Remove the Obstacles to Your Triathlon Goals-#9

In the eight in my nine-part series exploring obstacles that are blocking your path to your triathlon goals, I showed you how negativity is a weight vest that weighs you down on race day. In today’s article, I will describe how you can remove the obstacles in your path to your triathlon goals. In approaching how to remove the obstacles, you can first take a short-term strategy to mitigate the obstacles temporarily and then employ a long-term strategy to hopefully remove them permanently.

Short-term

When you go to the dark side, the obstacles exert a strong gravitational pull on your thoughts, emotions, behavior, and triathlon efforts. They can cause you to become fixated on all that is negative and wrong in your training and races. It will require considerable determination and persistent effort to diminish the negative impact of the obstacles on your performances. Your main goal in the short term is to take your mind off of the dark side, so those forces have less of an effect on you. The basic strategy involves distracting yourself, so you don’t see the obstacles blocking the path to your triathlon goals.

There are two general approaches you can use. First, you can immerse yourself in your preparations. If you are focused on what you need to do to get ready to train and race, you’re less likely to pay attention to the dark side. Specific strategies related to your preparations can include getting your equipment ready, getting physically warmed up, and doing mental imagery of your upcoming performance. These strategies not only take your mind off of the messages that the obstacles are sending you, but they also inspire you, build your confidence, and generate positive emotions that can further help you resist the dark side.

The second approach involves taking your mind completely off of your performance efforts. One way to do that is to socialize with friends. If you’re chatting it up with friends or teammates, you’re having fun which is one of the greatest enemies of the dark side. Music is another powerful tool for reducing the impact of the obstacles. Music has a profound psychological, emotional, and physiological influence on us. If you’re listening to music that gets you fired up or calmed down, inspires you, and gives you confidence, you are marshalling formidable forces against the dark side. Anything you enjoy doing before a race (when you are most likely to go the dark side), whether doing your pre-race routine, talking to people, checking your social media, or anything else that makes you feel good, can be useful in reducing the impact of the obstacles on your performances.

Long-term

The strategies I just described can help you keep the dark side at bay temporarily, but your goal is to remove the obstacles altogether, so they lose their influence on your triathlon efforts. This objective, admittedly, is not easy because the obstacles have become habits, of mind and body, that are deeply ingrained and resistant to change. At the same time, my experience working with thousands of athletes over the years has shown me that it is possible let go of the obstacles and liberate yourself to perform freely and fully.

The first step is to identify which obstacles are affecting you most. A review of the main topics of my nine-part series will help you accomplish this step. It involves thinking about the obstacles that I describe in the series and seeing how each, if any, interfere with your giving your best effort and pursuing your triathlon goals.

Second, once you have identified the obstacles, you need to understand how in your upbringing and past experiences the obstacles developed. For example, if you have a fear of failure, what messages did you get from your parents and others when you were young that led to the fear? This realization can be a real eye-opener for you in explaining patterns of self-defeating thoughts, emotions, behavior, and performance that you have had for many years, but never knew why. Now you can finally understand why you have continued to engage in these ways despite the fact that they hold you back in your triathlon participation and perhaps in other areas of your life as well.

Third, you can’t change old patterns if you don’t have new patterns to replace them with. So, identify a new way of approaching your triathlon life that is positive, motivating, energizing, and in sharp contrast to the ways in which the obstacles cause you to be. What would you like to think before a race? What emotions would you like to feel? What ways would you like to perform? For example, if you have a fear of failure, you can redefine success and failure in new ways, such success is giving your best effort and failure is doing anything holds you back from your goals. You can also set goals of giving your best effort, taking risks, and accepting mistakes.

Fourth, these changes require that you recognize that the road you are on is a bad one, identifying better roads, and then making the choice to take the good road. This choice isn’t an easy one because you are very accustomed to the bad road, however bad it is. But, with a determined commitment, you can take the good road that first time. When you do, it will be awe-inspiring because you will have overcome your greatest opponent—yourself!—and you will be rewarded with your choice by performing better and feeling better. So that every time you come to that same fork in the road in the future, it will become progressively easier to take the good road until the old, bad road becomes covered with weeds from disuse and the good road is the only one for you to be on.

Finally, for many of us, these obstacles can feel intractable and impossible to change, particularly if you are trying to make changes on your own. It may be helpful to engage a qualified sport psychologist or mental coach with experience with these types of challenges to guide and support you through this transition (pun intended).

Do you want to take the next step in training your mind to perform your best in training and on race day? Here are four options for you: