Home Blog

Goal Setting Wisdom From A Panel of Olympic Marathon Trial Qualifiers

By
andrew
-
0
2020 Olympic Trials Marathon , Boulder TC,

If you had the chance to ask anything to a panel of Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers, what would you learn? Back in February, a week before the Trials, I had the chance to find out when I dropped in on a Q&A session with a panel of local qualifiers at my neighborhood running store, Shoes and Brews in Longmont, Colo. While the runners’ discussions about training specifics like mileage targets and gear were interesting, it was their insights about goal-setting I found most instructive to my own running practice.

Only a few weeks later, the running world was turned upside-down as the coronavirus pandemic raged across the world. The Olympics were postponed to 2021, but these elite athletes’ goal-setting wisdom still holds – in fact, in this new and uncertain time, their insights seem even more applicable.

The common theme that stuck with me was the importance of setting ambitious but achievable goals that are customized for you. Here are some more observations I drew from this panel of elite athletes:

Visualize success

Among the eight runners, I noticed one slight, soft-spoken guy who seemed even more preoccupied with the Trials than the others. He was unsponsoredand coming back from a series of setbacks, including some injuries and a coaching switch-up.

When this panelist offhandedly mentioned he’d qualified at the Chicago Marathon with a world-class time of 2:10:36, my ears perked up. I squinted at his nametag: it was Jake Riley, who had the fifth highest qualifying time in the field. Riley went on to finish second in the Trials and win a ticket to the Olympics.

Riley said he’d been visualizing crossing the finish line every day for six months. That level of mental commitment, he said, makes him emotionally vulnerable; he’d competed in the Trials before, but the last time, he explained, he was not risking anything emotionally or mentally. Tough a competitor as he is, he felt a sense of shame for walking two steps in his previous race. He was imagining finishing finish strong and with a sense of pride: “to keep my head up when I cross the line.”

Good goals are often about why, not just the what

In 2016, Amanda Scott sat at an In-N-Out burger in Los Angeles with some friends, just moments after completing the Olympic qualifying marathon. It had been a stressful day: she’d spent the hours before stuck in L.A. traffic, and her pre-race meal was a T.V. dinner. She grinded out the race almost as an afterthought, and the reward for her effort was a quick bite of fast food.

This year, Scott qualified for the Olympic Trials with a time of 2:40:30 in the California International Marathon, well under the women’s cutoff time of 2:45. After the stress of her 2016 experience, she revisited the essential question of why she runs and what she wants to get out of it. For this year’s Trials, Scott was pretty sure she wouldn’t be a top 3 Olympic qualifier (she ended up finishing 287th out of 390 women finishers), so her goal was simply to enjoy the experience more.

For Scott, putting her all into the training process and running the best race she could was key. “Once we’re at the starting line, we’ve already put in the training hours, imagined our race strategy, and gotten our minds and bodies where they need to be,” she said. “At this point, there’s not much we can do but execute our race plan well.”

Goals don’t have to be about finish times

With hundreds of qualifiers and only six Olympic spots up for grabs, most athletes didn’t have a realistic shot at going to Tokyo. They had other goals, though – many of which didn’t have to do with finish times at all.

 Brandon Johnson, a Hoka rep who qualified with a 2:18:13 marathon time, said his main goal was to keep a foot in the running community. He set himself up for a rewarding experience regardless of finish time (he ended up finishing last).

Goals are for everyone

“The cool thing about the Marathon Trials is that it’s “’everyman’s’ (or woman’s) Trials,” said Noah Droddy, who qualified with one of the fastest times in the pack – a 2:11:42 marathon —  but had to drop out of the Trials due to a knee injury. Anyone, anywhere can set a goal to run in the Olympics, and all it takes is a single great performance in an event that’s open to everyone.

Emma Kertesz, who qualified just 38 seconds faster than the B-standard cutoff, said she thinks of the Olympic Trials as her Olympics. Her goal was not to get to Tokyo, but to better her pace from 2016.

Taking The Pressure Off Can Result In A Better Performance

Before the Trials, Grant Fischer had never run more than 22 miles in his life. Having qualified with a half marathon — which, the panel agreed, was a more difficult standard than the marathon standard — the Trials would be his debut marathon. For Fischer, the experience was about getting the most out of himself and enjoying the experience. He felt less pressure than some of the other athletes because whatever he ran, the Trials would be his marathon P.R. Fisher ended up finishing 25th, in 2:15:32 – an impressive result for a first marathon.

Sometimes outside events conspire to force goals to change. Ann Marie Kirkpatrick, at 37 the oldest person on the panel, was not able to train to the level she’d hoped. Still, she said, she thought of her Trails goals as a moving target, and the fun is chasing the next thing, even when circumstances are not ideal.

