Ultimately, we have to live with the paradox of performance. Opposite things can be simultaneously true.
You can feel horrible and perform well. Conversely, you can feel good and be off pace.
The best way to know a performance well is to know yourself well. Here’s the brutal truth: A Garmin can’t tell you that and a TSS won’t reflect it.
Sometimes we need to be on fumes. Other times we need overload. Maybe a challenge we can’t cope with.
At times we need to feel overwhelmed, anxious, frustrated, annoyed or even angry. Because we need to be at our wits' end to find our edge. That’s growth!
Flow demands that you find acceptance in all of that and asks the question, how fast can I get back to flow from here?
Yea, that’s right. You are going between two points as fast as you can in a race, but there is also a distance within yourself that you must learn to cover and cover it quickly. The point A of that distance is called judgment and the point B is called flow and presence.
Because let’s be honest, when you hit that wobble late in the race, you better damn well know you can stay in the game, because that’s when things get real, what ya got now all your numbers are falling flat?
Have you practised functioning on fumes? At least sometimes?
A lot of people replied with, well my power and pace was off so I went back to bed, really?
You going to come at the race with that one?
I never really factored being down to fumes and having to function because I was too busy following my training stress score?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that data, but let’s explore the inner data that goes through to the keeper.
The power of your reframe, the connection of your re-attention, the speed of your inner reset, your acceptance level, the quality of your presence regardless of what is happening. None of that is getting measured.
None of it!
The race in the latter stages is all about that, you could say, only about that.
Patience when we are feeling bad is another criterion. It’s not just about waiting, it’s patience with being patient and having the audacity and balls to not lose hope.
That’s the real definition of resilience.
When we talk about power, we need to broaden the term.
You gotta investigate yourself. What do I say to myself when I feel terrible? What’s the inner dialogue when the conditions are horrible?
If I’m matching horrible conditions with toxic, resistant thoughts, I am not going to perform.
It literally spins my coaching brain that generally, we are still not really touching this. It seems the more technologically advanced we are becoming, the further from it we are moving.
Performance is like an iceberg, we only see what’s above the water line but the bulk of it is in the depths we can’t see and can’t measure below the water line.
Don’t seek to only know what’s above the waterline, seek to understand the whole of yourself and the numbers will add to a power that is far more formidable than what’s on that screen.
Gilesy