Stay With It

Training Insights

Triathlon start first discipline: swimming
Photo by Markus Spiske / Unsplash

In the bubbling caldron of the session, when you are really starting to taste it. That’s when the brain, starved of oxygen, starts to come up with that confused message of how you wanted it to be and how it actually is.

In the space between what is, and what you wanted, that’s where your opportunity waits for you.

The problem is, the picture of what we wanted brings a refusal of what we’ve got. That refusal shuts down your ability to cope with the suck and it’s easy to slide into a mental and physical slump.

You need to be really awake here because this is where we teach ourselves to either thrive or give up. At that moment when your mind teeters on the edge of refusal and resistance, that is where you have to bring the willingness to go through it.

This mental picture we build of what we want is a good thing, we need it, that’s the manifesting power in you that converts itself to physical output, but we need to be able to program that picture and then leave it alone.

Athletes have this idea they can force things to happen if they are stoic enough, if they refuse to accept anything less than the ideal.

That’s a trap!

You are trapping yourself in a headspace that cannot adapt to what it is. Physical training is about adaption. We all know that, right?

So it’s literal meaning is exactly that, adaption. Adaption comes to you both physically and psychologically through the acceptance you bring to this pain right now in this session. That’s where your adaption forms and grows.

It is the measure of how present you can stay as you hurt and bubble in pure discomfort. That includes the discomfort of this session not looking the way you wanted it to.

So here’s the key to all this:

Give up your demands on the present moment!

You won’t see it for what it is until you stop looking at it through the lens of what you want it to be.

You gotta stop drawing conclusions about what’s happening and let it be. From there, you need to adapt to what is by letting go of what it’s not.

Grow up, don’t blow up.

Gilesy