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Setting and achieving your season’s goals
Dr Liz Scott
If you have not already done so, now is the time to set your goals for next season. Setting your goals is the start of the season. These goals will help to get you to the pool in the morning or get you out on your bike when the weather is less than ideal.
Now I am sure that you will all know that your goals should be SMART where S stands for specific, M stands for Measurable, A stands for Achievable, R stands for Relevant and T stands for Time phased. A SMART goal would then be something like:
I would like to finish in the top third of my age group category (Measurable, Relevant) at the BestTriInTheCountry Standard Distance Triathlon (Specific) on the second Sunday of June (Time phased).
Goal setting and its proven ability to affect our performance is a large and fascinating subject and on top of setting goals that are SMART there may be other issues to consider.
Sharing
Sharing your goal has been shown to affect the likelihood of success. This could be sharing with friends and family or sharing with a small circle of training buddies. The sharing adds accountability to your goal. You will now have people asking you about your goals and your progress. Every time you discuss your goal (assuming it was set SMARTly) it becomes clearer in your mind.
Desire
You have to want your goal, be excited by it and the bigger the goal the more you should want it. We have all heard it said that one person was “hungrier” for the success than the other. If you are not excited every time you think of reaching your goal then you should think again. We should, in our lives be doing things that excite, challenge and thrill us. We should look back on our season and think “wow – that was a great year of triathlon, swimming, cycling and running”. Ask yourself if doing the same set of races without any clear goals will be exciting enough??
Belief
A strong belief in your ability to reach your goals will keep you on track. Wh
en others may be telling you “it is too hard”, “you are not good enough”, “you haven’t got what it takes” etc, a belief in yourself can keep you going when the going gets tough.And of course, I am not the first coach to mention this …………..
Make it happen!
Once you have set your season’s goals you then should set yourself a set of training performance goals and skills development goals.
Training performance goals: Say for example you want to qualify for your age group team. The first thing you should do is look at the results from the previous year’s qualifying races and see what times for each discipline you will need to achieve in order to qualify. (Look at two or three of the qualifying races – some can have long bikes, others short swims but this will be enough for you to get a good grasp of where you need to be.) Perform a similar analysis if you want to qualify for any other championship – Kona for example.
Once you know where you need to get to then you can set yourself mid season goals. As an example if you know you need to swim 25 mins for 1500m to qualify, which is 1:40 per 100m, then a mid season goal could be to achieve a T pace or threshold pace or CSS (all are equivalent) of 1:42 per 100m by 12 weeks before your event.
Skills development goals: These are crucial to your reaching your performance goals. Triathlon performance is not only about physical strength and aerobic conditioning. In each discipline an improvement in skill will certainly translate into better performance.
An example could be improving your running efficiency. You will know that you can improve speed and energy requirements by improving your running efficiency (mid foot strike being more efficient than heel striking and landing under your body being more efficient than landing in front of your body). A mid season goal would be to be consistently landing under your body at the end of a 12 week period. This could be measured by getting a friend to video your running at the start and end of the 12 weeks. Remember, you need to be specific. You cannot set the goal “to run more efficiently”.
To make things easy for you, we at thetrilife.com, have prepared a form for you to complete and review regularly. We will monitor your progress and give you tips on how you may achieve some of your goals.
Complete your season’s goals here.
To summarise, the key to achieving your goals in the coming season is to set SMART goals that really excite you, that you believe you can achieve and then tell your friends and family about them – or you can tell your thetrilife.com coach.
Once you know what you want set some smaller mid season goals (both performance and skill based) to make sure you keep on track.
