Developing Resolutions for Endurance Athletes;

This is the second is a series of posts on New Year’s resolutions. The first post covered willpower, and how people have a tendency to overestimate their ability to change. To summarize that post, your future self has a limited amount of willpower to achieve your goals, and probably less than you expect. If you start from that assumption, you’ll work to keep your future self away from temptations. Planning to achieve your goals means planning to keep yourself on track, reducing the amount of willpower you’ll need each day.

Endurance athletes have different levels of success because of millions of decisions they make throughout their lives. The results of a race are the crystallized outcome of those millions of decisions on equipment, training, nutrition, and lifestyle. Obviously, willpower is an important part of achieving training goals, eating right, or sleeping enough. But you need to rely on more than just your willpower; you need strategies to achieve training goals.

The new year is a great time to refocus your goals and look critically at the last year to see what has helped and what has hindered you. I’d recommend considering the following questions before making your resolutions, as they’ll help you to identify areas of opportunity for improvement.

1. Why do you race, or participate in endurance sports?
2. Why not something else?
3. What would you most like to achieve next season?
4. What is most important in order to accomplish that goal?
5. What was your biggest goal last season, and did you accomplish it? Why or why not?
6. Did you stick to your training plans last season? Why or why not?

Record your answers, and think about them over the next few days. You’ll likely begin to see opportunities for improvement next season, and how you may capitalize on those in your training. Next post, we’ll consider how to make those resolutions.