Focus and Mind
I´m just on my way back home from sunny Mallorca – the last camp for me and my company for 2011.
I´m quite happy about my training these last few months. Two new people have started with the company so I have more time for my own training and was able to start a lot earlier this year. Also, the next months will be more structured and with less stress than the last years. Good signs for my 3rd start at Norseman.
In the last few weeks we have done lots of aerobic base training and started with some quality sessions as well. The first race will be Xterra Sardinia – the Italian Championship – in May, where I will compete against a lot of the best cross triathlon athletes in the world. For me, it´s my first cross triathlon – quite excited and looking forward to that!
The main subject of my blog: focus and mind.
I think it’s not necessary to tell you athletes that Norseman is a very special race… one you need a strong mind for. But not just during the race. Also in your preparation time, you will need to stay focused and keep your head down for hard training quite often. But, sometimes it’s much harder to stay focused on useful, structured training than just collecting hours without sense. Most people who sign up for this race have in mind that they have to do more, harder, longer training. Training this way will soon lead to tiredness and injuries. So… staying focused also means to stay calm an concentrated on a good structure of training and recovery. The best and hard unit will not make you faster, if you do not compensate it - you get faster during the rest, not during the session!
Sit down and take your time to split the weeks until Norseman into real training weeks and weeks of recovery. And do the same with each week - split it up in to training days and recovery days where you just swim, do little core, or just rest. Plan your preparing races carefully and make sure that you start with the taper down to the race early enough. This is also part of the focus. To not just add lots of sessions and then get a little more tired every week and be unable to show your performance in August.
Focus also means to collect your mental energy for the race. Decide how much races you can add to the race calendar to have the maximum energy for your most important race.
For those who are racing Norseman for the first time, I can advise to learn to stay cool for a long time during the race. The real race starts after 25km in the run, especially if you are used to racing hard from the beginning because of long distance races in the past. Make sure that you remember on the start line that this race is different from all the races you´ve done before. The biggest difference is that if you blow up in a “normal” long distance race, it´s always possible to get back to a good rhythm. At Norseman, I would say, if you blow up, your day is not necessarily over, but it will end up in a walk on the hill for sure.
In my first year of racing Norseman I had no other girl around me on the bike, so I nearly did it at the pace of a proper training session. The result was one of the best marathons in the whole field and a win with 47 minutes to spare to the second girl. In 2010, after being 10 minutes behind in the swim, I was a little less calm and pushed a little too hard on two hills on the bike and the result was a very hard marathon that was a much poorer performance than in 2009. It was just my mental strength that made it possible for me to fight hard until the end and take the win again. I know that with a little less speed on the bike, I could have ran a much better marathon, so my overall time would have been better for sure. So… even if you know the theory, it’s not always that easy to practice it J.
During the race your mind is forced to stay strong lots of times. But I guess everyone in the participants’ list knows that already. Even when racing for the third time, it´s sometimes hard to imagine this amount of miles and also these metres to climb. Help yourself by saying: “I just have a long day of sport – I start early in the morning and in the evening/night, I´m done, no matter how far and high I have to go.”
If you come to the point that you´re just tired of swimming, biking and running and just want to lie down and sleep, never forget how much it meant to you to be able to stand on that ferry and how much you trained for it. You have just one time each year for that possibility – so never think of quitting. Even if the day is getting a long one.
Again, my last advice in this blog is to stay calm enough to do structured training with enough recovery to stand fresh on the ferry in August, and hard enough in your mind to finish the race you will surely be thinking about so often every day.
