Lessons Learned from Last Season That Will Make You Faster Next Season
With COVID-19 in our rearview mirror this past race season, ski racing in the U.S. and worldwide returned to some semblance of normalcy, with training and race opportunities again in abundance. Unfortunately, at the same time, another global problem, namely, climate change, has made training and racing more challenging, with too much snow in the […]
Read MoreI Practice What I Preach: Tempering Expectations
Let’s begin with an exercise: I don’t want you to think about a pink elephant. What did you do? Well, you thought of a pink elephant, of course. But don’t think about a pink elephant, don’t think about a pink elephant, don’t think about a pink elephant! Does that help you not think about a […]
Read MoreI Practice What I Preach: Listen to Your Mind
In two recent posts, I discussed the training and race situations in which you want to listen to your body and when you want to ignore your body. In this article, I’m going to share with you some ideas about listening to your mind. I’ve just finished my fifth week of a six-week high-volume, high-intensity […]
Read MoreI Practice What I Preach/Psychology of Sports Technology: My Latest FTP Test
This article offers you a “two-fer!” I will describe my own personal experience with bike fitness testing while also highlighting the psychological benefits of the technology behind it. I’ve been doing FTP testing for three years now. Since beginning to work with my coach, Dr. Greg Rhodes, the last two tests involved a more sophisticated […]
Read MoreI Practice What I Preach: Our Love/Hate Relationship with Training
It’s 5:15am. It’s cold (around 42 degrees), still dark, and I can hear the rain pummeling the roof of my house. I have a challenging swim workout planned (6×75, 5×200, 8×50 hard) at the local outdoor pool. How much do I want swim at this moment in time? Well, you can probably guess. This experience, […]
Read MoreI Practice What I Preach: Mental Marginal Gains
In my last segment of my “I Practice What I Preach” series, I explained that you don’t always want to listen to your body when you’re training and racing. The reality is that, if you did, you would slow down or stop when you started to experience high perceived effort or exertion pain. Instead, you want […]
Read MoreI Practice What I Preach: When Not to Listen to Your Body
As I indicated in my last segment of “I Practice What I Preach,” you definitely want to listen to your body when it’s sending messages of injury to you. Moreover, you want to listen when your body is whispering, so you don’t have to listen to it when it’s screaming at you (then it’s too […]
Read MoreListen to Your Body Follow-up: Not What I Had in Mind! ;->
I saw this cartoon in the New Yorker and thought it was karmic timing with my last post. The cartoon gave me a good chuckle because there are those times that I feel the same way!
Read MoreEffortless Swimming Podcast: Mind Hacks for Mental Margin Gains
I recently made another appearance on the Effortless Swimming podcast (my 4th!) with Brenton Ford. If you’re not familiar with Effortless Swimming, it’s one of the top swimming-focus on YouTube. I’ve learned a ton about swimming from watching Brenton’s informative videos. In this segment, I talk about, as the title indicates, Mind Hacks for Mental […]
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