Keep your running goals in perspective

Riley said that achieving a  PR and enjoying running required switching up the other parts of his life, and keeping his running in perspective. This meant ensuring work/life balance, entering grad school, and changing coaching. Goals must be adjusted as realities change, such as training and injuries– and of course, global pandemics. When the Olympics were postponed to 2021, Riley had to revisit his training plans. He emphasized the importance of putting things in perspective when he told Runner’s World, “One of the things that I’ve been preaching since I made my comeback is when running is not going well, it’s nice if you can have something else going on. And I have other things going on that I can kind of focus on to take my mind off the

Trail Tip: How to Adjust Miles for Elevation Gain

By
andrew
-
0

In this quick trail tip from Devil’s Backbone trail in Loveland, I explain how I adjust my mileage on a trail to account for elevation gains.

Why Sports are for Nerds

By
andrew
-
0

When I was in ninth grade, I was the classic nerdy outcast. I was the smallest kid in my class, I had thick Coke-bottle glasses, and I was terrified of the slightest glance from any of the school bullies. I was bookish and introverted, and spent my evenings learning computer programming and reading books instead of hanging out with friends – or, God forbid, participating in any kind of organized sport.

When I was in school, sports were for jocks. You needed to be big, strong, confident, and often a bit of a bully to excel at them. Sports, to my teenage brain, were both above and below me.

They were above me because they were an area of mystery belonging to the physically strong, that subset of boys who attracted girls and walked cockily through the hallways.

But they were also below me. In my intellectual world, I couldn’t be bothered with the roughness and dumbness of physicality. I operated on a higher plane, occupied with math and science, not to mention the time I needed to spend perseverating on the world’s injustices.

High school culture – at least where I attended, in a rural Nebraska town – was defined by castes, at the top of which was the football team. If you were in the “nerd” caste – or worse, in no caste at all – you had little chance of attaining the coolness that came with sports culture.

Sports, I believed, were not for nerds.

It took me years to realize just how wrong that assumption was. I began running in high school, and continued through college and in my twenties. I gradually learned that I was actually pretty good at it, and that a competitive athletic outlet made me feel more like myself, not less.

Now that I’m almost 50, my sport has become an even more essential part of myself. As the years have passed, the old castes and cliques of high school have melted, and juggled the pecking order.

I’ve come to see that sports are not just for bullies. They’re a way to better understand ourselves and to help us grow into better people. Training for and competing in races helps builds my own sense of confidence and strength, without sacrificing who I really am.

Of course, I’m still a nerd, and still preoccupied by math and science and philosophy. But I’m an athlete too.

Now that I watch my kids make their way through school, I hope they make friends who are kind, thoughtful, and sensitive. I also hope they’re able to adopt identities as athletes, to be able to build confidence in their bodies and to understand the value of setting physical goals and working together to achieve them. Once I was able to do that, I was able to see myself as an athlete – and a nerd – all at once.

How The First Rule of Improv Helps Us Face A Crisis

By
andrew
-
0

In the world of improvisational comedy, a scene begins when someone, such as an audience member, suggests a situation – say, newlyweds watching a baseball game.

The improv comedians take off from there, like this:

Husband: I can’t believe we got tickets to the seventh game of the World Series!

Wife: What an exciting game!  Can you believe – tied in the bottom of the ninth?

Husband: And look who’s coming up to bat: Queen Elizabeth!

So far, so good. Now, the Wife might respond like this:

Wife: Lucky for the Red Sox – she’s batting over .300 this year!

The actor playing the Wife just demonstrated the first rule of improv, called “Yes, and …”.  When a new, and possibly absurb situation is presented, you’re supposed to say yes, and … expand on the new reality, embracing it without question.

What if, on the other hand, Wife had responded this way:

Wife: That’s absurd!  The Queen is far too old to play baseball, and besides, she’s British!

It would have stopped the scene cold, with no laughs to be found anywhere.

Saying “Yes, and …” to a Crisis

The first rule of improv applies to real-life crises, too.

We can reject the new reality as absurd and deny it. We can push back against it, feeling like things “shouldn’t” have been this way, asserting that it was not “supposed” to happen. We can endlessly compare what is to what we think should have been.

Or we can say “Yes, and …” to new realities.

The current coronavirus crisis is fundamentally changing all our lives for a bit. I can continue to fight against this story – say, bemoaning the fact that our family vacation to Morocco was cancelled, or telling myself this is a “nightmare” that can’t possibly be happening to me.

Or, I can say “Yes, and…” to the coronavirus crisis. It’s up to me to figure out what comes after those ellipses.  Maybe:

  • “Yes, we’re in the time of coronavirus … and it’s spring so I have time to focus on adding running miles.”
  •  “Yes, we’re in the time of coronavirus … and it’s teaching us all valuable lessons about protecting the environment  is coronavirus … and I’ve learned about how much privilege I have.”
  • “Yes, there is coronavirus … and it gives me an opportunity to learn what I really need, and what I merely desire – but don’t need.”

