race morning.

While there were many race mornings that happened over the years, the races themselves were always different. Even if the race took place at a venue where I had raced before, the circumstances around it were always changing. My goals for the race may be different, the field may be different, the weather may be different, etc.

The main point is that each race had a level of unfamiliarity, but the pre-race routine I developed was familiar.

Over the years, through trial and error, I eventually landed on what I have called the 3-2-1 routine. I found it provided me with the Goldilocks amount of time on race mornings, where I had enough time to get everything done, but not so much that I found myself looking for things to do.

That routine consisted of:

• Waking up three hours before the race start

• Leaving for the race venue two hours before the race start

• Beginning warm up one hour before the race start

No matter where I was racing or what time the race started, this is the template I eventually found myself working off of.

I believe the routine was effective for me because it was both incredibly simple and incredibly flexible.

For example, what I did between when I woke up and when I left was not specifically defined within the routine. I often tweaked what I ate for breakfast or what I might do for early morning activation, but the departure time remained fixed. Similarly, what I did for my warm up in the final hour might look quite different from one race to the next. Part of this had to do with what was available to (e.g., could you actually warm up for the swim) and how constrained the area might be.

Additionally, over time I came to find that certain components of the routine were more important to me than others. For me, this entailed having a full hour from when I woke up until the time I left for the race venue.

There were certain cases where race morning logistics were quite complicated. It might involve a longer morning commute, transferring between multiple transition areas, loading on/off buses, etc. If, and when, this was the case, I was less concerned about compromising other components of the race morning routine so long as I got my full hour from wake up to departure.

To ensure this was the case, if I needed more time to account for all the race morning logistics, I would simply wake up earlier to protect that hour.

For whatever reason, I did not mind if I was rushed getting ready in transition or getting ready to warm up, but it really bothered me to not have this time to ease into the day. Someone else might be completely different and might want to be more protective of another aspect of their race morning routines.

Creating your own pre-race routines

As you develop your own pre-race routine, the two components I would focus on would be making them simple and highly flexible. They need to be consistent enough to feel familiar, but flexible enough that they can be applied anywhere.

One of the reasons my pre-race routine was quite simple was because long course triathlon almost always began early in the morning. If I was lucky, I might get a 7:00 a.m. start time, but more often than not, those start times gradually crept closer and closer to 6:00 a.m. (which then meant a 3:00 a.m. wake up).

For other sports, this consistent pattern might not exist. Cyclists often have start times that vary from early in the morning to late at night, as do runners that race on the track. Nevertheless, I do think that working in that three-hour pre-race window is a good place to develop routines, even if the first step isn’t waking up. Moreover, you might divide your routines up a bit to account for pre-race routines for events taking place early in the day, and pre-race routines for events that take place later in the day.

Additionally, while routines maintain their effectiveness because they are, in fact, done routinely, it should not deter you from adjusting them over time. I did not create a 3-2-1 routine and then start to apply it. Instead, I came to it over time by trial and error, and by making adjustments that eventually provided me with something I felt comfortable in continuously repeating.

Formalizing a routine

While our discussion here has centered around routines in the hours before a race, routines are something that can be much longer, like a race week routine, or much shorter, like a routine an athlete performs immediately in the seconds before competing.1

The reason I bring this up is because we often have more of a routine that we realize, even if we have never specifically brought attention to it. Therefore, even if you don’t think of yourself as having routines, if you look more closely, you might realize that you do. By looking at what you already do, you can begin to take the steps that lead to formalizing an actual routine.

I would start by asking yourself:

• What do I already seem to be doing?

• What seems to be effective?

• What might I be able to improve?

While those questions are not an exhaustive list of formalizing a pre-race routine, they can provide a good framework for progressing towards one.

Why do pre-race routines work?

There is a lot of research concerning pre-performance routines, but they are generally framed around routines in the immediate proximity before a performance.2 For example, a study might look at trying different pre-performance routines before a soccer player attempts a penalty kick. Generally speaking, in these sorts of studies, the simple introduction of the routine appears to be where the benefit lies, as opposed to what that routine actually consists of.

However, my suggestion of using a pre-race routine is not really about something being done just before the start gun goes off, but for several hours leading into it. Nevertheless, I believe that same concept applies, where having a routine is helpful, regardless of what it entails.

In my opinion, this is because it provides us with actionable strategies when our pre-race nerves may be at their highest. It is not uncommon to feel a certain level of pre-race anxiety in the morning of a race, but I think that having a routine that we can rely on helps to keep those nerves working for us, instead of against us, in a facilitative way.

This has often been described as “getting your butterflies to fly in formation.”

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In 2023, I decided to go back to school to study sport and performance psychology. The program I chose was structured around quarterly classes which kept a cadence of 11 weeks on/2 weeks off that repeated 4x throughout the calendar year, with a standard course load of two classes/quarter.

As my first quarter was nearing its completion, I began to contemplate increasing my class load. If I could manage to add a class for two consecutive quarters (three classes/quarter), I would be able to finish my course work earlier and shift to the applied work phase of the program sooner (one of my primary goals).

However, I did not want to throw everything else in my life out of balance in a way that was unsustainable. I was adding school to my life and didn’t want to drop the ball on my primary responsibilities, namely coaching. And while I was willing to compromise on some of my personal outlets, such as daily training/exercise and reading, I was not willing to eliminate them.

Nevertheless, I thought that it was worth taking on the heavier class load to see if I could manage it.

As I contemplated how I would handle this faster-track course of action, I thought about a podcast I listened to with Jim Collins.

Jim Collins’ Creative Hours Tracking

In February of 2019, author and researcher, Jim Collins, was on a podcast with Tim Ferriss, where he shared the origins of how he tracks his annual creative hours with a stopwatch. For those that are interested in hearing his story in its entirety, you can find it around the 40-minute mark of Episode 361.

Earlier in Collins’ career, he asked a number of faculty members at Stanford University (where he was at the time) how they spent their time and the answers converged around the following breakdown:

• 50% of their time was spent doing new, creative work

• 30% of their time was spent teaching and working with students

• 20% of their time was spent on “other stuff that just needs to get done”

After garnering this consensus of time allotment, Collins sought to try and structure his time accordingly. In order to do this, he used a stopwatch that had three separate timers within it so that he could track the way he spent his time.

However, after tracking his hours over an undisclosed period of time, he came to find that what really mattered (to him) was how many hours he spent doing creative work, so that has become the single metric he has focused on tracking ever since.1

I’m not sure when I heard this podcast, but it inspired my decision to apply a version of his stopwatch strategy to try and see if I could manage a heavier class load.

My initial plan was to have three stopwatches available to track the time I spent on each individual class and then see how it broke down, but I eventually made some adjustments to that strategy which I’ll expand upon below.

The use of the stopwatch led to some interesting insights that I believe are worth sharing and might have some helpful ideas beyond its application to my school work management.

The First Quarter

While I had originally intended to use three stopwatches, I don’t even think it took more than a week before I scrapped that idea and just went with one stopwatch to track one metric:

Total hours spent on school work

At the outset of using a stopwatch, I was not using it in any strategic way. Its only use was to collect the data around how I was currently going about my work and it was not meant to direct me in any way. This is similar to using something new to track data in training for the first time, like using a heart rate monitor, power meter, HRV, etc. It is initially more helpful to simply do what you have been doing, collect data for a while, and then start to assess trends that you are seeing that can then be incorporated and applied in the future.

The main thing I wanted to know from the stopwatch was:

How many hours do I actually spend on school work?

If I found that I was spending an unsustainable amount of time getting my work done, then it was not something I wanted to continue. But I needed the numbers to back this up and not simply be something that just seemed that way.

After tracking data for 11 weeks of school in this quarter, these were the two most important takeaways:

• Distractions come very easily and can interrupt work flow

• Overworking one day had to be paid back on another

Distractions

I probably don’t need to convince anyone that it is easy to get distracted while trying to get work done. Sometimes this is out of your control. In my case with school, it was mostly a matter of setting up better systems to allow me to remain in a more effective work flow.

When I was using the stopwatch, I was very intentional about starting and stopping it any time I decided to do something other than school work.

If I got a text on my phone, I would stop the watch, read and respond, and restart the watch.

If I wanted to check my email really quickly, I would stop the watch, check the email, and not start the watch again until I went back to work.2

Over time, I became aware of how often these distractions occurred by the constant stopping and starting of the watch.

Breaks definitely need to happen, but in order to make unintended distractions less likely, I began to operate proactively by:

• removing my phone from my line of sight and keeping it in do-not-disturb mode

• closing all tabs that might refresh with new data (like an email inbox)

• setting aside specific blocks for my non-school work like coaching, email, etc. so that those times stopped being blended into school time.

I would not say I ever completely eliminated distractions and breaks in focus, but the time between these breaks became longer and longer and my ability to remain in a work flow seemed to gradually extend.

Overworking & Breakpoint Volume

The next thing I noticed from tracking hours over 11 weeks is that the total hours tended to max out around 28 hours/week, but its distribution could be all over the place. I never planned it this way, but putting in heavy volume for a handful of days would inevitably have to be paid back later. It wasn’t always a clean split, like one 6 hour day meant one 2 hour day, but it still seemed to naturally revert back to a mean of 4 hours/day and 28 hours/week.

Interestingly enough, over the years I was racing I found 27-28 hours/week to be the sweet spot for training where I seemed to be able to remain balanced in focus and capable of repeating it over and over again.3 There were exceptions to this number at times, but not on a rolling basis. I have often heard speak about how each athlete has a breakpoint volume they can handle and I think I have found that concept to hold somewhat consistently for me across a couple of different mediums.

So following this first quarter, I had proven I could handle the higher work load, but now I wanted to see if I could improve my approach with what I had learned.

The Second Quarter

As I moved into the second stopwatch quarter, I was now ready to use the stopwatch in a strategic way as opposed to a simple, passive means of collecting data. Given that I observed the breakpoint volume of 28 hours/week to come about rather naturally, I shifted my focus to how I might be able to maximize my output, and its quality, within those 28 hours.

When I looked back in Q1, I would often see a day or two each week that amounted to 6-8 hours of work. While I didn’t have much more context to reflect on, my assumption was that those last few hours of those long days were likely not as effective as the first few hours of those days.

With that in mind, I set the following parameters:

• I would cap each work day at ~four hours

• I would do two specific work blocks each day

• I would set specific priorities for M-R, then use F-Sun in a more ad hoc fashion

Four-hours/day

This strategy might be anathema to how many people prefer to work, simply because I was quite rigid in cutting myself off when I came upon four hours no matter how well I was doing in the moment. I might find myself writing a paper that was going particularly well and see that I was up against the time limit and I would make myself start wrapping things up. I gave myself a grace period of 15 minutes to finish up whatever I was doing, but I rarely ever used it. Once I came upon four hours, I would close shop on school for the day.

Two Work Blocks

In addition to capping myself at four hours/day, I also felt it was important to break up the day into two work blocks to give myself time in between to recharge and reflect, so that I could try and squeeze more out of that second block and not go flat.

This would typically amount to 2-2.5 hours in block one and 1.5-2 hours in block two. Additionally, I would sometimes book a study room at the library that is a few blocks from my home. The library would allow you to book blocks of two hours which meant that I was not only up against my own clock, but theirs as well.

I felt like this split became really helpful. I would usually go exercise for an hour or so in this break and it felt like my mind would piece together some of the remaining problems of the morning and I would be able to drop back into a work flow more quickly in the afternoon.

Setting Priorities M-R then ad hoc F-Sun

When I have worked with some athletes doing ultra events that will last many hours, we will often plan out their nutrition strategies and one of the things I will tell them about the plan is:

If the plan can get us through 60% of the race, we can ad hoc the rest.

In the first stopwatch quarter, I wasn’t as deliberate with planning my schedule for each week because I didn’t really think of what my daily or weekly constraints were.

However, in the second stopwatch quarter, I was looking to maximize my daily hours so I started setting specific priorities for the first four days of the week. This gave me a better sense of what I needed to focus on each day and took away some inefficiencies that likely inhibited my performance previously.

Moreover, I liked having the back end of the week remain flexible as it allowed space to use those days as needed and avoided the temptation to let one early day of the week carry over into the next if the assignments were more time consuming than initially anticipated.

Lessons from the Second Stopwatch Quarter

After 11 weeks of applying the above strategies, I felt they had been highly effective. I was still having to use almost all of my 28 hour weekly allotment to get everything done, but it felt different.

By placing the daily caps on my work, I seemed to have more energy for other things.

For example, during the first stopwatch quarter, I was doing much less personal reading because I was feeling so cognitively fatigued regardless of whether I had put in a big day or was recovering from a big day. In the second stopwatch quarter, I got back into reading personal books on a consistent basis. I also found that I could start doing a workout with some higher intensity from time to time, whereas beforehand I lacked the mojo to do more than training at an easy/steady intensity.

The other thing I noticed during this period was that I was getting into a higher level of focus within each work block more quickly.

I didn’t formalize it, but I had developed a routine where once I sat down at my desk (or in the library), I just seemed to be able to switch into focus mode more quickly than I had in the past.

The Remaining Quarters

After taking two consecutive condensed quarters of classes, there was no longer a strategic advantage of taking more than two courses/quarter as I was now required to take three sequential classes, each one a prerequisite for the next, making a fast-track strategy an impossibility.

At this point, I could have chosen to step away from the stopwatch strategy, given the extra time available, but I decided to keep it in place, even though I was now only having to commit to less than 20 hours/week on average.

While I may have begun the stopwatch strategy as a means to better facilitate time management, I really felt like its advantage was helping me operate with a higher level of focus and with more efficiency.

Now, part of this efficiency is because the earlier work that took a lot of time was starting to pay dividends. Particularly when it comes to writing academic papers, sometimes the work and research you initially did for one assignment carries over into another. You likely still have to build on that research, but as the foundational knowledge gets wider and wider you can afford to get more narrowed and nuanced in focus without having to spend the same amount of time as you did upfront.

In addition to the earlier work having its benefits, I think that the systems themselves were paying dividends too.

Deep Work Enters The Chat

Cal Newport is a professor at Georgetown University and the author of a number of popular books. One of those books is titled Deep Work and was published in 2016. While it probably would have been helpful to read this book prior to starting school, I didn’t actually read the book until February 2025, only a month before I finished school.4

However, once I did read it, I realized that the entire stopwatch experiment had essentially been built around Newport’s concept of seeking Deep Work.

According to Newport, Deep Work is defined as:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.5

Conversely, Shallow Work is defined as:

Noncognitively demanding, logistical style tasks, often performed distracted.6

One primary focus of Newport’s book is the premise that the ability to complete deep work is becoming more and more valuable while simultaneously becoming more and more challenging to do.

What I found with my school work is that it almost exclusively required deep work, simply by it being grounded in reading, research, writing, etc. There just wasn’t a lot of room to do any of the required tasks in a distracted, or low-focus, state of mind.

Therefore, it wasn’t that I just needed the time, I needed to be able to use that time for deep work.

Using a stopwatch may have given me an understanding of time availability, but it did not automatically translate that time into deep work. I believe the strategies I applied after the first stopwatch quarter allowed me to bridge the gap from time simply being available to becoming time well spent.

So in order to enhance the space for more deep work, the order of functions might be:

1. Find out how much time is available.

2. Develop strategies to get the most out of that time.

Using the Stopwatch Strategy

When Jim Collins set out to track his hours with a stopwatch, he came to find that what really mattered to him was not how he spent all his hours in a day, but that his regular routine allowed enough space to generate a minimum number of creative hours.

In my case, the stopwatch strategy was not necessarily about trying to generate a minimum of purposeful hours of deep work per day. Instead, it was about finding the limit of deep work that I could personally maintain for a concentrated period of time.7

Collins has sought to track and create a system to implement indefinitely, while I sought to track and create a system to implement temporarily.

Collins’ use of the stopwatch might parallel what many of us try to do with our training, where weekly, monthly and annual targets are set to try and create the space for compounding fitness over time.8

My use of the stopwatch might parallel something like project-oriented work where something needs to be done by a deadline and requires a high level of focus to complete.

I think in either case, one of the underlying principles is being intentional with our time; it helps us regardless of whether we are working indefinitely or temporarily.

It begins with a simple question:

What do I want to try and achieve with the time that I have today?

When we get into a habit of routinely asking and answering that question, we can increase the quality of work within the time that we have.

