A coin of great value

When I was a teenager I was into my father one day about money and how I want to be rich by playing music in my band at the time. He told me this old story.

“If you give a man a coin, does that make him rich? What if you give him another coin and another coin and another coin? At some point, a coin will make him rich”.

While my band never made it far, I still think of this message often and think it has a crossover to many things in life including triathlon.

If someone wanted to be a doctor but kept missing science, maths, never doing homework, always cutting class. That dream of becoming a doctor dramatically decreases and their nightmare of being a security guard at their local shopping center starts to look more like a reality.

This isn’t to say they can turn things around, They are simply not doing themselves any favours.

I get athletes tell me all the time they want to qualify for Kona, they want to finish an Ironman, they want to run a marathon, etc. Within the first training block I can tell the ones that will give themselves the best opportunity of success and the ones who will struggle or simply fail.

By missing a training session, it isn’t going to make or break you however in my experience missing a training session makes it a lot easier to miss others. It can be a slippery slope if you haven’t got real self-control.I tell all my athletes when they join these simple but effective tips

Aim not to miss a training session
If you are sore and tired, drop the intensity but keep the volume.
If you are still sore and tired and are really struggling, shut it down and have the rest of the day
DON”T PLAY CATCH UP. If you miss a session or a day, just move to the next day and forget about what you have missed.

One of the biggest issues that come up by athletes is “I struggled to get out of bed in the morning”. NEVER get into the habit of pressing the snooze button on the alarm or looking at the phone or checking the weather before getting out of bed. Alarm goes off, roll out of bed right away and start moving and before you have a chance to think, you are already in transition from waking up and getting your training gear on. Just like if you were going to the airport for an amazing holiday, treat training the same way. UP AND AT IT

I mentioned this a hundred times and it is worth repeating