Struggling with motivation? A sports psychologist helps you stay in the game
Our love/hate relationship with triathlon training
It’s 5:15am. It’s cold, still dark and I can hear the rain pummeling the roof of my house. I have a challenging swim workout (6×75, 5×200, 8×50 hard) at the local outdoor pool. How much do I want to swim at this moment in time? Well, you can probably guess.
This experience, quite common I’m assuming among my triathlete (and other sport) brethren, has caused me to consider my relationship with my triathlon training. How do I really feel about the time, effort, energy, and, yes, pain that I put into my efforts to be the best triathlete I can be? And how do I best get through those times, as I just described above with my recent swim workout, when the pull of a warm bed or some other equally attractive alternative (or simply the desire not to do something that will be difficult) can exert a gravitational pull on my inertia (an object at rest will stay at rest unless a force is exerted on it) at these delicate moments when my motivation is tested.
Over the years, I’ve heard colleagues tell their athletes, “You gotta love every moment!” My thought was always, “They’ve never actually done this, have they?” Yes, there are a few unusual athletes out there (the first words that come to mind was freaks and aliens) who do seem to love every aspect of their training, whether painfully intense or monotonously long workouts, cold, heat, rain, snow, waves, vertical, what have you, but for most of us mortals, love just isn’t always in the cards when confronted with a challenging workout. To be sure, we love the feeling of accomplishment when we finish and, later, we love the feeling of pride when we achieve our competitive goals. But in that moment, there is decidedly little to love.
So, if love at those critical moments isn’t possible, what’s the alternative? Well, if you think in a binary way, there is only one other option: hate. But hate has no place in triathlon because if hate is your dominant emotion you experience, then you will likely just not show up for a particularly hard workout, give an extremely poor effort if you do show up, or, in the big picture, just quit our sport because you can’t enjoy something you hate.
Love/hate continuum
To find a place you can land when your triathlon training gets challenging, you must consider love and hate not as dichotomous variables, but rather lying at the ends of a continuum, so you can find a place along that continuum that is both realistic and helpful. I thought about what lay close to the extremes that might make a tough workout more palatable, such as liking rather than love or disdain over hatred but didn’t find either particularly appealing.
One place that I initially landed on the love/hate continuum was resignation. If I wanted to achieve my triathlon goals, perhaps I should just resign myself to the fact that I have to do them, and they were going to be hard. But resignation didn’t strike me as a particularly positive or inspiring attitude to have. Perhaps it lay too far along the “hate it” side of the continuum. And there was an aspect of surrender to it that just didn’t feel right.
I then had an epiphany: If neither love nor hate are reasonable options when faced with a tough workout, then maybe what lies in the middle of the continuum is acceptance. I just need to accept the situation and get through it as best I can. Had I found a good place on the love/hate continuum that was both possible and beneficial? Acceptance does have a long history in philosophical and Eastern religious thought, so perhaps if it was good enough for the Dali Lama, it should be good enough for me.
Acceptance meant several things to me. First, it removed the resistance I had to the workout which alleviated the negativity and anxiety that can come with facing impending pain. Second, it connotes that I am making a choice to still do the workout despite the discomfort. Third, it was prioritizing the value I gain from triathlon, the goals I want to achieve in our sport, and the feeling I will have when I finish the workout over its likely unpleasantness.
But acceptance didn’t feel quite right to me either. Sitting at the center of the love/hate relationship felt so…uncommitted, sort of like being in limbo. Not as passive as resignation but lacking in proaction and weighted with a sense of numbness, no feeling at all. Acceptance might prevent me from going to the “dark side,” but it certainly isn’t rocket fuel to propel me forward. There had to be something else that lay somewhere in between acceptance and love that I could really wrap my arms around.
And then it hit me when I thought “wrap my arms around!” Wrapping your arms around something is a really positive thing because it’s proactive and physical. And what is one word that best describes that action? Embrace! I needed to embrace those difficult workouts. I recalled the well-worn military saying, “Embrace the suck.” It symbolizes a certain toughness associated with the military, especially the special-operations units such as the SEALS, Delta Force and Green Berets. And who doesn’t want to be as tough as those warriors? There is also something more positive, enthusiastic and energetic compared to mere acceptance. To embrace something also wreaks of discipline, toughness and perseverance in the face of hard workouts. It is definitely a place that is closer to love along the love/hate continuum, yet seemingly attainable for most of us.
So, from now on, when I have to wake up at “zero dark 30” (another popular military phrase) on another cold, dark and rainy morning, I’m going to look along the love/hate continuum, consider my options, and then choose to embrace the challenge ahead of me. I may not like dragging myself out of my warm and comfy bed, but I’ll be glad I did when I finish my workout and, more importantly, when I crush it in my next race.
Jim Taylor, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading authorities on the psychology of endurance sports, as well as a two-time Ironman, USA National Champion, and three-time World Championship medal-winning age-group triathlete. To learn more, visit: www.drjimtaylor.com