Whenever I have heard Collins talk about how he goes about generating his creative hours, he frequently mentions doing this type of work early in the morning, on his own, away from distractions.

In other words, he is protecting the space he needs to do deep work.

Collins may have needed a quiet morning, while I needed a stopwatch.

When I would sit down and hit the start button of the watch, it signified my transition into the space where I could focus deeply. I would remove as many distractions as I could and would commit myself to staying in this protected space until I hit the stop button.

The start and stop button became my ritual and routine for putting myself in a place to go deep into The Focus Bubble.

My way is certainly not the only way, but hopefully this shared experience can help you think about your own strategies of what it takes to go deep.

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In the late 2000’s, Gordo Byrn and I hosted a somewhat short-lived podcast series called Endurance Corner Radio. Podcasting was still in its early days so we really didn’t see it as its own entity, but rather an extension of the mostly written content that existed on the Endurance Corner website. During that time, we tried to get a number of different athletes in Boulder on the show, which equated to interviewing some of the world’s most accomplished endurance athletes.1

I cannot remember who I first asked this question to,2 but at some point I came up with a question that I believe gave some of the more interesting and unique answers of each interview.

That question was probably framed somewhat differently each time, but it was essentially the following:

What is a race/performance that other people might not necessarily have taken much notice of, but is one that you personally are very proud of?

This question typically led to a story of perseverance. The athletes rarely reflected on a race that they won or placed very high in, but one where that absolutely maximized themselves on the day.

While the podcast eventually faded away, I have continued to ask this question to athletes over the years. On the eve of Ultraman Florida in 20223, one of the crew members I had just met, John Richardson4, and I went on a run where I asked him that question. After he shared a great story of a 1500m race he did in college, he turned the question on me. Interestingly, I had never been asked my own question, so it was the first time I actually had to think about that answer.

This was the story that I told.

In 2013, there was an inaugural race that was set to take place in California called Ironman Lake Tahoe. The race was unique in multiple ways, particularly because it was at 6000+ feet and had a difficult bike course with a considerable amount of climbing. I had chosen to make this race a major focus of my summer prep, but unfortunately I suffered a mechanical on the bike on race day and had to withdraw around mile 40.5

I was somewhat at a loss for what to do with the rest of the season (it was late September) and I decided that I was going to try and attempt two Ironman races in four weeks to end the season. I think the closest I had ever raced two Ironmans up to that point was eight weeks, so this was a considerably more aggressive bridge.

The first race was going to be Ironman Florida on the first week of November, followed by Ironman Cozumel on the last week of November. Ironman Florida ended up being one of the fastest races in history at the time and even though I managed to race the fastest race I had ever put together, I only barely made it inside the top-10 (I finished 9th).

At this point in the season, I was feeling rather frustrated. I had put in a lot of work without much to show for it, but with Ironman Cozumel on the horizon, I felt I had one more chance to put together a good race before the season came to a close.

I had never raced Ironmans this close together so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I essentially went by feel and just gradually got back up to normal-ish training loads. Eventually I started feeling pretty good in my training, even surprisingly so. On the Monday of race week, I did a race specific ride and the numbers looked good.

I felt good.

I was ready to roll.

Then that night, I woke up feeling sick, having developed a cold.

I didn’t train Tuesday, hoping to turn the course. Nothing changed.

Then it was Wednesday and Brooke and I had to make a decision on whether to travel to Cozumel or not the next day.

While the costs for the travel at this point were sunk, we didn’t let that influence our decision on whether we should travel to the race. The more influential factor was that the season would be over after Sunday; there was nowhere else to pivot. This ultimately led us to the decision that we should just go through our normal race routine, knowing that I could always make the decision to not start later.

When traveling to Cozumel, the flights onto the island are often limited, making a more feasible option to fly to Cancun, take a taxi/bus to Playa Del Carmen, then a ferry over to the island. We went with the latter option and had even chosen to stay one night in Playa before taking the morning ferry to Cozumel to break the trip up a bit.

I had still not improved by any considerable margin when I woke up on Friday morning in Playa. The little hotel we stayed in was within walking distance of the ferry so later in the morning we gathered our gear and started to make the trek over.

About midway through the 800-meter walk to the ferry terminal, I turned to Brooke and said:

I think we need to sit down because I’m about to pass out.

We proceeded to sit on a bench for a while until I felt composed enough to walk.

Things were not looking good. I was supposed to race in less than 48 hours and I was struggling to walk half a mile.

Eventually we made it onto the ferry and started the ~45 minute journey to the island.

The ferry terminals run fairly directly from west to east on this route, and at the time there was an abnormal weather pattern that had strong winds blowing 30+ mph out of the north. What that meant for the ferry ride was that it was going to involve massive swells that would cause the boat to rock from side to side as the boats could not take swells head on.

I have heard that it takes about 20 minutes for motion sickness to kick in. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but on that boat ride I saw about 80-90% of the passengers get sea sick in that time frame.6 I was fortunate enough to be one of the few to be spared in this respect, but Brooke was not.

Brooke and I were quite the sight by the end of this ferry ride. Once we got to Cozumel and got off the boat, we were both equally wrecked. Me from my illness, Brooke from sea-sickness.

Things were not looking good. It was starting to feel like making this trip was a terrible idea.

The next morning (day before the race), I had not improved by any considerable margin. Had the race been that day, I would not have started.

Ironman races require that you turn your bike into the transition area the day before race day. In this case, I had until 5:00 p.m. to turn in my bike. If I did not turn my bike in by that time, I would not be able to start.

I sat around all day debating whether I should turn in the bike or not. In Cozumel, the start of the race is somewhat south of the main part of town and I felt like it would be a logistical mess to have to go there in the morning and try and get the bike back if I chose not to start. Not that it would be impossible to do so, but if I really felt like I wasn’t going to start, it would be a lot less of a hassle to not turn my bike in.

With about an hour to go before the deadline, Brooke and I decided that I would drop the bike off. I had almost no faith that I would start, but we didn’t think that the nuisance of getting the bike back in the morning was a good enough reason to not at least check the bike in and see what would happen.

After getting back to the hotel, I went about preparing for the morning like I was going to race, but I went to sleep that night fully assuming I would not be starting in the a.m.

Then at some point in the night I woke up and I felt different. It might seem crazy, but in these final hours I seemed to be turning the corner. When the alarm went off at 4:00 in the morning I felt extremely tired, but I didn’t feel the symptoms I had been feeling all week.

It should be noted: prior to this race, I had started a race once when I was sick. It had not only resulted in a poor performance, but it had also resulted in me becoming much, much sicker. I mention this because I was fully prepared to not start Ironman Cozumel if I felt sick.

At 4:01 in the morning, I really felt like I had improved enough that starting the race was now an option.

The question now was not about starting, it was about finishing. And what that finish might look like.

I had done close to zero training for six days. While some sports benefit from extreme acute rest, longer aerobic events tend to suffer as consequences of acute detraining. While rest is good, extreme rest is not so good. Not only that, but I hadn’t been resting while healthy, my body had been working hard to try and repair itself all week. While I did feel healthy on race morning, I did not feel fresh or rested.

Ironman Cozumel had prize money that went 8-deep. Finish 8th or better and you get paid; finish 9th or slower and you would not. I had not originally set out to train for Cozumel to try and only break the Top-8, but I now realized that I was no longer working with 100% of my capacity, it might be something like 85%. Therefore, the goal was to try and figure out how I could extract 100% of that 85% and build a strategy around that.

I had raced Cozumel in 20107 and had followed the race in the years that followed. What I had noticed was that the race tended to see some late shuffling amongst the positions. The marathon was a three “loop” out-and-back and positions would often change on that third loop, so what a race looked like at the start of the run was not particularly indicative of how it looked at the end.

Additionally, the race was being affected by weather conditions. Earlier, I mentioned that the ferry crossing was hammered with rolling seas because of northerly winds. Well those winds had kept up, creating a stronger-than-usual current for a swim course that had originally always been a full loop.

As a contingency plan, the swim portion of the race was now going to be point-to-point from north to south with a different swim start than usual. Moreover, the race organizers said that the swim was now going to be around 3000 meters instead of the standard 3800.

Given I had not swam in a week, I figured I would be losing considerable time to the front pack in the race, but with 800 less meters and a potential current at my back, I felt like my losses would be less than they otherwise would have been.

With that in mind, Brooke and I talked over a race plan.

My goal was to start the swim and just do what I could. Once on the bike, I would stick to my own pacing and race by heart rate, something I never did but felt was necessary under these circumstances. I knew I would lose a lot of time on both the swim and bike, but I felt if I gave myself enough reserves, I might have a late chance on the marathon to move up. And by move up, I meant that on the third lap of the marathon, I could potentially grab 8th place.

Additionally, I recognized that I had no idea how I would feel; I might need to drop out of the race at any point. Fortunately, Cozumel had a lot of get-off points. The bike was a 3-loop course8 and the run was a 3-loop course. Brooke and I arranged a specific point in town where the bike passed through two times where I would pull out if I felt it was necessary. The run course also went directly past our hotel so I used that as another optional exit for the run, if needed.

So now it was on.

The field for this race was large and had a lot of good athletes in it. You see this a lot in late season races where many athletes are looking for one final result to end the year. This usually results in a couple interesting dynamics. One is that the race is very competitive for the win and podium. The other is that a lot of people end up dropping out because it ends up being one start too many. So I felt like I needed to be patient and not get too discouraged early, even if I was WAY back in the field.

Given the field was so big, I figured I could still get in some swim pack, even if it wasn’t the front pack, and from there I could just try and conserve energy.

There was some confusion at the start that morning. I think the late contingency plan had not really been thought through and as a result, we were not given any real opportunity to warm up. They essentially called the pros from the beach and had us swim maybe 50 meters to a quasi-start line and told us we had ten seconds until the start.

It was kind of strange because everyone thought there was more time and then suddenly it was just:

BANG!

And off we went.

Swim starts can sometimes be chaotic, but for whatever reason, this one felt like we all just started moving smoothly as one group. I didn’t find myself having to jockey as much for position. The course was oddly marked with buoy lines being really inconsistent so perhaps there was more hesitancy at the front than usual.

After a little while I noticed a swimmer on my right that I was pretty certain was Balázs Csőke, though I wasn’t fully confident that it was him. Balázs was always a front pack swimmer and was frequently first of the water in many of his races. So if it was him, that meant I had likely made the front group, which I had never considered to be a real possibility that morning.

With the shortened swim, the end came quickly and as we hit the stairs to come out of the water, I realized that I had actually made the front group. I could hear the announcers calling all the big names. So the swim had gone A LOT better than expected. The shortened distance and frazzled start may have played in my favor.

However, as I started the run from the end of the swim to the bike I realized I was GASSED. I felt like I was at the end of a maxed-out interval session. The swim may not have felt that stressful in the moment, but now I was starting to feel the effects. And the reality of my circumstances was starting to set in.

I got onto the bike and was immediately left in the dust by everyone in the front pack. However, I stuck to my plan to try and race with what I had on the day.

I made my way through the first loop of the bike riding solo and saw Brooke at our agreed upon spot in town.

I decided to keep rolling.

I finished the second loop of the bike and saw her standing there again.

I decided to keep rolling.9

As I made my way onto the third loop of the bike, it was hard to decipher any position changes because I was beginning to ride through the back end of the age group race. So if anyone had faded from the front end of the race, I really wasn’t aware of it. I’m sure some people had passed me on the bike as well. I honestly had no clue if I was racing in the top 20? top 30? worse? I just figured I would finish the bike and then assess what was going on.

I got off the bike and started out on the run. After getting past the crowds near the center of town, I saw Brooke on the side of the road.

Our exchange:

J: What place am I in?

B: 9th

( couldn’t believe it)

J: What’s the gap?

B: 9.5 minutes

Shit.

While I was one place away from the money, nine and a half minutes was a considerable gap. I was running ok, but it was still a good bit slower than usual. I took a couple K splits on my watch, but then stopped doing so as I didn’t want to get too discouraged. I just figured that I could run what I could run and I would have to just wait and see what happened.

At the first turnaround, I saw eighth place running back at me and took a split from where I saw him to see if I hadn’t eaten into the gap at all. Once I got there, I hit my watch.

No change.

I then ran to the next turnaround and did the same thing.

No change.

I’m now on the second loop. While I expected bigger changes to likely happen on loop three, I felt like if there was no momentum shift on this second loop, I was probably gonna fall short on the day.

I got to the end of loop two and saw 8th place running back at me. I didn’t even need to take a split because I could see he was in almost the exact same spot as the previous loop. In other words,

No change.

At this point, I figured that it just wasn’t gonna happen. It was a good attempt, but it just wasn’t in the cards. Nevertheless, I had come this far so I figured I might as well see it through.

As I made my way back towards the end of loop two, things were starting to get crowded and it was harder to see everything that was going on in the race in front of me. I did not see eighth place as I ran towards the turnaround so I figured I must have just missed him somewhere along the way.

I went onto loop three and about a mile into that loop (what would have been about mile 18 or so), I saw eighth place right in front of me.

I couldn’t believe it.

I eventually ran up on his shoulder, passed him, and moved into eighth place. The final money spot.

8th place paid something like $1500, but it felt like I had the chance to earn a million if I could hold it to the finish line.

While all this was going on, there were actually a handful of athletes who had been running somewhat closely behind me so I needed to continue to focus on running what I was still capable of running.

I made it to the turnaround holding my position.

4.4 miles to go.

I continued to hold the position.

Then with less than 2 miles to go, I saw an athlete in front of me that seemed to have a low bib number. As I got closer, I realized I was running up on 7th place.

On the 25th mile, I moved into 7th place. Couldn’t believe it.

Then as I entered town and ran under the ferry walkway, which was probably 600ish meters from the finish line, I saw 6th place.

In the 26th mile, I moved into 6th place. Couldn’t believe it.

I crossed the finish line and finished 6th overall.

I later saw that fifth place was held by Nils Frommhold, who finished nearly seven minutes ahead of me.10 While it is possible I may have managed to find a second here or there to go faster on the day, I could unequivocally say that there was no way I could have gone seven minutes faster.

This meant that I had gotten the best possible result with what I had on the day. And I had extracted everything I could out of myself to get it.

While I had races with better results than that day in Cozumel, there is no result that matched the level of contentment and satisfaction I had from knowing that I had done all that I could.

Additionally, at some point in the race, I either lost my timing chip or it didn’t work. Either way I wasn’t showing up in any of the live tracking, so my coach, family, and friends, who knew my chances of starting were small, just assumed I hadn’t raced. It wasn’t until the final results populated that they realized I had started and finished the race.

Before writing this piece, I went back to try and find a photo from this race and can’t find anything anywhere, which feels somewhat metaphorical to the theme of remembering a race that was less memorable to anyone other than me and Brooke (who remembers it well).

Epilogue

IM Cozumel in 2013 was not just my proudest race; it also provided me with lessons that I have carried forward to this day.

Nothing lasts forever

After the race, Brooke and I were out on the street watching athletes run the final laps of the marathon. As we were standing there, I told Brooke that I felt better at that exact moment than I had 24 hours beforehand, despite having raced an Ironman that day.

The human body is capable of the craziest fluctuations. How you feel today is not indicative of how you will feel tomorrow (for better or worse) so it’s important to not read too much into any one moment and assume anything will last forever.

You don’t have to make decisions until you have to make decisions

I hesitated to include all the details about the lead up to the race and making the decisions that I did, but I ultimately decided to include it to demonstrate how I gave myself every chance to start the race until the last minute. If I had made the decision to race or not based on how I felt before any other time than race morning, I would have chosen not to start.

However, I chose to not make a decision until I had to make a decision.

Not all scenarios will allow for such close proximity to making a call one way or another, but many people/athletes make decisions before they have to.

I think going through this experience has given me the space to live more at ease when uncertainty is high.

It doesn’t always turn out this way

In 2015, I was set to race Ironman Texas, but fell ill with pneumonia before the race. I was on medication and healing before race day; I knew I had taken a big hit to my fitness, but similar to Cozumel in 2013, I was considering whether I could race a more modified plan to try and make a late move on race day into the top ten.

However, I made the decision not to start. While it was a sad and emotional decision for me, I think my experience in Cozumel gave me the confidence to understand that I was not healthy enough to toe the line. I never questioned the decision afterwards.

