Ask yourself this question: if your heart rate monitor
broke, would you ride or run without it? Or would you not exercise until it was
fixed and/or replaced?
You may be surprised by just how many athletes of all levels
would choose the latter as their answer. Endurance athletes of today - generally
speaking of course - are becoming more and more reliant on what I would loosely
term “biofeedback technology.” This is all very well but what does it do to
your brain? Should your entire athletic destiny/ability/enjoyment be in the
hands of technology?
The bottom line is that many people are not using their
ability to think and hence make decisions for themselves athletically.
I listened to an amusing and entertaining podcast the
other day, hosted by the hilarious Paul Huddle, a former
top professional triathlete and now a highly respected coach/commentator/event organizer.
Together with his business partner Roch Frey and tri-legend Jimmy Riccitello, the trio discussed
their “pet peeves” amongst today’s triathlete, which gave some interesting
insights.
A recurring topic during the discussion was that, as
coaches, they feel that today’s approach to training is way too complicated.
While life in general was a lot simpler “back in the day”, the consensus is
that many coaching programs have to have some kind of quick fix/secret/appeal
to be marketable in the now highly competitive industry of endurance coaching.
Riccitello goes on to relate how he swam a main set of 40x50m
every single Monday throughout his pro-career, adding that “how do you market
40x50m to the consumer?” It may be highly
effective; it certainly would get results; but would that kind of basic workout
be attractive to a potential client?
He goes to quip that he is currently writing his own book on
health nutrition, where the first chapter would be entitled “Don’t Eat Shit.”
At first you may laugh, but he is right. The subjects of fitness and nutrition
have been complicated to such a degree that many people simply cannot fathom
what is right and what is crap.
The message that this podcast brings is simple: if you are
an athlete at any level, you have to learn to think for yourself. Your intuition
– that little voice in your head – is one of your greatest attributes in
determining what is right for you. Not to say that people do not need coaches.
But if an athlete seeks out a coach, there needs to be a coach-athlete partnership
where the athlete’s independence is gradually developed, which in turn improves
their confidence and subsequent performance.
You may be surprised to learn that many top athletes across
the entire spectrum on endurance sports have an extremely
simple – sometimes even unconventional
– approach to training, eschewing numbers altogether. This is an important fact
seeing many people look to these elite sports people as role models.
One size certainly does not fit all.
Don’t be a robot.