The day Denver and Boulder issued “shelter at home” advisories, I decided to try this strategy myself. After reflecting for a few moments on whether to panic, I decided that this type of mental energy was a waste of time, and instead went out for a long run. It was a beautiful day, with a few white clouds and a breeze blowing down from the foothills. Last week’s snow still dusted the front range, casting the Indian Peaks in slabs of angular white against the cobalt sky.

Instead of my typical run around the Open Sky trail, I took a set of backroads with less foot traffic. I passed the beautiful farmland of West County, breathing in air as clean as any I can remember, and gradually moved my emotional dial from “panic” to “joy”. 

If we believe that the big world, just as it is, is our friend, we find it holds a sort of wisdom for us. We need only be willing to listen to it. Sometimes it takes us to difficult places where we’d rather not be, sometimes to places we never think we’ll have the strength to get through.

But the world, if we trust it, reveals something amazing:  we are always in the right place, at the right time.

We just need to remember that life itself is a game of improv, and follow its most important rule.

Listening to the COVID Spirit

By
andrew
-
0

In the classic 2001 Japanese movie Spirited Away, a 10-year old girl wanders into an abandoned amusement park, which turns out to be a bathhouse for residents of the spirit world. Some are scary, some are kind, and some come in just hoping for a good spring cleaning, trailing detritus and baggage from their wanderings through the human world.

I’ve been imagining, these past few weeks, that coronavirus is a sort of spirit too. This spirit has come into my life and those of all my fellow humans, stomping around and making a mess. It’s hard to tell why it’s here or when it might go off on its way. But perhaps, I’ve been imagining, it’s trying to tell me something.

The Covid Spirit wants me to run.

One of the small blessings of this time is that my main source of stress relief and spiritual seeking – running – remains more or less intact, although I sadly can’t share it with friends. I’m blessed to live in a place where the outdoors remain open and great trails are available within a few minutes’ drive. Runners’ brains are already primed for social distance, so spending an hour or two rambling outdoors, alone, seems to fit more naturally for us than it perhaps does for others.

Moreover, this is all happening in springtime here in Colorado, just as the peaks around town are losing their snowcaps and becoming passable, and as it is becoming downright pleasurable to spend time outside.

I’m not sure when our social runs and races will come back – I’ll be quite pleased if I can run my ‘A’ race for this year, the Never Summer 100K, in late July – but running is always about more than just training. The ambiguity of this year’s race schedule is just a reminder that competing always has a degree of uncertainty, and the real joy is in putting one foot in front of the other, day after day.

It has shown me my strength in a crisis.

Times of uncertainty and hardship are difficult, but they are also rife with opportunity. I’ve become aware of many of our blessings during this particular crisis, including that we have shelter, plenty of food to eat, and clean air to drink. The challenge for me is in keeping my head together for the long race we’re all in together. This takes attention every day to remembering our own strengths, gaining confidence in our ability to make it through hard times, and practicing gratitude along the way.

Life lessons are transferable, and what we learn about ourselves now will help us at other points in our lives – just as surviving previous crisis has given me a set of tools to help me flourish today.

It’s time to budget, for real

Just before the pandemic, Lisa and I had our biannual meeting with our financial advisor. Our income increased in 2019, and that was great. But when we looked carefully at our expenses, we found we’d spent almost as much as we’d made, and barely made a dent in our savings.

Our trusty advisor told us we needed to really focus on cutting our budget in 2020, much as you might go on a sugar fast to lose weight. We nodded along, saying “sure, sure, we get the idea,” and then Lisa and I sat down together and managed to agree on a few incidental cuts.

Then Covid came. Our restaurant budget, one of our key guilty pleasures, was instantly sliced by 100%.  Our inviolable travel budget: cut by 100%. Child care, gas, cocktails: all sliced to virtually $0 overnight.

Once we’re able to do a bit of travelling and pop into our favorite haunts for, say, a world-class Old Fashioned, the financial lessons we’ve learned during the crisis will show us how deeply we can really cut our budget when we need to – and make us appreciate those things we do splurge on.

We’re giving the environment a much-needed break

This is a pretty weird time for humans, and there is undeniable suffering happening around the world. It’s sort of a weird time for other living creatures, too, but in a very different way. Polluted cities like Wuhan have seen historic drops in their pollution levels, while the canals of Venice, usually filthy from boat traffic, are sparkling clean. Here near Denver, which is among the 10 worst cities for air pollution in the country, the spring air is clean and the familiar inversion layer has vanished.

As a frequent air traveler and owner of a single-family house, I’m as guilty as anyone in my contribution to climate change. Now, like so many others around the world, I’ve been forced to cut my emissions. Perhaps the Covid spirit is giving our species a little nudge to help us see how we might get on track with the foremost issue that faces us in the 21st century.

123...5Page 1 of 5

Featured Posts

Load more

EDITOR PICKS

POPULAR POSTS

POPULAR CATEGORY

©