Back to Business

Christmas is over.  It is time to get to the business of training.

Kind of funny, don't you think.  Mostly because my training continued through the holidays.  With family visiting I still found time to sneak away and get some training in.

The business of training contains a number of basic steps.  Letting my coach know my future availability for training,  receiving and reviewing the training plans, and providing feedback to my coach.  Just the basics.  I guess following the training plan is a part of it too!

Since my theme this year is train to attack (last year was train to survive)  the basics are just not good enough.  What is beyond the basics?

It is not just more training, more and longer workouts.  If more and longer were the only keys to any successful endeavor there would be 1000's of multi-million businesses everyday, there would be far more successful musicians and a lot more gold medal winners.  Many have worked long and hard to achieve success.  Their efforts are  applauded but not always rewarded.  Not every hard working musician makes it big,  not every entrepreneur makes millions (even if he has a better mouse trap).

Now do not get the impression that there is an easy way to achieve big things.  It is not just the only thing.  This is a coy way of saying that:

 "Practice Does Not Make Perfect.  Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect."

Most of us grew up with the opposite of the first part of the previous statement.  In fact a quick google search on the statement "practice makes perfect"  brings up an entire industry of responses.  From self help books to academic journals everyone has an opinion regarding Practice makes perfect.  I guess that that is true for most things.  Everyone has an opinion.

Simply put if you practice something the wrong way you /may end up getting very good at doing it wrong but never good at doing it right.

Here is my example of that.  For the last 3-4 years i have been diligently working on my running.  If I could get my run times to just average I could place much higher in races.  My work has paid some dividends.  I am faster.  I am no where near average yet.  At Ironman Louisville I did place reasonably well but that was mostly because of the large number of DNF's.

I still am unable to generate any more raw speed than I did 4 years ago. Even after dropping about 20 lbs I am still a very slow 40 yard guy.  I felt I was doing everything right; still no speed.  I have never been a fast runner.  One of the reasons I gravitate to distance running is total ineptitude at sprinting.  I must be doing things wrong.

So back to the basics.  At club workouts I badgered the coaches to watch me very carefully.  At every movement of every drill I made them pay close attention to me.  Am I doing this right?  Is this movement fast enough?  I had them watch me enough until they finally pointed out an exercise that I was very poor at.  Without going into all the finite details we came to the conclusion that I still "push" too much when I run as opposed to lifting.

I was doing about 90% of it right but is the 10% that was slowing me down.  Has it fixed it, am I now generating the raw speed.  NO!  just because I have identified the weakness does not mean it is fixed.  Now comes the fun part, deciding how to fix the problem.

Since Christmas  I have coaches watch me a number of times.  After all I am paying my club membership fees.  Still no definite fix.  Still working on it!!!