Maximizing the day

More than anything else, this race taught me what it means to maximize what we have on the day. I was disabused of the notion that race days had to be magical days. That likely led to the first time that I said:

Most days are just days.11

I think much of the writing I have done here, particularly with Raise the Average, is typically centered on learning how to maximize performance under a variety of circumstances, as well as evaluating and assessing those performances accordingly.

What about you?

What is a race/performance that may not stand out to others, but is one that you are personally very proud of?

Feel free to share your answer in the comments below, but at the very least, talk to your friends and training partners about it as the answers will likely amaze you.

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In Part I of this series, we covered the beliefs, perceptions and working definitions of mental toughness.

In Part II, we explored the question of whether mental toughness can be coached. I posited that it can, and discussed how coaches might help cultivate it in their athletes.

In this final installment, we are going to try and answer the second question I posed at the end of part one:

Are there strategies we can implement to build mental toughness in ourselves?

While many of us may work with coaches, mentors, teachers, leaders, etc. that can help us to develop mental toughness, we also need to be able to look at what we can do for ourselves.

There are three specific areas I want to cover that I believe can directly help us build mental toughness:

• Recognizing when a training session becomes more about character building than fitness building

• Understanding that hard will find us

• Recalling our own moments of perseverance

  ---

Character Building vs Fitness Building

When I was in college, I was on a bike ride outside College Station, Texas. As I was making my way back from the turnaround point in Caldwell, Texas I got a double flat after rolling through some broken glass that I had not seen soon enough. I always rode with at least two tubes and a patch kit so I was able to fix the two flats and ride on.

However a little while later, I punctured my rear tire again, potentially with some glass that I hadn’t scraped off when I stopped the first time. I had used up all of my co2, but I still had a hand pump and patch kit. But the patch wouldn’t hold. I kept trying to go about it different ways, but it just would not hold up no matter what I tried.

This was maybe 2002 or 2003 and while cell phones existed, they really didn’t work anywhere outside the city limits so I rarely even took it on my rides. I can’t remember if I had it or not, but it wouldn’t have mattered based on where I was.

I didn’t want to hang out on the side of the road, but I also couldn’t ride normally with a flat rear tire. At this point, I decided that I would just ride standing out-of-the-saddle for the next ~25 miles back home. While not ideal, it might solve the problem of getting myself home with a rear wheel that was hopefully still intact by the end.

So there I went for the next 90+ minutes or so, unable to sit down except for a second or two here and there. I eventually got to the city limits where there was a pay phone, but I figured it would take just as long to get a hold of someone and wait as it would to continue to ride, so I just rode home despite the cramping quads and fatiguing shoulders.

A few years later…

My friend Chris McDonald and I were riding through the mountains towards Estes Park, Colorado on a familiar route that starts from Boulder. It was solidly in the fall season so it was getting close to the time of year where this route might be typically less-than-ideal, but we decided to go for it anyway.

As we were climbing up towards the small town of Glenhaven the weather started to change. First it was a light rain. Then heavy rain. Then heavy rain/sleet/snow.

We could have turned around, but we were at a point where we felt it would take too long to seek shelter if we flipped so we would have to take our chances by continuing forward into town.

The wintry mix was coming down harder and harder and was starting to accumulate and pile up on our hands, arms, shoulders and anywhere else it could find a flat surface.

Both of us were riding side by side in silence. It seemed we both understood how miserable the situation had become, so there was little use in saying it out loud.

We managed to get to the top of the climb above Glenhaven where we got a mini break in the weather, so we hammered the descent into town and went inside a Safeway grocery store, where we gathered ourselves around the Rotisserie Chicken Heating Lamps to try and warm our hands and face.

As we started to warm up a bit, we felt like we were finally in the clear and that the hard part of the day might be over. But then I saw the dark clouds gathering on the climb out of town and I told Chris we had to get going now if we were going to beat the storm.

We didn’t.

We got caught in the storm for a second time. Once again we were met with heavy precipitation and freezing cold temperatures. We would eventually make our way out of the storm only to be met by another piece of it later down the road. Over and over again this just kept happening.

As we were finally riding up the last hill into Boulder, I (somewhat) jokingly said to Chris:

I think I might retire after this ride.

There have been countless other times in training over the years when conditions and circumstances have become the challenge to overcome, rather than the session itself. I am sure that I had originally set out in those two examples to execute some sort of workout that might have consisted of power/heart rate/effort targets, but that eventually fell by the wayside for the aforementioned reasons.

While these sessions may not have resulted in establishing new levels of fitness, I have still found them to be highly valuable and effective in other ways. I am not sure when I came up with this particular framing, but at some point I came to the conclusion that:

These sessions have shifted from fitness building to character building.

Even though I used the word “character,” I think that it would be perfectly acceptable and appropriate to interchange it with “mental toughness.” Moreover, I think that if you can come to the realization that the session is no longer what it was originally intended to be, it can help to reframe what a successful session might look like.

In these cases from my past, just getting myself and my friends back home made it a success. By finding a way to overcome a series of challenges and obstacles, we were going to grow as athletes, even if it wasn’t going to be reflected in the training data.

What’s more, we didn’t go out looking for hard.

Hard found us.

Hard will find us

From 2008-2018, I took part in a number of training camps and saw it from every angle as an athlete, coach, and director. After I had gathered some experience in those various roles, I began to realize that one of the more common mistakes athletes made in the training camps was to go searching for more work when it wasn’t needed. The reason that mattered is because moments of difficulty in the camps would eventually occur on their own, and having the energy and capacity to handle them was what led to some of the more successful training camps.

Eventually, the night before the first day of training camps, I started to give the following advice:

You don’t have to go looking for work. The work will find you.

While this recommendation was a little more influenced by energy management and intensity control, I think it has broader implications.

There is a compelling parallel for seeking to build mental toughness in a similar way. Only now, we might phrase it as:

You don’t have to go looking for hard. Hard will find you.

In Part II we discussed how coaches can help build mental toughness by introducing adversity, but it’s also important to realize that adversity will naturally present itself on its own.

In my opinion, the key is to be able to recognize when hard has found you.

Reflecting back on the two stories I told earlier about riding home while standing or freezing in the mountains, I was not setting out to encounter those challenges.

They just happened.

It can be easy, and perhaps the most natural, to respond to these types of scenarios with frustration and even anger. It can be tempting to simply focus on the training opportunities that were lost or lament the amount of time spent getting ourselves home as being wasted.

On the other hand, we can see these unforeseen circumstances as providing us with an opportunity to grow.

Instead of seeing these moments as frustrating challenges that have to be endured, they can be seen as (still) frustrating challenges to overcome.

By getting in the habit of embracing the occurrence of these hard moments, it gives us more chances to develop mental toughness through perseverance.

Recalling Moments of Perseverance

In 2016, I was in Tennessee in the lead up to Ironman Chattanooga. The race was taking place on the last day of September and while there was certainly a chance it could be warm, the forecast was calling for record high temperatures. The forecast definitely delivered and race day was met with a high of 99 degrees and not a cloud in the sky.

As I started the first 5K of the run on an exposed roadway without an ounce of shade I remember thinking that it was pretty hot. But I also remember thinking:

Ironman Texas in 2013 was WAY worse.

Ironman Texas in 2013 was the hottest long course race I have ever competed in. Athletes were given IV fluids on the run course. People burned their feet on the concrete while running on it briefly through transition.1

Despite all that, I made it to the finish line in Texas in 2013 and so I planned to do the same in Chattanooga in 2016.

This does not mean that it made the temperature and conditions any more bearable, it just meant that I believed I could handle it.

I often refer to this as tapping into your Rolodex of Experiences.2

A rolodex of experiences is what I refer to as a sort of mental file cabinet where we store our past experiences, particularly ones where adversity was faced.

Over time, as new and different adversity presents itself, having the ability to recall moments of perseverance can be beneficial in giving ourselves confidence to face whatever is before us. Some experiences apply quite directly, like my recollection of the heat in Texas compared to the heat in Tennessee, but even when they don’t, the simple recollection of perseverance can help to foster a belief that whatever challenges occur, they can be met head on.

Bringing it all together

Mental toughness is a topic that could encompass entire books and still leave many stones unturned. With that in mind, I think it’s important to recall Brooke’s simple take on mental toughness as:

People’s response when things get hard

In Part I, I introduced a study3 of wrestling coaches of the 1980’s, where they found that nearly all of these coaches simultaneously believed that mental toughness was crucial for success, but nearly impossible to change.

Much like the wrestling coaches, I believe that mental toughness is one of the most impactful psychological attributes that can lead to success in athletics.

However, unlike most of those same coaches, I believe that mental toughness, like many corresponding skills, can be changed and built over time.

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In Part I, we covered the perceptions, beliefs and working definitions of mental toughness, as well as its relationship to performance.

One of the most common perceptions we explored was the notion that many people believe that mental toughness is simultaneously:

• Crucial for success

• Difficult, if not impossible, to change

This was exemplified in a landmark study done nearly 40 years ago with wrestling coaches which found that:

• 82% of the coaches said that mental toughness was THE most important psychological attribute that led to success.

• 9% of the coaches felt that they had been able to positively develop mental toughness in their athletes.

We also examined the working definition of mental toughness and how it has evolved over time.

From an academic perspective, that definition looks like:

a state-like psychological resource that is purposeful, flexible, and efficient in nature for the enactment and maintenance of goal-directed pursuits1

I also mentioned my wife Brooke’s more simplified definition:

People’s response when things get hard

While both definitions provide value, Brooke’s resonated the most based on reader feedback.

Moving beyond definitions and perceptions, I concluded part one with two lingering questions.

In Part II, we will address the first question:

Can mental toughness be increased with coaching?

In 2008, U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, setting the record for the most gold medals won by an individual at the Summer Olympics, which included winning the 200-meter butterfly.

In the aftermath of winning the 200-meter fly, Phelps shared that his goggles started filling with water 25 meters into the race, forcing him to rely on his stroke count instead of his vision to execute his race. Despite this setback, he still managed to walk away with gold.

This led to a back story provided by his coach, Bob Bowman, who shared that when Phelps was younger, Bowman had stepped on Phelps’ goggles before practice one day, forcing Phelps to have to manage a full practice with faulty goggles.2

I like to think of this coaching tactic as:

Create challenges that are not simply physical.

In a sport like swimming that requires a heavy focus on physical conditioning, it can be easy to become narrowly focused on improving fitness to achieve success, but Bowman showed how Phelps’ fitness alone may not have been enough to win the 200-meter butterfly when it mattered most.

I don’t know what Bowman said to Phelps with those broken goggles at practice years ago, but he may have asked questions like:

• What do you use besides sight to assess where you are in the water? (e.g., stroke count)

• Where can you focus your attention with the limited sight you have?

• What sensations do you feel without the exact feedback that pace clocks provide?3

Now, having one’s goggles fill up while swimming is a scenario of adversity that a coach (and athlete) may be able to easily anticipate and logically include in their preparation. Similarly, a football team may conduct practices in wet conditions, windy conditions, noisy conditions, etc.

While I do think that preparing athletes for a myriad of scenarios is a great coaching tactic, I think the broader skill for coaches to work on is teaching athletes how to cope with unexpected adversity. In other words, even if we prepare athletes for all kinds of potential scenarios that may occur, we cannot prepare athletes for all of them.

One of the better places to explore this idea a little further is not in sport, but (perhaps surprisingly) with The Great British Bake Off.4

What the Great British Bake Off Can Teach Us

In 2017, a few friends of mine and I went down to Tucson, Arizona in October to get in a training block for a late season Ironman in Cozumel, Mexico. During that time, we stayed with Lisa Roberts who was also training for that same race (and subsequently won it).

Lisa would frequently do hard trainer workouts on her bike in her backyard in the late afternoon, which was often near 100 degrees at that time of day. As she hammered out set after set, she would have a laptop set up next to her. One day I went out to see what was on the laptop, assuming it was something that kept her motivated day after day.

The show she was watching on her laptop was the Great British Bake Off.

If this seems somewhat unexpected, then you are feeling the same way I felt at the time when I saw what she was watching while her heart rate was 170+.

However, Lisa was one of the mentally toughest athletes I ever knew while I was racing so it seems fitting that I am now using a lesson I learned from her favorite show.

At some point after this training camp, I started watching the show and have since become a huge fan.5 I have watched every season available multiple times and I think it has really interesting insights into understanding performance, including the psychological attribute of mental toughness. Some of the best lessons about performance can be learned when looking beyond our own milieu.

For those that are unfamiliar with the show, each episode consists of three bakes that the competitors must do which fall under the theme of the week (e.g., cake, bread, etc.). The first and third bakes in the competition are bakes that the competitors have had the chance to prepare for and practice throughout the week.

The middle bake they have to do is called “The Technical Bake.”

The Technical Bake is a blind bake. The bakers have no idea what they will be faced with aside from the fact that the bake will align with the week’s theme. Before the bake begins, each baker stands at their station with the ingredients and components they will use covered by a towel.

Then the following occurs:

• The bakers are told what they are going to bake, which is almost always something none of them have ever baked, and often, something they may have never even heard of.6

• At this point, their ingredients are revealed at their station along with a set of written instructions. The ingredients are limited, which means that mistakes cannot be fixed. The instructions are ambiguous, often with sparse details.

• The time allotment they are provided is usually between 90-120 minutes, which does not allow for much downtime or second guessing. If they pause or hesitate, they may not complete the bake in time.

The show itself lasts ten weeks, with one baker eliminated at the end of each show, which means that the stakes of each technical bake grow as the competition narrows.

Bakers have a wide range of experiences during the technical bakes, particularly when things are not going well. It is not uncommon to see bakers struggle and panic. It is also not uncommon to see them thrive.

The reason that I have decided to use the Technical Bake as an example is that it would be extremely difficult for the bakers to try and specifically prepare for every possible scenario/bake that they might have to do in a Technical. The more important skill to develop is the ability to execute under pressure and manage setbacks that will inevitably occur.

There are some bakers who seem more naturally calm under pressure in these scenarios from the get go, perhaps exhibiting a certain element of ingrained or innate mental toughness.

But there are also bakers that initially seem very frazzled and overwhelmed in the early weeks, but as the weeks go by they become more calm and composed under pressure. Even if they don’t match the composure of the bakers that were calm in week one, their improvement in comparison to themselves can be substantial. What I believe is important to underscore here is that these bakers are still unable to specifically prepare for the Technical just like they were in week one. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is their belief that they can handle unknown challenges, without specific preparation, because they have done it week after week.

To me, this is an example that contradicts the notion that mental toughness is immutable. While ceilings and starting points may be different for each of us, I struggle to ever accept that something cannot be changed.

Coaches will not be able to prepare an athlete for every possible challenge that they may face. But coaches can help cultivate an athlete’s ability to problem solve and cope with new and different adversity under pressure.

The judges of the Great British Bake Off may not have intended to build mental toughness in the participants, but for many bakers that was the result. While the judges aren’t coaches, the skills they indirectly helped foster could be more directly applied in coaching contexts.

This direct tactic was suggested in a study7 that interviewed a number of sport psychologists to ask if, and how, coaches can build mental toughness in their athletes.

One consensus they came to was that coaches should:

• Introduce adversity, and

• Teach the corresponding mental skills to manage the adversity

A key distinction in this recommended strategy is that the goal is not simply to find solutions to overcome a single type of adversity, but to develop the broader coping skills that can apply across a multitude of scenarios.

So can mental toughness be coached? In my opinion, yes.

Brooke defined mental toughness as “people’s response when things get hard.”

When coaches introduce adversity, it should not be to lead an athlete to a conclusion that “I can do A,B,C… things.”

Instead, the goal is to help them simply say “I can do hard things.”

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In the late 1980’s, there was a study1 done that asked a series of coaches (in the sport of wrestling) how much they contributed an athlete’s success to a variety of different psychological attributes (21 in total to choose from).

In the end, the study found that:

82% of the coaches said that mental toughness was THE most important psychological attribute that led to success.

The study also found that:

9% of the coaches felt that they had been able to positively develop mental toughness in their athletes.

The findings from this study, published almost forty years ago, consistently showed up in the literature review of almost every mental toughness study I came across when reviewing some of the research on this topic.

My interpretation of why this may be the case is because it shows such a striking dichotomy of a belief that:

• Mental toughness is super important.

• Mental toughness can’t be trained.

Now, if you bring your skeptical lens to this broader conclusion you might read this and say:

Why are we giving so much credence to one study done so long ago with one set of coaches in one single sport?

This is good and fair criticism. I had a similar intuition when I first came across the ubiquity of this study a couple years ago, but when I started to explore this idea in the field, I began to feel a bit differently about it.

