Welcome Fall! It's perfect training and racing conditions!! It doesn’t matter whether it’s cross-country, road racing or marathons on your agenda, here are a few simple ways to supercharge your performances and make it your most enjoyable and memorable season ever. 

1. CLARITY

Get clear on your targets. Setting goals for each year, week, training session and, most importantly, each race will give you something specific to focus on. This will help you beeline towards your own goals and will prevent you from getting distracted by what others are doing or from any distraction happening on the daily. 

What’s your main race of the season?

What are you going to work on this week?

What’s the purpose behind today’s run?

What are you hoping to gain from your early season races?

Take time to get clear about what you’re actually shooting for and why. For a step by step guide to setting and sticking to your goals, check out our goal setting pages in the Believe Training Journal—we provide prompts throughout in each section to optimize your weekly goal setting and race planning.

2. KNOWLEDGE 

a) Knowledge of Sport - you don't know what you don’t know.

It’s essential to keep learning and educating yourself about your sport. There’s so much information available on training, nutrition, sports psychology, racing, etc.  And there’s always more to learn. Except for the rare guru out there (i.e. my old coach, Ray Treacy) the rest of us are still learning. It’s important to surround yourself with a community you can learn from, both online and in real life. Both Lauren Fleshman, a multiple U.S. and NCAA champion, and World Championship finalist with a Master’s degree from Stanford, and myself (Ro), an Olympian and Sports Psychology consultant, began our quest as runners over 20 years ago...and we’re STILL learning! We have distilled down our most valuable lessons on every topic from training and racing, to psychology, to nutrition and injury prevention into our Training Journals. We also included tips and insights from many of our favorite world class #sistersinsport and #herosinsport so you can increase your knowledge and feel empowered. And remember, mastery in sport is a life long pursuit, so no matter what you win or you learn!

b) Knowledge of Self — know thyself.  

Reflecting on your training and racing allows you to  develop a keen sense of what works and what doesn’t work for you. Developing self awareness and a deeper understanding of yourself and your body is priceless for honing these insights. Keeping a training journal and being consistent with journaling the physical, mental and emotional ups and downs will provide immense insight for you.  From this you’ll get to know what’s too far or too fast for you, including the kind of workouts and races you both love and loathe. With this kind of awareness you can cut the guesswork when deciding on future plans or learning from what went wrong. You’ll also discover what you need in order to succeed, which will help you replicate this environment and consistency in the future. Understanding ourselves empowers us to create the right environment to thrive.

3. ATTENTION

The best thing you can do for the people and things you care about is to regularly give them your *full* attention. All the clarity and knowledge you gain on how to train and live right won’t make you faster unless actually DO the training. Setting goals is like planting a seed - the more water and sunshine you give the seed the more likely it will grow and blossom. But If you plant that seed and then toss into the basement and forget about it, it won’t grow at all. 

So it is with relationships—in order to foster meaningful, connected relationships you must give someone your complete attention (this sounds easy, but it’s getting increasingly harder in our culture.) Focused, undivided attention is an important hallmark of success in anything! Furthermore, studies show that intense focus, engagement and commitment in activities is a huge sources of happiness. Presence is powerful.
You don’t think or believe your way to success. Rather, you BEHAVE your way to success. You put in the time. You focus. You show up. You do the training.  
Carve out the time in your schedule and get ‘er done.
You’ll gain more confidence, momentum, motivation and enjoyment from tracking the training you’re doing in a journal if you actually show up and get your run/workout/tempo DONE..
And as a plus, when the inevitable pre-race nerves rear their ugly, beastly heads, you’ll be prepared to face them - you will have gained the knowledge of what it takes, and you’ll have the proof in your hands, knowing that you’re prepared and have done the work!

The power is yours!

For more tips and insights on how to run towards your goals in sport and in life, check out the Believe Training Journal by Ro McGettigan and Lauren Fleshman. 

Got any success stories for us? Has the Believe Training journal helped you? If so, how?  We LOVE hearing people's stories. Share your victories so we can all collectively enjoy the success together! Email us ro@believeiam.com