Performance Is Knowing Why

I've been sitting with a Jimmy Chin quote all week. It was in some email I received from a company, and I haven't been able to shake it. Here it is:

"Performance for me means a lot of different things. As an athlete, performance often means just feeling really good when I'm doing something really hard. In the rest of my life, it means having clarity of the intention of why I'm doing something."

If you don't know Chin, a quick primer: he's climbed and skied Everest, made the first ascent of Meru's Shark's Fin route, and directed Free Solo - the film that won him an Oscar and put the rest of us mortals in a cold sweat just watching Alex Honnold climb El Cap with no rope. This is not someone who's short on hard-earned credibility around the word "performance."

And yet he splits it in two?

On the wall, performance is a feeling. It's the flow state, the moment when something brutally hard starts to feel good because you're fully in it. But off the wall - in the rest of his life - performance isn't a feeling at all. It's clarity. Knowing why you're doing the thing in the first place.

We talk a lot about performance in sport as if it's one thing. Watts, pace, splits, podiums. But Chin's quote is a reminder that performance actually has two different engines, and they don't run the same way.

The feeling-good-doing-hard-things engine is the one we train constantly. Intervals, long rides, the mental grind of week fourteen of a build. We know how to build that one.

The clarity-of-intention engine is the one we mostly ignore until it breaks down. And it always breaks down eventually - usually somewhere around a DNF session, a burnout, or a season that technically went "well" but left us feeling hollow.

Here's what I see over and over with the elite athletes I coach: the ones who sustain performance year after year aren't the ones with the most raw talent or the biggest engine. They're the ones who can tell me, without hesitating, why they're doing this. It's not "to go faster" - that's a metric, not an intention. It's something underneath it. And when that clarity is intact, the hard days feel like Chin's description: hard, but good. When it's missing, even a great training block feels like something to survive rather than something to want.

So here's a question worth sitting with this week, whether you're building toward an Ironman or just trying to get through a Wednesday: do we know why we're doing this? Not the surface-level answer. The real one.

Feeling good while doing something hard - that's the athlete's performance. Knowing why - that's the rest of it.

Jimmy Chin says we need both - and who am I to disagree with him? ;)

Gratefully,

Mark

Team MPI