I will regularly bring up the topic of mental toughness in conversation with athletes, coaches, friends, etc. and I will generally frame my questioning around two prompts:

• How would you define mental toughness?

• Is it trainable, coachable or otherwise adaptable?

While the answers vary, it has been my experience that the general theme still mirrors that of that wrestling coaches 40 years ago.

The general conclusion is that mental toughness is:

1. Super important.

2. Difficult to change in most cases.

Furthermore, what I find so fascinating about this topic is that the definition of mental toughness has been really hard to pin down with consistency, and yet, the feeling that mental toughness is both crucial for success and hard to change remains consistent.

Defining Mental Toughness

Before we delve into the struggle to define mental toughness in academic terms, I think it’s important to underscore that whatever you, or I, see mental toughness to be is valid. What is more important is exploring ways to define the attributes of it, because that is the first step in exploring the next phase of whether or not it is capable of changing (for better or worse).

In 2002, a study2 was done to try and define mental toughness based on a consensus amongst elite athletes across a variety of different sports. This eventually led to the following definition:

Mental toughness is having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to:

• Generally, cope better than your opponents with the many demands (competition, training, lifestyle) that sport places on a performer.

• Specifically, be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining determined, focused, confident and in control under pressure.3

The first time I read this study, I was asked to comment on it in a class and my initial impression was that I mostly agreed with their definition except for the comparison components. In other words, the athletes in this study seemed to suggest that by winning or beating an opponent one would, by default, be more mentally tough than their opponent. While that certainly might be the case, I definitely don’t think it would always be the case, as I think one could have superior mental toughness and not win.

Therefore, if it were up to me, I would simply remove the “better than your opponents” wording from each line to make it a little more constrained to the individual themselves versus being constructed around a subjective comparison to others.

In this same class, I also suggested an addition to the definition of mental toughness that would at least apply in long course triathlon.

I offered the following:

Mentally tough athletes have the ability to consistently derive motivation from a variety of different sources that allows them to persist and perform while under duress.

The reason I underscored this idea of varied motivation comes from both personal and anecdotal observations of what helps athletes manage the challenges and discomforts of long duration events. What I have consistently come across is the notion that what may have worked to keep an athlete motivated on one day may not work on another, but mentally tough athletes seem to still be able to search and source their motivation in different ways.

As it turns out, researchers in the field have also been shifting their definition of mental toughness. In 2017, one its leading researchers, Daniel Gucciardi, published a paper4 that assessed the current consensus, and debate, around the understanding of mental toughness.5

One of the first points the author highlighted was that the focus on mental toughness research had shifted from a focus on comparison to opponents to being centered more on individually subjective and goal-oriented themes.

An example from Gucciardi:

In the first round of major tennis tournament, like Wimbledon, a new up-and-coming rookie tennis player might be matched to play a previous champion. While this young player may have low odds of winning, they may still have goals for the match and their ability to strive towards those goals amidst adversity might be a better assessment of their mental toughness instead of looking at the final outcome of the match relative to their opponent.

Therefore, Gucciardi offered a new working definition of mental toughness as:

a state-like psychological resource that is purposeful, flexible, and efficient in nature for the enactment and maintenance of goal-directed pursuits.6

While the definition includes the evolution of centering it around goals, another key aspect is the inclusion of seeing mental toughness as “state-like” rather than seen as a trait. In other words, one might be exceptionally mental tough in one respect and not in another. It is not simply something someone either always has or always doesn’t.

My wife, Brooke, may have put it the most succinctly by simply describing mental toughness as:

People’s response when things get hard

Brooke has a way of stripping away complexity and getting to the underlying core principle of a subject.

Mental Toughness & Performance

The next, and perhaps more pressing, question worth exploring is the actual relationship between mental toughness and performance. Earlier, we discussed the study where wrestling coaches not only suggested that mental toughness was important, but that it was considered to be THE most important psychological attribute for success in their sport.

In 2023, a meta-analysis7 provided a systematic review of the research around the relationship of mental toughness and performance.8 Generally speaking, the review showed that mental toughness and performance were positively correlated. However, the effect varied considerably depending on different contexts. I am going to include some raw data to provide some clarity. For the data below, the “r” refers to the strength of the correlation. When looking at the numbers, the authors referenced that:

• an r value of .37 represents a large effect

• an r value of .24 represents a medium effect

• an r value of .10 represents a small effect

With that in mind, here were their findings:

• The overall effect for all studies was .36, nearly meeting the large effect threshold

• Combat sports, r = .72; ball sports, r = .30; endurance sports, r = .32

• Individual sports, r = .73; team sports, r = .20

• Adult athletes, r = .41; adolescent athletes, r = .20

The considerable effect size of mental toughness and performance amongst combat sports comes across to me as the most intuitive, given the stakes of their competitive environment. Competitors in combat sports have some of the least room for error and the smallest lapses in their concentration, focus and confidence can quickly lead to the end of a match, or worse.

It might be surprising to see such a stark contrast in individual versus team sport athletes. A simple conclusion might be that individual sport athletes need to have more mental toughness because they have no one else to rely on while competing, but I would be interested to see how a team sport athlete might answer questions related to mental toughness if they were asked to make an assessment of their team as a whole. In other words, they might attribute mental toughness to being more collective than individual because they compete as a team.

The final difference between adult and adolescent athletes is interesting to me, primarily because of the notion that mental toughness is more innate than trainable. If you agree with that premise, you might argue that the strength of the relationship to performance increased as the athletes got older because the athletes with superior mental toughness were the only ones able to excel as the sport became more challenging.

Another take would be that mental toughness increases, alongside other skills and fitness levels, as adolescent athletes progress to becoming adult athletes.

While the relationship of mental toughness and performance may have varied for the reasons I provided, it might also have varied because the measures for mental toughness are determined by standardized assessments regardless of the sport. While these assessments may be reliable and valid, there might still be a strong variance in how mental toughness might be described by its participants.

For example, being mentally tough in golf might look considerably different than being mentally tough in boxing. If you use the same questions and criteria in those two subsets of athletes it may give a complicated answer when comparing mental toughness’ relationship to performance. I think an argument could be made that athletes that excel at either of those sports require substantial mental toughness, but how that is exhibited and described might be considerably different.

The Next Questions

While mental toughness may mean something slightly different to everyone, it still appears to hold real value amongst athletes and coaches and is strongly correlated with performance. And yet, many people still cling to the paradox of recognizing mental toughness’ importance, while simultaneously believing mental toughness to be more innate than malleable.

In part II we will address:

• Can mental toughness be increased with coaching?

• Are there strategies we can implement to increase mental toughness in ourselves?

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote an article about an exchange between me and on a 90-minute flight. Within that discussion, I reflected that the use of time frames on success in a pursuit can be problematic.

Specifically, I said:

I am not saying that sticking with something will guarantee success in any pursuit, but I do think that abandoning pursuits too early is what creates the greatest separation between those that make it and those that do not.

Following the article, a reader (Ryan Kusek) posed the following question:

I do have a question around the line: “but I do think that abandoning pursuits too early is what creates the greatest separation between those that make it and those that do not.”

How do you know when you are on the right path? Something Gordo has written about is how top athletes are 100% committed to what they are doing, but also have the openness to change their path when new information comes along (paraphrased, but I think the idea is close).

As someone who is trying to find their own way I struggle to know what I should pursue more of and what I should let go of - any thoughts you have are appreciated.

After my original article, Gordo addressed this topic (and others) directly in his own article which you can find here:

Endurance Essentials

Three Techniques You're Discounting

I got to spend last weekend in Jackson as part of a six-day unload. Justin was there and he wrote a few thoughts up on his Substack…

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4 months ago · 47 likes · 7 comments · Gordo Byrn

I have thought a lot about Ryan’s question related to knowing when to stick with something. This led me to taking a look back at my own abandoned pursuits that eventually landed me on something I was willing to stick with. While these examples come from my formative years, I believe there is an overarching theme that could apply at any point in life.

Worth It?

Baseball

When I was growing up in Houston, Texas, the baseball little league culture was central to my community. Even kids that weren’t that enthusiastic about baseball would usually play until they were at least 11-12 years old (starting at ~6) and the baseball field conglomerate (what we would colloquially call “The Field”) was a place of social gathering for kids even when their teams weren’t playing that day/night.

I personally played baseball in this context from 6-14 years old and during this time I remember certain friends of mine like John, Clayton and Chris who were really good at baseball.

All three of them certainly had some natural talent, but the primary reason I remember them being good at baseball is because they worked really hard at being good at baseball.

I would see all three of them putting in extra practice hours when I did not and whenever I was challenged to really grow in the sport, I often backed down. Specifically, I remember when I moved to the level of baseball where we transitioned from pitching machines to live pitching. I initially wanted to be a pitcher until I found out it actually required putting in extra practice time.

Regardless of my own reasoning, the fact of the matter was that the effort and work required to become a better baseball player simply wasn’t something that was worth it to me.

Guitar

When I was around 11 years old, I started playing guitar. It began somewhat casually, but it eventually turned into something I did for a few hours a day most days throughout middle school.

I remember in this period of my life, I was often envious (read: jealous) of the other musicians that just seemed to “get it” more easily than me. I felt like I was putting in a decent amount of practice and so I couldn’t understand why it didn’t manifest into being at least as good as the others around me.

In Houston, there is a high school within the Houston Independent School District that is called the High School for Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) that allows each student to spend multiple hours per day training in their various crafts. Students that wish to enter the school must apply and audition within their respective fields.

I chose to apply for entry to play guitar.

I auditioned and was not accepted/admitted.

While I did not stop playing guitar after this, it was essentially the beginning of the end and within six+ months I rarely played anymore.

Now, there is absolutely no reason that anyone needs to be accepted into a performing arts school to play an instrument (well or otherwise), but for some reason I took it hard. I think I needed an acceptance into the school to let me know if playing the guitar was actually something I could do well.

Instead of playing the guitar for the joy of playing guitar, I was caught up in seeking external validation from it.

U.S. Naval Academy

Sometime in my junior year of high school in 1998, I got into the idea of applying to the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) with the long-term goal of joining the special forces.

I am unsure of how much the process of applying to a service academy has changed since then, but at the time it was quite a rigorous process between the work required to garner a nomination (from one’s congressional representative1) to the various stages of the application process that followed.

To make a long story short, I made it to the final phase of the application process, but ultimately was not accepted.

Garnering an appointment to the USNA was certainly not the only avenue towards joining the special forces, but for me, it turned out to be the end of my journey. Had the end goal of joining the special forces been something that was truly driving me, I could have pursued other means to that end. It may not have worked out, but I could have done more.

Looking Back

I think when you look at the three examples I provided, from baseball to guitar to the USNA, there is a progression of reasons for my own abandonment.

With baseball, there was a general aversion to doing what it would take to improve in any capacity. With guitar, there was an unreasonable expectation that my own level of work should provide the same outcomes as it would for others I envied. While likely present at some level with all three pursuits, I think the failure of admittance into the USNA exposed my own lack of understanding of what I was actually trying to achieve.

Time and time again, I experienced a substantial lack of will when faced with push back. I believe I fell short in these various pursuits because my intentions were not something grounded deep inside me.

And Then Came Triathlon

As I entered college, I started to dabble in endurance sports, beginning with the Austin Marathon in February 2000 (4:14 finishing time), my first Olympic Distance triathlon in August 2000 (2:52) and my first Ironman (California) in May 2001 (12:55).

I have included the finishing times to try and give some context for where I initially entered the realm of endurance sports. I think in all the above examples I was somewhere in the 30th-50th percentile in terms of finishing times.

If I were to have applied the lens I applied to my other past pursuits, I might have simply pivoted in a different direction at some point when things got hard.

I’m not really sure why, but when it came to triathlon, for the first time, I did not seem as concerned with what was required to improve.

I simply wanted to get better.

Instead of avoiding the work, I liked the work.

I enjoyed riding my bike for hours and hours. I spent a considerable (perhaps even too much) time outside my regular studies reading and learning about training and racing. I really only gauged progress against my own past pursuits instead of comparing myself to others.

Suddenly, the work required to improve seemed worth it for the sake of itself. I was becoming more immersed in the process of self-improvement rather than seeking some sort of validation that I might have sought before.

Instead of equivocating over whether the work I was putting into triathlon was worth it, I started to ask: “how good could I be?”

Responding to Push Back

I made a lot of progress while I was an age group triathlete, particularly at long distance Ironman races, where I had progressed from racing 12:55 in 2001 (May) to 8:57 in 2005 (November).2

By the end of my age group racing journey, I had seen a steady progression year over year, and while nothing is linear, I certainly had a lot more positive than negative moments in those first 5+ years of racing.

Then I turned professional in 2006.

As I moved into this level of racing, I finished near the bottom, if not the very bottom, amongst the professional field in every race I entered that year.3

To say I was discouraged is putting it lightly.

While I had certainly put in a lot of work to get to this point in my career, it was the first time where I really started to question whether this was something I should stick with. Maybe it was actually time to move on to something else. Perhaps staying the course would be foolish.

Let’s bring back the earlier point that Ryan said when paraphrasing Gordo:

Something Gordo has written about is how top athletes are 100% committed to what they are doing, but also have the openness to change their path when new information comes along.

At the end of my season in 2006, I did not have a lot of confidence in my abilities to race competitively amongst the professional field and the “new information” I was receiving was that I was apparently not nearly as good at triathlon as I thought I was.

I was 25 years old at the end of 2006.

I decided that if I was going to have a chance to make it in the sport, I needed to set my life up so that I would still be racing when I hit my 30’s. This led me to making certain decisions and life choices to support that pursuit,4 but more importantly, it helped me avoid defining my success by time constraints. I became more accepting that I didn’t control the rate of my own progression.

Moreover, by committing myself to this much more time in the sport, I also had to come to terms with the fact that even if I invested another 5+ years, it may not work out. In this case, I became accepting of the ambiguity and uncertainty of my future in the sport as I felt that the process of trying was more important than the results it might produce.

While I may have understood and accepted the uncertainty of my future, what I did not initially realize was that the setbacks of 2006 were only the beginning.

Constant challenges and push back never stopped coming from that point until the day I stopped racing nearly 15 years later.

In 2007, I contracted giardia (parasite from open water swimming). In 2009, I had all my race gear stolen from a car and had to borrow other people’s gear to train with. In 2012, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like someone had swung a baseball bat into my foot and unknowingly raced with salmonella poisoning later in the year.5 In 2015, I developed pneumonia after a bout with mono in a lead up to a major race.

In 2016, I gave a presentation at my friend Trent’s triathlon shop in the DFW area and one of the reflections I gave about my time in sport was that I never knew how hard it would be. While my context was sport, I think that anyone that finds a path worth sticking to will likely come to a similar conclusion. Moreover, what separated triathlon from the earlier examples I gave about my formative years, is that adversity became anticipated and accepted rather than providing me with an easy exit.

What keeps someone on their chosen pursuit will vary, but for me, it came down to continuously asking myself one simple question:

Do I believe I can still get better?

Earlier, Ryan had asked about discerning when we know we are on the right path.

For me, the right path meant answering "yes" to this question. If I still felt upside existed, I wanted to stay the course.

I always felt that the day I answered “no” was the day I needed to walk away. 6

Was it all worth it?

When I look back on my different abandoned pursuits prior to triathlon, I find that when I eventually found myself immersed in the thing for the sake of the thing,7 I ultimately found something worth sticking with. When I understood what was driving me internally, instead of externally, I found the right path.

I won’t lie and say I wish I hadn’t gone faster or finished on more podiums over my time in sport, but I think whatever better results I might have attained, I still would have had that same sense of “maybe there could have been more.”

Nevertheless, as I have become more and more removed from that time of my life, I am left with a sense of gratitude that I gave myself the chance to see triathlon to its end. While the trope about something being “all about journey” might seem tired, there is a reason it exists.

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I have known Gordo Byrn for over 20 years. Back in early 2019, there was a surprise birthday party for him and everyone at the table was asked about how they first came to know, and meet, Gordo.

For me, it started with an old website forum that Gordo used to run in the early 2000’s called GordoWorld. As a college student1, I was becoming more and more interested in triathlon and how to properly train and condition myself to become faster and faster. This search eventually led me to the site in 2002, and unlike other online forums, the community there seemed much more cordial and focused on having an open dialogue about training ideas.

