Endurance sports: When goals take a back seat to process
We intuit that the mind leads and the body follows. What you may not know is that many of the new-fangled concepts have been around for thousands of years. The following quote from Patanjali's Raja Yoga Sutras on meditation is dated at least as early as 150 BC.
"The mind is controlled through tireless endeavor and non-attachment." (Book I, Sutra 12)
Most athletes have no trouble with the "tireless endeavor" part, which means literally constant practice, ceaseless repetition and the reiterated effort to impose new rhythm upon the old.
Our problem comes with the "non-attachment" clause. We are taught to set goals and focus on achieving them. Our modern culture stresses the bottom line, and we do indeed become attached to the results.
By their very nature, endurance athletes are goal-seeking and often obsessed with "winning," be it against other athletes or in line with their own time, distance or self-esteem goals. These are useful traits when planning your race season, training objectives and goals for the upcoming period.
Without some target to aim at, training and racing have no purpose. Yet one of the key components to achieving these goals is an ability to rightfully forget about them during the actual performance.
No one can deny the fiercely competitive, goal-directed nature of Tiger Woods, who won his first Masters title at age 21. While putting to clinch the victory, he could remember being so focused on reading the green, the mechanics of the stroke, tuning out the crowd, that he was a surprised when he heard cheers after it dropped.
In 1993 a 71-year-old man stepped up to the line in a local gymnasium and sunk 2,750 free throws in a row. He walked away without a miss -- they were closing the gym and asked him to leave. World-record holder Dr. Tom Amberry was asked why great shooters like Michael Jordan or Larry Bird couldn't make 99% to 100% of their free throws.
His answer: "They're too worried about making it or not, about winning the game. When I'm shooting a free throw, I don't think of anything else. I am 100% positive I will make the basket."
He thinks about things like lining up the seams properly and sighting the basket.
With all the emotional energy we invest as endurance athletes in achieving our goal, how can we reach this transcendent state of awareness? Here are some practical suggestions:
1. Forget yourself
Becoming totally absorbed in what one is doing means not having any space for worrying about one's self. Stop worrying about what others think about you, and you can gain freedom from self-consciousness.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to achieving total flow is our feeling of self. So much of our training time is spent in self-evaluation, and our race results are evaluated by event, time, placing, pace, course -- everything. Is it any surprise we are self-critical?
Interestingly enough, the better athletes perform, the greater the criticism they are likely to receive from peers and the media, requiring great detachment. This may explain why it's so difficult to stay at the top year after year in events like the Ironman and competitive golf, having more to do with psychological rather than physical stress.
2. Focus on the process
To understand what process is, we must first define what it is not. It is the polar opposite to results or outcome. If you are thinking about the finish line at the halfway point of the race, you can't think about what you should be doing at that moment.
Process occurs in the present. What you did in training, at this race last year, in a different race last month, or what you'll do in the next event doesn't matter.
Fans would ask Lance Armstrong about his thoughts during a six-hour Tour de France stage. He answered simply, "I think about cycling." Process focus is something that can be learned in training. We do this already with things like stroke drills in the pool, pedaling drills on the bike, striding drills on the run and heart rate or power monitoring.
Personally, I find the heart rate monitor a great way to keep you in the present moment, focused more in the immediate bodily state than on miles-per-hour or minutes-per-mile.
3. Bodily awareness
Elite athletes and coaches tell us to "listen to our body." It's also a great way to forget your ego, paying attention to the physical flow absent of self-talk.
The rhythm of your breathing, muscle response and the pulse of the heart take center stage in your consciousness while your ego and social identity recede into the background.
For many of us, this dissolution of the ego was a primary reason for entering arduous endurance events and their required training -- that sublime loss of self, the floating-through-space feeling that often accompanies longer or peak performances. It's what I live for in sport.
We still need to set long- and short-term goals, but once the goals are set they should fade into the background. It's been said that our vices are merely our virtues taken to a negative extreme. Goal-setting is like that.
If you ask an endurance athlete about the deeper purpose of their pursuit, it's doubtful you'll get a quick, straight answer even when the respondent is sincere. I have trouble answering this one myself, perhaps no closer now than when I began years ago. We tend to define most of our activities in reference to self, and when we try to similarly define endurance sports, perhaps we feel an inherent incongruity between ego and the transcendent awareness we achieve while training and racing.
"You have to lose yourself to indeed find yourself," and perhaps nowhere is this more true than endurance sports.
Tom Rodgers trained astronauts for physiology experiments aboard the International Space Station at NASA before becoming a certified Ultrafit coach. He has a 9:59 Ironman PR at age 40, multiple Ironman Hawaii finishes and a top masters finish at Ultraman Hawaii. He coaches triathlon and road cycling, is a USAT All-American triathlete and the top-ranked masters triathlete in the Southern Midwest region for 2003. His upcoming book on long-course triathlons, "The Perfect Distance" (edited by Joe Friel), is scheduled for publication in 2004 by Velo Press. Find out more about his coaching and racing at www.svi.net or email coach@svi.net.
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