Send It!
Have you ever stood at a start line, or the edge of a decision, and felt your whole body ask you one question: are you really going to do this?
That's the moment. Not the training, not the taper, not the gear check. The moment where you either send it or you don't.
It happens before triathlons, before someone's first open water swim, before an athlete's first multi-stage race or before their big event with tens of thousands of people doing the same thing. It's all the same moment, scaled differently, and it's the one that may actually determine whether the thing gets done.
Physically ready doesn't equal mentally ready. We spend most of our time as athletes and coaches on the physical side focusing on the watts, the paces, the hours. That part is trainable, measurable, and honestly often times the easy part. What's harder to train is the moment where we have to trust the work we've already done and go stand behind it. Our body will usually be ready before our head is. That gap is where many of us get stuck.
If I had to name the single biggest thing that keeps athletes from going for it, it's not fitness but rather fear of failure. Not fear of the distance, not fear of the hill, not fear of the weather - fear of what it means about them if it doesn't go well. That fear doesn't just stop people from signing up. It follows them into the race, into the swim start, into mile 18, quietly running its own commentary the whole time.
And crazy as it may sound, I think it's usually the same fear that keeps people from actually enjoying the experience, even when they do show up. We can be standing in the middle of something incredible and miss it entirely because we're busy protecting ourselves from a bad outcome that hasn't happened yet.
Controllables and non-controllables - this is where it helps to draw a hard line. On one side: our training, our pacing plan, our nutrition, our effort and our attitude. On the other: the weather, the competitors, mechanicals, how our stomach feels at mile 2! One of these lists we can actually do something about. The other we can't. And every minute spent gripping the "what ifs" on that second list is a minute stolen from the thing we're actually there to do. Letting go of the non-controllables isn't giving up. It's freeing up the attention we need for the controllables, which are the only things that we're ever going to decide the outcome anyway.
So here's a thought for us this week: whatever our "it" is - a race, an event, a sport we've never tried - start or continue to do the physical prep, obviously. But also do the mental prep: name the fear, sort our list into what we control and what we don't, and then let the second list go.
Not because failure isn't possible. Because it isn't the point.
Send it!
Gratefully,
Mark
Team MPI