However, the thing I was most drawn to was that Gordo and his community didn’t seem like individuals that were afraid to do the work. I appreciated the willingness to go big and take chances, not simply for the outcomes themselves, but for the process it entailed.

Gordo and I eventually met in person in 2004 and have engaged in many conversations over the years. In the past 4-5 years, I have felt that some of our best interchanges have occurred while traveling together. On Friday2, we were on a 90-minute flight together and afterwards, I wrote down some notes of what we covered in our conversation. I’ll expand a bit for context in some places, but like many conversations, it took some interesting twists and turns and I want to keep the spirit of that journey.

Carbohydrate Intake while Training & Racing

A common topic at the moment (in long duration endurance sports) is the carbohydrate (CHO) intake athletes are consuming while competing and training, often consisting of ingesting 120g+ of CHO per hour, depending on the size of the athlete.3

What I was asking in our conversation was whether there has been much attention paid to how the carbs get distributed within each “hour.” In other words, 120g/hr of CHO can be 120g every 60 minutes, 60g every 30 minutes, 30g every 15, etc. (If someone has seen a study on this, please post in the comments)

While I was racing triathlon, it was generally my intention to spread calories out across an hour, but in SwimRun I have been experimenting with alternating approximately 90g and 30g every 30 minutes (for ~120g/hr in total).

Writing Books

Gordo has written a number of books and he asked me if I was considering writing one.

I have always liked the idea of writing a book, and have been repeatedly encouraged to do so by my father, but have often demurred.

G offered a couple points such as:

• Using Substack as a way to understand where interest lies amongst readers, not simply as a litmus test of go or no-go for content inclusion, but also for organizational flow.

• Try to write in a way that feels accessible to more people. It can be easy to get quite narrow when we are really interested in a topic, but it might be a better strategy to bring more people into the tent instead of leaving them out (not his exact words, but my take on them).

The accessibility piece is something I think about a lot. I once heard someone tell a story about their dissertation defense for a PhD. The student had his mother attending the defense (along with the various faculty members) and his advisor told him that both his mother and the faculty should all learn something that day. In other words, whether familiarity is high or low, it is important to bring something to the table for everybody.

Athlete Burnout & Overtraining

When I was in grad school, the topics of burnout and overtraining were combined in a chapter/lesson and it’s something I have thought a lot about since. While I do think burnout and overtraining can occur together, I tend to think of them as having separate foundations.

My personal opinion is that:

• Athlete burnout is psychologically rooted. Meaning that the body may be able to properly train physically, but the desire and motivation to train are diminished for a myriad of potential reasons.

• Overtraining, on the other hand, is more physiologically rooted. Given the wide range of contradictory symptoms that can be applied to overtraining (e.g., can’t sleep or want to sleep too much, heart rate too high or heart rate too low, etc.), I tend to see it as when one component of the nervous system overrides the other, where either the sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system is dominating the other. Moreover, athletes that are overtrained can paradoxically remain highly motivated (the reason I separate it from burnout), which only exacerbates the problem. So while there might be a psychological will to train, there is an absence of the corresponding physical ability to properly do so.

G mentioned an athlete he knew well that was experiencing the type of overtraining where the sympathetic nervous system was in overdrive. This athlete could not get themselves to relax or calm down when they needed to and the only time they felt “good” was when they trained, as the physical output finally matched their nervous system’s arousal state.

Becoming fully fluent in a new language

After recently turning 45, I mentioned that I was interested in becoming fully fluent in a new language. I have the most experience speaking Spanish and some experience speaking Swedish so those are two choices at the top of the list.

G suggested I would need to live somewhere to become fully fluent and I agreed.

Moreover, there was a discussion on which language to focus on. I explained that Spanish entailed a more pragmatic approach given its broad scope and use, whereas Swedish entails a more emotional approach for me (my mother is from Sweden).

I have tended to advise athletes to choose a race based on what makes them more excited as opposed to what makes the most “sense” so maybe that’s an insight into the direction I’ll choose to go.

Avoiding a timeline for success

G shared some instances from different athletes he is working with and their varied rate of athletic progression. This segued into talking about the pitfall of athletes (or otherwise) creating timelines for their success.

I once heard actor Scott Glenn talk about his early journey in acting. When Scott made the decision to commit to acting full-time his father told him something that really stood out to me.

He told Scott that if he was going to pursue acting, he shouldn’t put a timeline on it. He should just go and take whatever time it takes to make it.

The reason this story resonated is because Scott did not really have a major breakout role until he was nearly 40 years old. Yes, he was a working actor, but his level of success may not have been the level to which others would continue to say “it’s worth it” to continue.

I am not saying that sticking with something will guarantee success in any pursuit, but I do think that abandoning pursuits too early is what creates the greatest separation between those that make it and those that do not.

Year over year strength training

G and I chatted a bit about strength training which entailed a few different subtopics.

What is strong enough?

G recently wrote about what “strong enough” means in the context of endurance athletes. I told him I had similar questions come up in conversations I was having when I asked different people what it meant to them “to be strong.” This is a similar idea to asking yourself to define success in nearly any pursuit you are engaged in.

Too tired to do the little things

Our conversation then moved into the success G has been having by continually doing his physical therapy exercises each week. He further mentioned that he let a lot of this stuff fall by the wayside when he was racing elite and this ultimately led us to conclude that:

Sometimes we are too tired to do the little things.

Doing the thing for the sake of the thing

While a little tangential, when we were discussing strength training I told him about someone I talked to that said they really didn’t enjoy strength training, but they felt it was important for injury prevention (in running).

I told them they should try to find ways to enjoy strength training for its own reasons and not for the reason of injury prevention.

In other words,

Do the thing for the sake of the thing.

And then the plane landed

Until the next one.

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In 2009, I was getting ready for a race in New Zealand1 and I was going over some of my race goals and tactics with my MPC.2 One of the objectives I had included in my initial race plan was my intention to “not blow up” and “not get dropped” at the start of the swim.3

In response to my position, I was informed that my use of language around these goals might need to change.

Instead of focusing on the outcomes I did not want to have happen, I needed to frame the goals around what I did want to have happen.

For Example:

“Don’t blow up” becomes “Start the race within myself”

“Don’t get dropped” becomes “Maintain contact with the front group”

This might seem like trivial semantics of ways to say the same thing, but as it turns out, there is a lot more to it.

Even though I used the words “not” or “don’t” before blowing up or getting dropped, it still brought attention to the unwanted outcomes. And by bringing attention to the unwanted outcomes, I was potentially and ironically making the outcomes I wanted to avoid more likely to occur.

For this reason, it was important to change my framing and focus

I later called this changing “don’t” language into “do” language.

So what is going on?

Back in 1994, Daniel Wegner published a paper titled Ironic processes of mental control that led into his theory of the same name.4 At the time, Wegner was looking at what happens when people try to avoid unwanted thoughts, and how trying to not think about something ironically leads to thinking about it more and more (a phenomenon he called “ironic effects”).

This concept has often been incorporated into mainstream culture, like TED Talks, using a Pink Elephant.5

Pink Elephant

If I instruct you, the reader, to NOT THINK ABOUT A PINK ELEPHANT, you may realize that it immediately leads to you picturing a pink elephant in your head.

As you began reading this article you probably had zero inclinations to think about a pink elephant, but now that you have been specifically instructed not to think of a pink elephant, you can only think about a pink elephant.

It can be easy to imagine setting up a basic experiment where one group is assigned to “not think about a pink elephant” and a control group is given no instructions. The results would easily show that the only way to not think about a pink elephant is to never bring it up in the first place.

How does this apply to sport?

Building on the concept of the ironic effects of avoiding unwanted thoughts, Wegner and colleagues (1998) designed a study that attempted to apply this theory to sport. They ran a couple different experiments, including one with the sport of golf. In that experiment, they would incorporate instructions telling individuals things like “pay particular attention to not putt the ball long” and when they did so, they found those ironic (i.e., unwanted) outcomes to occur at a higher frequency.

In other words, by bringing attention to unwanted outcomes with verbal instructions (e.g., “don’t hit the ball long”) it made the unwanted outcomes more likely to happen.

Since that initial study, there have been a myriad of studies and in 2024 a meta-analysis was conducted titled:

“A systematic review of ironic effects of motor task performance under pressure: The past 25 years” (Bartura et al., 2024). (Paper is open access so I encourage you to read it for yourself).

The various studies that made the cut for this review generally combined a couple different things in their experiments:

1. Participants were given ironic/avoidant instructions (e.g., “try to avoid X” or “don’t do Y”)

2. The experiments would attempt to create low and high anxiety conditions

In almost all the studies, they found that the ironic outcomes (things that were instructed to be avoided) became more likely to occur with the combination of ironic/avoidant instructions and high anxiety conditions.

“Don’t turn left” analogy

When it comes to understanding how unwanted outcomes increase with avoidant instructions and higher anxiety conditions, I like people to picture the following two scenarios:

1. I am riding in the passenger side of a car. We are driving at the speed limit of 60 mph (~100 kph). One mile (~60”) prior to a fork in the road (only options are to go left or right), I tell the driver “60 seconds from now, we will reach a fork in the road. When we get there, Don’t Turn Left.” While I have given avoidant instructions to not do something, the driver still has 60 seconds to process this in a lower anxiety setting, giving them more time to understand that “don’t turn left” actually means “DO turn right.”

2. In this next scenario, I am in the same car as a passenger, but now we are traveling at 80 mph (~130kph). As we are traveling faster, we are approaching the same intersection in the road, but I forget to mention my instructions when we are one mile away. As we come barreling down to the fork in the road, I realize my mistake and when we are just seconds from the fork, I yell my instructions “DON’T TURN LEFT!” With almost no time to respond, the driver is likely to only process “turn left” and ultimately veers the car in wrong direction.

I use this analogy to show how the time and place of our language and instructions matter.

The authors of the review used an anecdote of a tennis player getting frustrated in competition (rising anxiety) and continually telling themselves not to serve into the net (avoidant instructions) only to find themselves continually serving into the net.

Moreover, when thinking about this concept as a coach, one can easily imagine how telling an athlete not do something in a high pressure scenario suddenly causes the athlete to ironically focus more and more on the outcome they are trying to avoid.

While the various studies in the meta-analysis showed the powerful combination of ironic effects and anxiety, there were also some limitations to the research. Moreover, there are areas of interest it did not address that I believe need to be discussed.

Limitations in the Research

In my opinion, the authors of the review were quite critical of the extant research looking into the ironic effects in sports. At least, they were more critical than I found myself to be. I have shared my commentary on their criticisms directly in the first point below, but have left my commentary for points two and three in the footnotes.

The limitations addressed by the researchers are the following:

1. Participants were generally novices and not elite/professional/experienced. It was questioned as to whether more experienced athletes might process “don’t” instructions a little differently than novices. While it would be interesting to examine how elites might handle being told “not to do” something in high anxiety conditions, I think that understanding how novices respond in these conditions is very important, particularly because it might help coaches and inexperienced athletes improve their skills more quickly with better instructions. However, the authors pointed out another issue: it can be hard to know whether novice participants are making ironic errors instead of random outcomes (in other words, they don’t have the skills to execute things appropriately in the first place). I do think that is a fair criticism.

2. The simulated anxiety conditions and measurements of “cognitive load” were inconsistent across studies. In other words, it was difficult to tell whether one anxiety-induced condition would amount to the same levels as another that was designed and quantified differently.6

3. The research was done in lab settings and not real-world performance settings.7

Moving beyond the constraints that come with conducting research, a key question remains: how do we translate “don't” language into actionable “do” language?

Giving equal weight to alternatives

Within the studies the authors reviewed, they were really only looking at how often ironic outcomes occurred in a very binary way. Essentially, they only measured whether ironic outcomes happened or if they did not.

For example, if participants in a golf experiment are told, “don’t putt long” then any putt that is not considered long is, for lack of a better term, a “successful” outcome.

What has not been done in these experiments is studying what helps lead to desired outcomes.

In other words, what would actually help someone sink that putt?

Where “don’t” language leaves us short

When I think about “don’t” versus “do” language, one of the main problems that I observe is that it weighs all alternatives to the undesired outcomes equally.

Let me try to explain this better with an example:

Imagine a baseball pitcher on the mound who is facing a batter that is known for hitting inside pitches very well.8 If the pitcher starts to focus specifically on “don’t pitch inside,” not only are they bringing more attention to that outcome and making it more likely to occur, but they are also failing to address where they actually want to throw the ball.

We are essentially left with two problems: increased chances of ironic effects by using “don’t” thinking as well as not creating specific alternative “do” language towards desired outcomes.

So instead of thinking about not throwing inside pitches, the pitcher might tell themselves to throw “high and away” or “low and outside,” etc. The point being, we need to evolve our approach from what we want to avoid into what we actually want to do.

Another example with a slightly different angle:

Imagine a runner is entering a distance race, such as a 5K, and they are worried about starting the race too quickly (for the first kilometer, for example). Once again, bringing attention to the unwanted outcome may make it more likely to occur, but we are also faced with a lack of a clear alternative. Presumably, going out too slowly may also be problematic, meaning that simply executing a not-too-fast start is an incomplete action plan.9

The runner needs to shift away from having an action plan of what they don’t want to do into what they do want. In this case, it would be formulating a plan on where they might draw the line on what it means to go out too fast (and too slow) to help create an actionable and effective race plan.

Putting Everything Together

When I work with athletes and coaches, I talk a lot about using “do” instead of “don’t” language, but I always take time to underscore the following point:

I think we will always have a natural inclination to using “don’t” language as the starting point for much of our thinking.

When we recognize that something will potentially inhibit performance, whether for ourselves or for athletes we are coaching, we want to point that out.

This is all perfectly reasonable and logical thinking (as well as helpful in understanding where lapses in performances may occur).

The key is not to avoid doing that, but to avoid stopping there. We need to take it one step further.

Instead of leaving the advice at telling ourselves or others what we do not want to do, we need to create instructions and thinking around what we do want to do.

So it is not about avoiding the use of “don’t” language so much as recognizing when it occurs and then taking the next step. Moreover, it has been my experience that this habit can develop to a point where it becomes more natural to think and speak with “do” language, but it will never completely eliminate the quick reactions that result in the opposite.

The following framework is what I recommend using to help trend towards the use of “do” language.

1. Recognize and acknowledge what we don’t want to do.

2. Move towards recognizing what we do want to do.

3. Create instructions and focus built around “do” language that directs our attention towards the desired outcomes.

What we ultimately want to remember is:

• What do we want to do?

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Near the end of 2025, Griffin Jaworski invited me to join him on his podcast, Forging Iron. Throughout our conversation, Griffin asked me a lot of thought provoking questions that allowed us to explore the evolution of my thinking around athletic performance, coaching, mental and physical conditioning, and more.

You can listen to the full episode using the links below. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and if you find it valuable, please consider sharing it with others.

Follow Up References on Goal Setting

During our conversation, we referenced a series of articles that I was writing at the time around the process of goal setting. If you have not read that series, you can find links to those articles below:

Goal Setting Part I: Outcome/Performance/Process

Goal Setting Part II: Collaboration

Goal Setting Part III: Specific vs Non-Specific

Goal Setting Part IV: Difficulty & Timelines

Goal Setting Part V: Assessments, Follow-Ups & Adjustments

Self-Determination Theory

Griffin and I also discussed self-determination theory, and I briefly referenced a book that presents extensive research on the topic by Richard M. Ryan, PhD, and Edward L. Deci, PhD.

You can find that book here: Self-Determination Theory by Ryan & Deci

Thank you to Griffin

I just want to take a moment to thank Griffin for the work he puts into producing his podcast, and for providing me, and many others, with the chance to explore the evolution of our ideas and perspectives.

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As we settle into 2026, I wanted to bring up something I found myself talking about a lot with athletes in 2025: the idea of raising the average of our performances.

This was often brought up in contrast to primarily assessing athletic progression based on personal bests (PB).

A quick personal anecdote:

In the fall of 2007, I raced Ironman Florida and finished in tenth place in 8:40. It was a 17-minute PB for me, the first time I broke 3 hours on the marathon, and I was ecstatic. It was a major breakthrough day for me where I felt like all my training and preparation had come together and I was thriving.1

In the fall of 2008, I raced Ironman Arizona and just never seemed to have ‘it’ on the day. Everything felt harder than it should, my motivation was waning and I certainly did not feel I was thriving.

I also finished this race in 8:40.

I was initially pretty disappointed in the day as I felt like I was capable of something more, but after some time I came to realize that a time and performance that I once considered to be me performing at my peak (8:40) had now become something I could do when I felt pretty mediocre.

I mean sure, it would have been better to race faster and see some improvement when I was at my best, but I started to realize that I had seen improvement: I had raised the level of my average performance.

In January of 2023, I wrote an article titled Most Days Are Just Days where I tried to underscore the importance of understanding that race days are not magical days. They are just days like any other day, but we still need to try and get the most out of ourselves on those days, no matter what the circumstances may be.

This is why I think a superior way to assess athletic progression is to shift away from solely judging it on our single best performances and giving more credence to the rolling averages of our performances. This is not because I think personal bests don’t matter, it is because I think that raising the average makes new personal bests more likely.

There are a couple of ways that I think about raising the average:

1. What the average actually amounts to

2. The depth of the average

Here’s what I mean:

What the average amounts to

This idea focuses on the numbers themselves. For example, a swimmer who does several 200 races in 2:19, 2:23, and 2:27 has an average swim time of 2:23. However, the range is 8 seconds and the number of reps is small.

The depth of the average

Let’s say there is another swimmer who races the 200 with an average of 2:23, but they have seven races with times of 2:22,2:22,2:23,2:23,2:23,2:24,2:24. This second swimmer technically has a slower PB than swimmer number one (2:22 vs 2:19), but the depth of their average performances is stronger and the range of performances is tighter (2 seconds vs 8).

Now, there are strengths to both athletes. One has a faster PB and one has a deeper average, but I would posit that if athlete number two breaks through to a new PB, they are more likely to repeat performances in a similar vicinity of that new level based on their consistency.

The legendary running coach Jack Daniels wrote about this observation in his book Daniels’ Running Formula. In the book, Daniels describes that once athletes break through to a new level of performance, they are more likely to go on to repeat it.

I agree with his observation, but I might add to it by saying that athletes that show the ability to replicate performances are more likely to find themselves in positions down the road to make further breakthroughs in performance.

Paradoxically, the ability to make a new level of performance into an average performance leads to the opportunity to supersede it.

Not only that, but I believe that one of the benefits of raising the average is that it translates into robustness in athletes.

Robustness

• Robustness (n): the ability to withstand or overcome adverse conditions or rigorous testing.2

The conditions of competitions will always vary, whether that is from:

1. Countless variables like dynamic environmental conditions (heat, cold, wind, etc.), venues, schedules, etc.

2. The level of competition and the stakes that are at hand (e.g., the difference from local comps to championships).

One of the benefits of athletes that have repeatedly shown their ability to perform is that they are more likely to withstand either of those challenges.

This comes from athletes knowing they do not need magical days to perform, just an average one.

Last year, I saw two athletes advance to a championship competition that would consist of a qualifying round and a final.

Athlete one had a faster qualifying time going into the championship, but was somewhat new to the sport.

Athlete two had a slower qualifying time going into the championship, but was much more experienced in the sport.

Upon entering the qualifying round, neither athlete posted a time that was as fast as their qualifying time, but athlete two still posted a time that was fast enough to advance to the finals while athlete one failed to do so.

Raise the average of training

So far, we have talked specifically about raising the average of performances, but it’s also important to understand this concept in the context of training. Like racing, training has days where it all comes together, but many of those days fall below that standard.

A memorable moment from Alexi Pappas

When Alexi Pappas appeared on the Rich Roll Podcast3 in February 2021, there was an interaction in their conversation that went viral where she discussed her coach’s rule of thirds.

According to Pappas, when she was training for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, she felt lousy during one particular workout and shared that with her coach.

Pappas’ coach, in response, told her not to worry because training will often fall into one of three buckets:

1. One third of workouts will feel good

2. One third of workouts will feel ok

3. One third of workouts will feel bad4

Generally speaking, I like this framing of not expecting a disproportionate amount of training to feel good.

However, I would probably widen the OK bucket in the middle quite a bit so that you would be left with something like:

1. 15% will feel truly good

2. 70% will feel ok.

3. 15% will feel truly bad

Regardless of whether you use Pappas’ coach’s numbers or my own, it still requires an understanding that we cannot only assess our progression on the good days because most days will fall below that threshold.

I used to describe a lot of those OK training days as the following:

The training may not have been “good” but it was “acceptable.”

It may not have met the threshold of ‘good,’ but I knew it was still moving the needle.

Final note

To be clear:

I am not suggesting that you cast aside the aspirations of new personal bests, only that you also apply the concept of improving your average performances when evaluating progression.

What we can do on an average day directly contributes to what we can do on our best days.

• Breakthrough→Raise the Average→Breakthrough

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The end of 2025 brings about my fifth full year of post-elite athletics. When I was still racing triathlon professionally, I would often wonder what this stage of my life might look like when it comes to training/physical activity. Would I still train? What would it consist of if I did? How much would I do?

Next year, I plan to write more about my evolution of thinking around this topic, but I did expand on this idea a bit several year ago when I wrote:

The Benefits of (Still) Training

I continue to still log all the training I do each day and I have a Training Peaks account that goes back to the fall of 2004. At the end of each year, I like to look back to see what I did and how that compares to other years, or more specifically, to the year before.

I have a very basic way of collectively looking at things these days as I simply lump time spent doing aerobic training or doing strength training.

Aerobic training hours consists of all intensities and while I continue to do some sessions at targeted intensities, I am mostly interested in how much time I spend moving each year.

My strength training also has a simple measure: time spent doing strength training.

While there are times of the year when strength training is more rigorous/demanding than others, I am more generally concerned in seeing how much time I spent moving heavy (for me) stuff around.

2024 Data

Swim: 103.5 hours, ~350,000 meters

Run: 236 hours, ~3215 kilometers

Uphill/SkiMo: 50 hours

Cycling: 15.75 hours

Rowing: 14 hours

++

Total Aerobic Training: 419 hours

Total Strength Training: 103.5 hours

2025 Data

Some context for the numbers that I am about to include. This year I did some SwimRun training sessions and races where it would default to being recorded as runs. I did try to estimate total swim distance, but I did not account for the time that would have been allocated to swim rather than run. Therefore, the run hours are higher than they should be and the swim hours are lower than they should be (maybe 10-20 hours or something like that).

Swim: 147 hours, ~543,000 meters

Run: 241 hours, ~2969 kilometers

Uphill/Skimo: 6 hours

Cycling: 81.5 hours

Rowing: <1 hour

++

Total Aerobic Training: 476 hours

Total Strength Training: 80.5 hours

2025 Recap

While I did not set any specific parameters of how I would do it, I did want to try and hit 500 hours of aerobic training for the year. This would assume that for 50 weeks of the year, I would average close to 10 hours/week. I ended up falling a bit short of that, but I did manage to up the hours from 419 hours to 476 hours and one of the primary ways I did this was by using the bike for longer commutes.

For strength, I like to be around 100 hours/year with a priority placed on strength for 5-6 months of the year (circa Nov-April). I came in around 80 hours for 2025 which is due to some inconsistencies in the spring when I was adjusting to a busier schedule and because of a decision to back off strength in the late summer after I had two back-to-back minor tweaks in my back that I felt was coming from a lack of focus and too much ancillary fatigue.

2025 Competitions

At the beginning of 2025, I only had one event on the calendar which was serving as the anchor leg of the Colfax Marathon (~6 miles) in May. In the end, the year looked like this:

May: Colfax Marathon Relay, Anchor Leg

May: Bolder Boulder 10K (got outkicked at the line by a dude in a banana suit).

July: Ötillö Whistler SwimRun: 4th Overall Mixed Division (5th Overall Team)

August: Ötillö Casco Bay SwimRun: 1st Overall Men’s Division (2nd Overall Team)

August: Calarat Trail Half Marathon

October: Ötillö Colorado SwimRun: 1st Overall Men’s Division (1st Overall Team)

November: Ötillö Austin SwimRun: 2nd Overall Solo Division

In 2023 I raced the Ötillö World Champs in Sweden with my friend, Lars Finanger, but had not ventured back into that sport since then. This year, there seemed to be a lot of serendipity at play in bringing me back to the sport. It began by filling in for a team spot that opened up for Whistler with my friend EK and ended in Austin when a trip I had planned to take to Texas for other reasons coincided with the final SwimRun race of the season.

Ultimately, this was by far the most I have competed in a year since my triathlon days and the primary reason this happened is because of the team dynamic that exists in the sport of SwimRun. Getting the chance to race with my friends, EK in Whistler, Jacob in Casco, and Steven in Colorado, was a great experience and feels as much an adventure as it does a competition.

2025 Health

I have been known for saying that:

The best plan is the healthy plan.

Typically, this in reference to run training, but it really applies to training as a whole because there is no bigger hindrance to training than if you cannot actually train.

This year I was sidelined with a pretty solid illness in April that forced me to take almost 10 full days off of any training that was more intense than walking. That is the longest time I have missed because of an illness in quite some time. Aside from that, there were a couple times in the year where I felt off and chose to take a rest day and managed to course correct each time.

Aside from that illness, I did not have any major physical injuries that resulted in any extended time off from training. As I mentioned early, I did tweak something in my back (twice) while strength training which did not affect me for more than about 24 hours, but it was something I did in close proximity to one another so it definitely caused me to reconsider my approach in that respect.

Now while I did not have any significant injuries, it does not mean I felt awesome all the time. I still had to manage discomforts that arose, which were typically related to my right ankle (slightly unstable) and some chronic lateral hamstring/glute tightness. However, nothing ever became unmanageable and my consistency remained reasonably high throughout the year.

Looking to 2026

I spent a lot of time writing about goal setting this year1 so I guess I should include a few goals of my own.

I think that trying to achieve 500 hours of aerobic training (and 100 hours of strength training) will not be adjusted from what I sought to achieve this year. It seems to be a highly effective target that aligns well with the rest of my life, but also forces me to be cognizant of my consistency and systems in order to achieve it.

In terms of performance goals, my friend Steven Zawaski2 and I will be racing the Ötillö World Champs in September. The last time I raced in 2023 I finished in ~9:06 and 18th Overall (Team)3 so I would like us to try to better one of those two (either go faster or finish higher), but more importantly, I would like to apply some of the lessons I learned from my first attempt.

If you are interested in reading more about my race in 2023, you can find a recap I wrote HERE.

Finally, in 2025 I spent very little time on snow as it did not align well with some scheduling I had to finish grad school. I would like get back to spending more time in the mountains this year if at all possible.

Engaging in your own year-end review

Athletic progression is built on consistency. The cumulative work that we do and its compounded effects over time is what gives us the best chance of breaking through to the next level.

Taking time at the end each year to review how it went can be a simple, yet highly effective, way of gaining a deeper insight into how we can improve our systems to either enhance, or continue to maintain, our own training consistency.

One thing I would suggest doing is taking some time to make some predictions before you go back into the data. Take a guess as to what your average weekly training volumes were, or how much you did of X, Y, or Z, how many days you took off, etc.

The main thing I would suggest you pay attention to is where your predictions are considerably off from the reality. This provides us with crucial insights into where we may benefit more from periodic check-ins throughout the year to make sure we are staying on task. It also helps us explore the reasons why we may have fallen short of our targets and can lead to a better understanding of what it may take to improve upon that in the future.

Thank You

As we close out 2025, I just wanted to say thank you for taking time to read any of the articles I have posted throughout the year. I hope that they may have been helpful in some way and I wish you all the best in the year to come, whatever your endeavors may be.

-justin

I have been struggling to get a start on writing this article because every time I go to review a study I find another one to read and another and another…

Just for context, if you enter the search query of “prolonged social media use” on google scholar it will give you an initial 1.4 million papers to sort through.

However, if you get a little more into the weeds of social media use and sport performance, it starts to narrow down a bit.

A lot of the experimental design for these studies have consisted of some sort of the following protocols:

A group of athletes within a sport do an initial performance test related to their sport (and usually a Stroop test). The athletes are then randomly assigned to a control or an experimental group. The control group is typically assigned to watch 30 minutes of tv/videos related to their sport while the experimental group is asked to engage in social media for 30 minutes straight on their phones (and in some cases a third group is designated to play video games for 30 minutes).

After doing one of those options for 30 minutes, the athletes are again asked to perform and are evaluated in comparison to their baseline performances. In some studies, this is all done in one session, but in others there may be multiple days in between baseline and experimental conditions depending on the sport (e.g., a study that involved a 50/100/200m time trial in swimming would be difficult to do in one day so the two sessions were one week apart).

Some of the sports where I have seen this protocol used have included boxing, swimming, volleyball, soccer and weightlifting.

Generally speaking, in all the experiments there was a statistically significant decline in performance and/or decision-making for the experimental groups that engaged in 30 minutes of social media use before practicing in their sport.1

These studies are definitely interesting because similar effects of performance degradation are seen in each sport while using a similar experimental design. However, these studies are really only examining the potential acute effects of social media on a single session and not looking at how chronic/long-term social media use might have on an athlete’s performance.

Fortunately, there is one study that came out in 2022 that did just that and it is one I have read through multiple times. The study is titled:

Does Social Media Use on Smartphones Influence Endurance, Power, and Swimming Performance in High-Level Swimmers? (Fortes et al., 2022)

This experiment was designed to take place over 10 weeks in order to examine the long-term effects of social media use prior to training sessions.

The population that was used for this experiment consisted of national level female swimmers from Brazil (25 in total) who had a typical weekly training volume of 15.9 hours/week (across 8-12 total sessions), an average age of 21.8 years, and an average experience level of 5.6 years in the sport (national and regional competitions).

At the outset of the experiment they had all swimmers do the following baseline tests spread across one week:

1. Subjective Mental Fatigue Assessment

2. 50m, 100m and 400m simulated race(s) on different days

3. Countermovement Jump (CMJ) Test (3 attempts)

4. 3-minute tethered swimming test (assessing power)

5. Stroop Test

After this initial round of baseline tests, the athletes were paired according to their 100-meter race times and then split between a control group and experimental group. In other words, they tried to get an even split of performances in each group so that one group was not considerably faster or slower than the other on average.

An important data point to include about each of these groups was their average weekly social media usage. The control group’s average weekly social media usage was 22.7 hours, while the experimental group’s average weekly social media usage was 23.6 hours.

This is an important point to highlight because neither group was unaccustomed to using social media on a regular basis.

From here, the experiment was designed to encompass eight weeks of training (5 sessions/week) with a goal of having the athletes complete 40 total training sessions2 under the following conditions:

• Control Group: Watch 30 minutes of videos (on an 84-inch screen, not a phone) related to the Olympic Games before practice with a five minute window between the video-watching session and the beginning of practice.

• Experimental Group: Engage in 30 minutes of continuous social media use (including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook) before practice with a five minute window between social media use and the beginning of practice.

Both groups were observed and directed not to speak with another during the 30-minute sessions. Each group was also asked not to use their phones for up to two hours before their practice each day.

Only athletes that underwent at least 90% of the sessions were included in the final results.3

Additionally, 30 minutes into each of the 40 training sessions, athletes were asked to rate their perceived exertion (RPE) of the workout to gauge their average internal training load (using a scale of 1-10).

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After eight weeks of training, the swimmers repeated the initial tests they did at the baseline.

The results were as follows:

1. 50-meter swim: Both the Control and Social Media group improved their times.

2. 100-meter swim: Only the Control group improved.

3. 400-meter swim: Only the Control group improved.

4. Countermovement Jump Test: Both groups improved.

5. Tethered Swim Peak Force: Both groups improved

6. Tethered Swim Fatigue Index: Only the Control group improved

7. Tethered Swim Critical force (last 30 seconds of test): Only the Control group improved.

8. Tethered Swim Aerobic Impulse: Only the Control group improved

9. Stroop Test: Only the Control group improved.

10. Subjective Mental Fatigue: Social Media group reported higher subjective mental fatigue than the Control group.

11. Internal Training Load: Social Media group reported a higher average rate of perceived exertion across the eight weeks of training than the Control group.

All in all, the group that used social media prior to practice only improved their 50 meter times, CMJ (force test) and their peak power on the tethered swim after eight weeks of training.

Anything that lasted longer than their 50-meter times (essentially 30 seconds or longer) did not see an improvement within the Social Media group. Moreover, the Social Media group subjectively reported that their daily training consistently felt harder than that of the Control group athletes.

So what should we take away from this study?

In the Discussion section of this paper, there was a lot of emphasis on the lack of objective performance improvements in the various swimming tests/races. I think that is fair, but I am always weary of reading too much into single performance points because there can be a lot of reasons for why a group of athletes may not go faster from one test to another in an experiment.

What actually stood out the most to me was the Internal Training Load variations between the Control and Social Media groups because it was something that was measured at every single practice and not something that is based on a couple data points like the swim tests. Given that the Social Media group continuously reported that their daily training felt slightly harder than the Control group, it likely means that they repeatedly underperformed in their training when compared to the Control group.

If 40 training sessions feel slightly harder than they might otherwise feel, that could have a seriously strong compounding negative effect.

However, I think we have to consider a few things:

• First, we do not know what the effect of watching Olympic Games videos had on the Control group. Did they improve their performance because they abstained from social media or because they watched videos that may have motivated them? Or was it simply the absence of the phone itself (as opposed to using social media) that made the difference?

• Second, it may not be a realistic simulation to make athletes deliberately use social media on their phones for 30 minutes straight before each and every practice (and without talking to anyone else).

• Third, the athletes in each group know what they are doing. If you are in the Social Media group you know you are using social media and if you are in the Control group you know you are not.

• Fourth, social media usage is rapidly changing with its engagement and platforms and limiting the options to WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram may be entirely different to what younger athletes would choose to use (and may change the effects).

I am sure you can think of many more questions that are worth asking, but those are some of the things that quickly came to my mind.

So how can we apply the findings of this study into the field?

When it comes to social media usage, the timing of when we use it may be one of the more important questions that this study has sought to address.

Keep in mind, both groups reported using social media more than 20 hours per week at the outset of the study, so presumably the Control group continued to use social media throughout this experiment; they just did not use it directly before they practiced.

Even though I mentioned that staring at a phone for exactly 30-minutes while using social media and not talking to anyone may not be a perfectly realistic pre-practice simulation, I do think it is realistic to encounter many athletes using their phones and social media right up to the moment they transition to practice/training.

This is where I think the concept of having a transition zone might be helpful.

If you happen to find yourself or athletes you coach consistently on their phones until the moment practice begins, I think one easy strategy to implement is to create a buffer/transition time between the end of phone use and the beginning of training.4 Deciding to put a phone away 15 minutes before every practice starts (as an example, not a standard recommendation) might be enough to make a more effective transition into having better training and practice conditions. (And FWIW, I also think applying that same 15-minute transition to the backend of practice is equally helpful, but that is not backed by anything found in this study).5

Creating a Focus Bubble

A number of years ago, I used to refer to attaining a high level of focus as being in a Focus Bubble. The main idea was to try and create a protective space from the outside noise in hopes of being able to generate and maintain a high level of focus for extended periods of time. Moreover, I always tried to raise an awareness of what might derail my focus and try to create strategies to be more protective of that space.

I think that the transition zone between social media/phone usage and the start of practice falls in line with the spirit of the Focus Bubble. While the amount of time needed to help enhance focus could be different based on individual or team settings, I do think it something worth considering with the intent of improved focus.

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While this is only one study that has looked at prolonged social media usage and performance, I do think it provides some valuable insight into how using social media immediately before training/practice could potentially have a negative effect on performance. Hopefully by taking a deeper dive into this study and its finding, it can help to lead to a better understanding of additional ways to maximize one’s preparation and training, and ultimately, help improve one’s performance.

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References

Fortes, L. S., Nakamura, F. Y., Lima-Junior, D., Ferreira, M. E. C., & Fonseca, F. S. (2022). Does social media use on smartphones influence endurance, power, and swimming performance in high-level swimmers? Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 93(1), 120–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2020.1810848

Over the last couple months, we have touched on multiple aspects of goal setting. If you have not read any of the previous series, you can find links to those articles below:

Goal Setting Part I: Outcome, Performance & Process

Goal Setting Part II: Collaboration

Goal Setting Part III: Specific vs. Non-Specific

Goal Setting Part IV: Difficulty & Timeline

In the final post in the series, we will finish with an overview of goal assessments, follow-ups and adjustments.

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GOAL ASSESSMENTS

I can almost guarantee that at some point you have all have read or seen a quote that says something along the lines of “a goal without a plan is just a wish/dream.”1

I think that statement carries the right sentiment in terms of setting a course of action to achieve a goal, but it does not take into account whether one’s goal(s) led to effective courses of action.

When it comes to assessing the effectiveness of goals, there are some questions I might suggest asking.

First:

Did it generate sustainable motivation?

Oftentimes, the initial creation of goals may generate a surge in motivation, but it might then wane over time if it creates too much friction to achieve it.

For example, I can remember when I was in college I had a goal to improve my cycling (in triathlon) and I made a goal of riding a minimum of five hours every Friday, but as time went on I found the static placement of a goal like this to be problematic depending on my class assignments, the weather, personal life, etc. As a result, I was lacking consistency in executing a five hour Friday ride and that compounded to less motivation over time as I saw myself as falling short of achieving my goal.

The next semester, I was still interested in improving my cycling and I still wanted to ride a minimum of five hours, but this time I just said that the goal would be to ride a minimum of five hours any one day of each week. This gave me the chance to be opportunistic with my schedule and helped me maintain much higher motivation levels as I found myself capable of remaining consistent with my execution.

In addition to asking questions about the motivation levels from goals, I would ask:

Did you achieve your goal?

AND

Does it actually matter?

When assessing goals, it might seem like achieving the goal makes it a successful or effective goal, but I would suggest that setting goals that bring out the best in us is what matters more than the actual achievement of them.

For example, if someone runs a 20:00 5K, they might set a goal of running 19:45 and run that exact time. But if they set a goal of running 19:30 they might run 19:35, missing their goal, but ending up as a faster overall athlete.

When I was still racing, I would often break down major races into the splits I thought it would take to win and reverse engineer the fitness and tactical parameters that might give me the best chance of matching those splits. This then led to developing an action plan towards achieving those goals.

If I assessed the goals on whether I achieved those targets, they would almost all be seen as failures, but if I assessed the goals on whether they brought out the best in me as an athlete, they would, more often than not, be deemed as successful.

All that being said, I am not suggesting that this approach will work for everybody. Some athletes may respond better to seeing specific goals become realized in their entirety rather than setting parameters that are perceived as being too consistently out of their reach.

Regardless of which approach might be best, the overall takeaway should be that the actual achievement of a goal may not be the best, or only, way to assess its effectiveness.

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GOAL FOLLOW-UPS & ADJUSTMENTS

Several years ago, two of my wife’s work colleagues (and close friends), Patty and Cindy, both retired at the same time. As the three of them would no longer be routinely seeing one another at work, they all agreed to get together on a regular basis to connect and stay in contact with one another. It has now been multiple years since their retirement and the three of them still get together with an exceptional level of consistency.

One of the reasons I believe they have managed to continue to maintain such a consistent connection with one another is their follow-up plan. At the conclusion of each of their get-togethers, the last thing they do is set the date for their next meeting. This means they never leave one rendezvous without knowing when the next one will be.

I think this same process can easily be applied to so many other aspects of life and organizations where we are hoping to check in on the progress we are making.

In honor of the lessons I have learned from Patty and Cindy, we will call this the Patty & Cindy Rule:

When conducting a goal setting session, the final course of action should be setting a date and time for a follow up session to assess progress and make appropriate adjustments.

While I believe many athletes fully intend to check back in on the progress of their goals, making an official time to do so will significantly increase the chances of that happening. Just as we often intend on getting together with certain friends, when we do not set a date, it may fall by the wayside.

Once the time has been set for a follow-up season, the next step is making any needed adjustments. There are a couple things that stand out to me when working in this process.

First, an athlete needs to ask the question: is the rate of progression reasonably in line with what was anticipated towards a long term goal (like a performance time)?

Typically, if the rate of progression is out of the range of expectations, it is usually the case that it is taking longer than expected to make certain gains, but it could also be the case that progression is exceeding expectations and goals might need to be adjusted accordingly to help maintain an appropriate challenge level. Regardless of what the case may be, the athlete should consider whether their goals should remain the same or be adjusted in either direction.

Next, particularly when it comes to process goals, athletes may not need to adjust their goals in any way, but they should provide some evaluation of how well they are executing them.

For example, a swimmer might have made a process goal such as “I will finish each interval at practice into the wall (i.e., no gliding).”

Now, it might be difficult to know if they did this on every interval of every workout, but they may be able to consider whether that has been top-of-mind during their workouts (i.e., is it something they are routinely thinking about). If it has not been, then these follow-up sessions give the athlete the chance to realign and refocus on the goals that they had initially set for themselves. Moreover, with these follow-up sessions, athletes can garner greater self-reflection and establish a better sense of what is in their control that they can focus on to help increase their performance improvement.

I was just rewatching the movie Rudy the other day and the main character keeps asking the question: “have I done everything I could?” (in his case, to give him the best chance of getting accepted into Notre Dame).

To help Rudy answer that question for himself, I might suggest a regular check in where he can ask:

What process goals did I set for myself to help me improve?

How successful have I been in executing those goals?

Is it within my control to increase that level of execution going forward?

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Over the last couple months we have explored various aspects of goal setting, from the different types of goals, the power of collaboration, the need (or lack thereof) for specificity, the range of difficulty and timelines, and finally how to assess, follow up and adjust goals over time.

Ultimately, while I have tried to help highlight certain aspects of goal setting that may help make the process more impactful, I think the primary takeaway should be that goal setting can, and should, look different for each and every athlete.

Good luck!

-justin

In the first three parts of this series, we covered multiple topics related to goal setting.

In Part I, we discussed the differences between process, performance and outcomes goals and how process goals had the greatest impact on performance improvements.

In Part II, we covered the concept of collaboration in goal setting and how the combined power of experts in a field can help increase the effectiveness of goal setting on performance improvements.

In Part III, we explored the differences between non-specific and specific goals and how both can, and should, be incorporated to help improve performance.

Each previous installment of this goal setting series has been contrasted with a 30+ year meta-analysis on goal setting in sport along with my own interpretation and observation of what I have seen in the field.

In Part IV, I would like to cover a two themes that are closed related with goal setting: Goal Difficulty and Goal Timelines.

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GOAL DIFFICULTY

In the meta-analysis1 on goal setting that has served as the foundation of this series, the authors noted that one of the limitations of the findings in the studies they included was that goal difficulty was not adequately incorporated into research.

This is particularly interesting because applied sport psych texts include language like this:

“Locke and his associates (1981) have found a direct relationship between goal difficulty and task performance. That is, the more difficult the goal, the better the performance. It must be remembered, however, that this relationship is true only when the difficulty of the goal does not exceed the performer’s ability. Unrealistic goals that exceed the ability of an athlete only lead to failure and frustration.”2

We are being told to make difficult goals, but not too difficult.

The level of nuance in the quote above is probably warranted, but it is not necessarily very helpful in distinguishing the line that has to be drawn on creating the Goldilocks Zone of how difficult goals should be.

Soooo, where do we go from here?

Well, I do not have The Answer either, but I think a good rule of thumb is:

The longer the time frame of setting a goal, the higher the level of difficulty can be.

An athlete can have goals for what they want to do in several years that might be quite difficult to achieve. However, as the timeline shortens to a season, or a month, or to today, the difficulty of goals needs to be contextualized and framed around creating a more achievable level. Making continued progress towards big, difficult goals requires the focus and completion of many goals in the near term.

For example, imagine an athlete is currently capable of bench pressing 100 pounds for their one rep max. This same athlete then sets a goal of one day being able to bench press 400 pounds, which is nowhere near their current capability, but given the timeline of being able to do it “one day” it does not really matter how difficult they have made that particular goal.

However, the athlete then needs to work their way towards lifting 400 pounds, which requires a focus on what can be done along the way. This might look like trying to see how much progress they can make on their 100 pound max in the next month.

Now the difficulty of their goal matters much more. 400 pounds is obviously too difficult, but where should the line be drawn? Should the goal be to increase their bench press in one month by one pound? 10 pounds? 50 pounds?

The answer will likely depend on a variety of factors like experience level, training availability, etc., but with a shortened timeline, it naturally leads to a narrowed range of applicable difficulty.

Although several considerations are involved in determining the tipping point of goal difficulty, the goal timeline itself can help narrow the range of what’s appropriate (especially when done collaboratively).

As the goal timeline moves closer to the present, goals can be constructed with more precision and with difficulty levels that are better matched to the athlete’s current capacity.

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GOAL TIMELINES

When I was a senior in high school3, I had an English Class with Mr. Nathan and one of our assignments was to write a series of journal entries on any topic of our choosing. It was not necessarily a difficult assignment when you had something you wanted to write about, but every now and then it felt challenging to come up with a new idea.

One of the days where I was having a hard time coming up with ideas to write about, I decided to come up with a bucket list of sorts. I started writing down different things I wanted to do in my lifetime.4

I was 18 at the time of that assignment. By the time I was 25, I had done everything on the list. Turns out I didn’t need a lifetime.

I bring this story up because I sometimes hear athletes develop goals that are probably more achievable in the near term than they may realize and I wonder whether the timeline they set for themselves leads to less of a sense of urgency to get to work in the near term.

This concept is better summarized by something I read in Tribe of Mentors,5 which is a book that consists of the same subset of questions being presented to a variety of people who have had a lot of success in their respective fields.

There are a few answers that have stuck with me since I first read the book seven years ago, including one answer to the following question:

What advice would you give to a smart, driven student about to enter the “real world”?

One of the answers (albeit a bit truncated) that stuck out to me was:

“Macro patience, micro speed. They should not care about the next eight years, but they should care about the next eight days.”6

The answer goes on to expand on this idea with some colorful language and examples, but the overall takeaway is that the goals people are setting for themselves in the long term are not necessarily being reflected by the actions they are taking in the near term.

This is why I think goal timelines matter and why I think it is important for athletes to understand the somewhat paradoxical idea that:

• No one day will make or break you, AND YET

• Every single day matters.

When goals are set too far in the horizon, it can potentially lead to more of a reliance on the first part, rather than the second part, of that paradoxical idea. In other words, goals set too far in the future may distract someone from the goals and work that can be accomplished on a daily basis.

If the goal feels too distant, the importance of what can be done today may be overlooked.

Therefore, I would advise athletes to balance the difficult, long-term goals they set for themselves by continually creating and assessing various short-term goals. Doing so helps them move toward their long-term vision by steadily building on the progress they can make each and every day.

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I had intended to make this the final part of this series, but I think that’s enough for today. The last area I want to cover before we move on to something else will be about goal assessments, follow-ups and adjustments.

If you are coming across this series on goal setting for the first time, I would recommend reading Parts I & II before we move onto Part III.

Goal Setting Part I: Outcome/Performance/Process

Goal Setting Part II: Collaboration

In Part III, we are going to look at the importance of setting specific versus non-specific goals in sport.

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If you have ever seen, read or heard a goal setting presentation or workshop, I can almost guarantee that it involved the SMART acronym at some point.

I have used the acronym in my own presentations, with an excerpt of it seen below:

Generally speaking, the SMART acronym consists of some iteration of what you see above:

Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Adjustable, Realistic/Reasonable, Time-Bound.

You may have seen some other terms used somewhat interchangeably with what I chose to use, but the one term that is never left out (or changed) is the first one:

SPECIFIC.

There has been an almost universal acceptance that if a goal is not specific, it will not be highly effective. Typically, a goal that is seen as “specific” would entail a direct target or outcome (e.g., run a mile in 7:00) versus a “non-specific” goal that has a more general tone (e.g., I will “try/do my best”).

The two foundational researchers (Locke & Latham1) in goal-setting theory have stated that:

“When people are asked to do their best, they do not do so.”

You also find statements like this within Applied Sport Psych2 texts:

“If athletes are to show performance improvements, specific measurable goals must be set!”

All this makes it seem like setting specific goals is an unquestionable axiom.

However, when researchers conducted a meta-analysis3 that looked at goal setting in sport from over 30 years of studies they found that:

“Non-specific goals appear to be just as effective as specific goals for improving sport performance.”

Now, I presume that the authors understood that making this statement would be highly questioned by their peers and they dedicated an extensive amount of their word count to qualifying their statements and explaining potential reasons for their findings.4

So this leaves us with the question of which types of goals should be used?

Specific or Non-Specific?

In my opinion:

Athletes should use both.

One thing I want to quickly underscore…

The researchers that found no difference in specific versus non-specific goals did_not _find that non-specific goals were more effective than specific goals.

Instead, they found that non-specific goals were just_as_effective as specific goals for improving sport performance.

As I see it, this makes the time and application of using non-specific versus specific goals the more important question rather than choosing to always use one type of goal over the other.

This is definitely something I have seen play out in the field. Sometimes it helps to have very specific goals in mind, and other times it helps to relieve yourself of fixed and measurable targets to work towards.

A couple weeks ago, I was talking with a younger athlete who mentioned that the previous season they had raced really well at a running event where they “really had no idea what to expect, I just tried to race my best.” Moreover, they reflected on how they were uncertain on what sort of times to expect on that particular course which also led to them staying away from setting specific goals.

However, that was last year, not this year.

This year, they set specific goals that were reflective of their previous performance and considerate of the course and conditions (i.e., they knew what a competitive time for them would be).

Moreover, the goals they established to improve upon their previous performance served as a strong source of motivation, giving purpose and direction to their training in the preceding block(s).

The athlete went on to set a new personal best on the course at this year’s race.

The same athlete was able to use both non-specific and specific goals at different times that both led to performance improvements.

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The previous example speaks a bit to how non-specific and specific goals might change as an athlete’s experience grows. An athlete that is new, or somewhat new, to a sport might garner more benefit from repeatedly trying to simply “do their best” in place of setting specific goals that are more concrete and measurable. As the athlete progresses and becomes more experienced, then specific goals might start to become more salient and helpful to their continued improvement.

Nevertheless, I do think it can be helpful for athletes to find a time and place to use both non-specific and specific goals regardless of how experienced they are.

For example, I have found it to be helpful when experienced athletes can incorporate competitions in their season that will vary in terms of course terrain, competition level and timing of the year (i.e., they may have varied fitness levels). The purpose of this approach is to try and balance highly focused competitions with competitions that have less pressure and expectations.

When this type of competition variance exists in a season, it can often lend itself well to the inclusion of both:

1) highly specific goals built around their high-priority events, as well as

2) opportunities for competitions where lesser defined or non-specific goals can be readily incorporated and used.

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Utility of Goals

The final point related to the use of specific and non-specific goals is understanding the fluid nature of the utility of the different types of goals. Something that has been effective for us at one point may start to hold us back at another, and we may need to shift our focus and reframe our pursuits differently.

Looking back….

In 2003, I was training for Ironman Florida as an age group triathlete. It was going to be my second Ironman to date, but the first one that I would consider myself to have properly prepared for. As I trained for the race, I developed a very specific goal of completing the race in 9:17, assuming there was not something (way) out of the ordinary on race day.

I ended up finishing the race in 9:20 with a flat tire, so pretty close to my goal. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but the use of specific goals served me well on the day.5

In 2006, I transitioned from racing as an age group triathlete to a professional. The transition did not come easily for me and both the 2006 and 2007 seasons saw little tangible progress in terms of performances and results. I had raced Ironman Florida in 2006 and Ironman Canada in 2007 and I was stuck around the same time and relative position. I could not seem to break through and it felt as though my use of specific goals was really just keeping me stuck in the same place.

In early September 2007, I was nine weeks out from Ironman Florida and for whatever reason, I can remember I decided that I was going to shift my approach.

I recall that I told myself my only goal was “to get as fit as possible in nine weeks and see what happens.”

Nine weeks later I set a 17-minute personal best on race day and had my first professional top-10 finish. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but non-specific goals served me well on that day.

While this example highlighted a moment of shifting away from the use specific goals, there were other times where I felt like a lack of specificity was more problematic than helpful, prompting a move toward more objective and measurable goals.

It can be hard to anticipate when one style of goal setting may lose or gain in its utility. The more important takeaway may be simply understanding that the utility of different types of goals may wax and wane in their effectiveness and being open to a shifting approach might be beneficial to long-term performance improvements.

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In the fourth, and final, part of this series I will cover a few other areas of goal setting that I believe can be helpful for athletes to incorporate.

In Part I of this series on goal setting, we covered how outcome, performance and process goals impacted performance improvements, based on the findings in the meta-analysis by Williamson and colleagues (2022).

As a recap, when comparing how the different goal types positively impacted performance, the authors found that:

Process Goals > Performance Goals > Outcome Goals

You can find more details about the three goal types and their impacts on performance in Part I, but for now, I will be moving on to other topics related to goal setting that were found in the meta-analysis, starting with the effect of collaboration.

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Collaboration

When reviewing this paper, there are a lot of different findings that could be discussed and highlighted, but one area that stood out to me is what I would call collaborative goal setting.

On page 1063, the authors wrote:

“Although goals produced significant effects when set by the researcher or self-set by the participant, researcher-set goals were significantly more effective.”

This was followed up with:

“Goals only approached significance when set cooperatively by researchers, coaches or participants.”

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Now, when looking at the first statement, the fact that research-set goals were better than participant-set goals is not necessarily all that surprising if you can imagine the context. The reason this may be happening is that the participants may have little-to-no experience with the activity that is being used for the experiment (e.g., throwing darts), whereas the researcher has observed many individuals with similar experience levels (or lack thereof) take on the activity. Therefore, the participants might not know what to focus on or what might be reasonable or unreasonable when setting goals.

As athletes gain experience and move along the spectrum from novice to expert, this dynamic may weaken considerably, but there is something that is worth keeping in mind.

Experts can also be novices.

For example, earlier this year I was speaking about goal setting with a group of strength and conditioning coaches. This particular group of coaches was unique as the majority of their athletes were professional/elite endurance athletes.

However, while the athletes may be experts at their sport, many were much more novice in the realm of strength training, which may diminish their ability to effectively set goals in this particular capacity. Therefore, the coaches’ expertise could be substantially helpful and impactful if they worked collaboratively with the athletes to help them set goals.

Having said that, I did not advise coaches to simply set goals for these athletes. Instead, I suggested that the coaches regularly check in to see what goals the athletes have set for themselves and whether those goals would align with what the coaches might have suggested, if asked.

If they find themselves pretty closely aligned, great. If there happens to be a pretty big delta, then this gives a chance for the coach to ask questions and get more information on how the athlete developed this particular set of goals. This will hopefully encourage more open dialogue and collaboration, leading to better and more effective goal setting practices.

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On the flip side, what about the athletes’ perspective?

As athletes, it is important to remember that our experience and expertise may vary based on the context. When we work with coaches and experts to help us improve, we should encourage them to assist us in the goal setting process so that we can increase its chances of having a positive impact on our performance.

I have often used an analogy where I suggest that an athlete is the CEO of their own improvement.

But like a CEO of a company, they cannot be an expert in every capacity, so they need to bring in others to help advise and counsel them in ways that can help their work towards performance improvements. The athlete CEO is left with making the final decisions that align with their goals and vision, but this collaborative process can help them better understand the path they need to take to improve their chances of success.

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A story about collaborative goal setting:

Over twenty years ago, I remember a story that my coach (at the time) told me about an athlete he was working with who had ambitions of racing well at the Ironman World Championship in Kona, HI. One day, the coach asked the athlete to write down the time he thought he was capable of running in the marathon leg of the race. The coach said he would simultaneously write down what he thought the athlete was capable of and then they would both reveal their answers to one another at the same time.

They both proceeded to write down their time predictions.

They each showed each other their answers.

Their answers matched each others’ exactly.

What stood out the most to me was that their time predictions were five minutes faster than the current run course record (at the time). Not only was it a time that had never been run before, but it was beyond the current mark by a considerable margin.

I always thought that this story was sort of a prime example of what it means for athletes and coaches to be on the same page with one another. While I had not necessarily kept this story in mind as an example of collaborative goal setting, I do think it fits quite well.

Even if you are not in the business of trying to break run course records and win world championships, you can still gain a lot from adhering to the same basic tenets of setting goals collaboratively, soliciting advice and counsel from trusted experts, and keeping an ongoing and open dialogue with your team.

References

Williamson, O., Swann, C., Bennett, K. J. M., Bird, M. D., Goddard, S. G., Schweickle, M. J., & Jackman, P. C. (2022). The performance and psychological effects of goal setting in sport: A systematic review and meta-analysis. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 17(2), 1050–1078. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2022.2116723

“You gotta have a goal. Do you have a goal?”

-Kit De Luca

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To this day, whenever I hear the word “goal” my mind almost always goes to one of the final scenes of Pretty Woman where Kit De Luca1 says the quote above as Edward Lewis2 proceeds to buy flowers from a roadside vendor nearby.

I brought in this anecdote because I think it speaks to the ubiquity of setting goals. No matter what we do, the incorporation of goal setting is almost a given, regardless of how/why/when/where it is done.

Sport is no different.

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Earlier this year, I gave a presentation on goal setting to several different groups of athletes and before I gave the presentation, I had the good fortune to come across the following open access paper:

The performance and psychological effect of goal setting in sport: A systematic review and meta-analysis (Williamson et al., 2022)

I have read this paper multiple times, including a re-read before writing this article, and I really think it is helpful in looking at some of the ways that athletes, coaches, teams, etc. can use the craft of goal setting in a way that may result in more positive impacts on performance. I would encourage anyone that wants to take a deep dive into this topic to read the paper above.3

For the purposes of this article series, my intention is to incorporate some of the findings from this paper and discuss my own interpretations of what this may mean when applying their findings on goal setting directly into the field.

Outcome, Performance, & Process Goals

In the realm of goal setting, there is a lot of variation of how to set goals, but particularly when it comes to sport, you will often see goal setting categories that are delineated into outcome, performance and process goals.

As a general overview, these three categories can be defined as:

Outcome Goals: These are goals that are related to the outcome of a performance, such as winning, placing, or beating an opponent.

Performance Goals: These are goals that are created relative to one’s own personal performance improvements, such as setting a personal best time at a race distance (e.g., running one’s fastest 5K time to date).

Process Goals: These are goals that are related to the technique, procedures, skills, etc. that are being applied while performing (e.g., a cyclist in a time trial may be focused on holding a specific head and hand position to help enhance their performance; a swimmer may be focused on a specific component of their stroke, etc.).

Now with those definitions in mind, the authors found the following as it relates to outcome, performance and process goals (p. 1024):

“Process goals and performance goals produced significant improvements in performance (d’s ≥ 0.44), but process goals elicited significantly greater improvements than performance goals (Q =4.77[1], p = .029). Conversely, no significant performance improvements were found by setting mastery, outcome, or ego goals.”

So what we essentially have from this paper, in terms of a hierarchy of the effectiveness for goal setting on performance in sport, is:

Process Goals > Performance Goals > Outcome Goals

My general interpretation of why this may be the case has to do with the level control that the athlete has when it comes to the types of goals they are using.

An athlete has the least amount of control when it comes to setting outcome goals, more control when it comes to performance goals, and the most control when it comes to process goals. Therefore, with goals that allow the athlete to exhibit more control, the more likely it may be to have a positive effect on performance.

Should outcome goals still be used?

I mentioned that outcomes goals are associated with the goal of winning/placing (a race, a championship, etc.), but these authors found that “no significant performance improvements were found by setting mastery, outcome, or ego goals.”

So given that outcome goals were not associated with performance improvements, should we do away with them altogether?

In my opinion, no. We should not discard outcome goals, but we need some context on how they might best be incorporated.

First, when someone is brand new to a sport, the incorporation of outcome goals is less relevant to performance improvements than it will ever be. Being overly concerned with winning or beating an opponent (as a goal) when someone has no experience or skill in a sport is irrelevant at best, and detrimental at worst.

However, as someone progresses through their sport, specific outcome targets will eventually become a more salient consideration.

While outcome goals may have their least relevance on day one as an athlete in a new sport, let’s think about the other extreme end of the spectrum.

For example, every four years the United States hosts a series of Olympic Trials to determine who will make the Olympic team in their respective event and sport.4 In swimming, the top two finishers in the finals (at Trials) for their event advance onto the team.5 If an athlete has made it to the top of the sport of swimming and has Olympic ambitions, then the need to place in the top two in their event is a reality and an outcome that cannot be ignored.

Nevertheless, despite the inevitability of outcome goals, it still does not allow an athlete’s control to increase towards performance improvements.

This is why I like to consider outcome goals as setting the vision for athletes. Even though an outcome is out of an athlete’s control, it can still fit well in this overarching function.

Once the vision is set, the athlete can then focus back on more of the controllables that come with the incorporation of performance and process goals.

Using Performance Goals as Anchor Goals

Similar to the question about whether outcome goals should be discarded, the next question is whether performance goals are really needed if process goals have been found to be more effective than performance goals in the research.

Should we just only focus on process goals and leave performance goals behind?

Again, my answer is no. In my opinion, I believe that performance goals can serve as the “anchor goal” that informs both our outcome and our process goals.

A quick story that also uses the sport of swimming.

Early in 2024, American swimmer Regan Smith was sick with mononucleosis. As a way to keep herself focused while she let her body recover, she began to think about what times she felt she was capable of swimming at the Olympic Trials later that summer6.

When it came to the 100-meter backstroke, she wrote down 57.13 as a potential target.

Later that summer, Smith swam exactly 57.13 in the 100-meter backstroke final, making her second Olympic team and setting a new world record (she had a personal best of 57.57 previously).

The reason I bring this story up is that Smith did not brainstorm about making an Olympic team or setting a world record (outcomes that were out of her control), but instead, she looked to what she believed would be performing to her personal potential.

By establishing a goal centered on her own performance, it helped to

1. Increase her chances of making an Olympic Team and setting a World record (outcomes), and

2. It helped her focus on improving various processes that could help her shave .44 seconds off her previous personal best.

When I was starting out in triathlon over 25 years ago, I looked more to swimmers, cyclists and runners than I did to triathletes on how to improve in each discipline.7 Based on my various experiences, I always found swimmers to be some of the best athletes when it comes to focusing on the process and honing their skills. This probably has something to do with the consistency with which they compete (e.g., standard distances, water temperatures, etc.8) where performance differences are consistently achieved and measured on the tiniest of margins.

I have no idea of what sorts of process goals Smith set for herself in the lead up to the U.S. Trials, but when I watched that race (and many of her other races), she did exceptionally well on her ability to maximize her time and speed under water in comparison to her competitors. It is something that she has managed to set herself apart from her competitors in a sport that is exceptionally difficult to find separation.

The skill she exhibited then (and now) is something I have to imagine has been a constant focus of her training leading into events and while performing in those said events. This likely required continual process goals to improve all aspects of her stroke while training and competing.

In order to nail every hundredth of that 57.13, Smith needed to nail the process(es).

And she absolutely did.

Smith’s performance inspired my idea of referring to performance goals as anchor goals which is represented in the visual below.

Setting a performance goal informs and directs the formation of process goals as well as the path towards our outcome goals.

By setting and executing our process goals, we increase our chances of achieving our performance goals.

When we achieve our performance goals, it gives us a greater chance to achieve our outcome goals.

So we really do have to “focus on the process?”

I am certain that all of you have heard that you either have to “trust the process” or “focus on the process” in one context or another. As the phrase reaches platitude status, it might be easy to dismiss the phrase as something people (like me) simply say when they don’t have anything else to say.

Even if that’s true, it does not take away from the fact that the utilization of process goals (and focusing on the process) helps with performance improvements.

When it comes to outcome goals and performance goals, I do not tend to get a lot of questions about what they are and what they entail. Attaining a certain outcome and achieving a personal best performance are generally self-explanatory.

However, process goals can sometimes create some confusion. As a result, I think process goals can be more easily developed by asking:

What do I need to do very well to perform at my best?

Good, but let’s go one step further:

What do I need to do very well to perform at my best that I can control?

When an athlete answers these questions, I think it can help me get a better grasp on the aspects of their performance that they can improve with an internal focus on their process(es).

Moreover, outcomes are only the final result of a performance, so any time they become a primary focus while competing, they shift the mind away from staying present on the task at hand.

Conversely, when athletes continually emphasize a focus on different processes, they can have a better chance of staying present in the here and now which can potentially lead them to better performance improvements.

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That wraps up Part I related to outcome, performance and process goals.

In Part II of this series, we will take a deeper dive in other aspects of goal setting that were found to be effective beyond the foundational usage of outcome, performance and process goals.

References

Williamson, O., Swann, C., Bennett, K. J. M., Bird, M. D., Goddard, S. G., Schweickle, M. J., & Jackman, P. C. (2022). The performance and psychological effects of goal setting in sport: A systematic review and meta-analysis. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 17(2), 1050–1078. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2022.2116723