You always seem to get what you expect

I did say get what you expect, not what you want.

So often I hear people say, “I knew that would happen”. When something goes wrong. Deep down, athletes sometimes really don’t believe that they are capable of achieving their goals. It’s like their mouth has spoken the goals but their heart doesn’t own them.

The concept of self sabotage is very real. Very often it’s so subtle it’s usually treated as “bad luck”. But sadly some people have all the “bad luck”, and it’s just when they didn’t need it. At the critical moment when they’re about to achieve their dream.

I have heard lots of people say, I swim OK, I ride OK, but I run like shit. Yet when these same people run fresh, they run OK. It’s not like something physiological changes when they have cycled first. It’s more likely something psychological has changed. They expect to run poorly. If that’s what they expect, that’s what they get.

I have coached a talented young athlete, who ran like a champ in training, but when she raced, she would never put the race together which we both knew she was capable of. It was like, she felt unworthy of the position she found herself in at the end of the bike.

We worked through this by repeatedly visualising the scenario of her getting off the bike with the top girls, during her training sessions. She visited that position at the front of the field so many times in training, she became comfortable there. We found that the thought of racing against the other top girls weakened her.

We switched the race to, racing the course. The first 400m, then the first 1000m, then we’d work on the second 1000m. So the other competitors were not even a factor in our plan. She became the “boss” of the first 400m, then the first 1000m. She then started to ride in looking forward to smashing the first 400m. She expected to smash it, so she did smash it.

Before this work, she expected to be smashed in the first 1000m, and that’s what she got.

It doesn’t change overnight. It takes quite a few visualation sessions to “own” a new expectation. But just like our present expectation, we now totally own our expectation because we have rehearsed it hundreds of times in our mind. Deep down, we know what’s going to happen before we put our bike in that rack.

Deep expectations will over-rule all the wishing, hoping and bullshitting in the world.   

Visualisation is a real athletic skill which is not practised anywhere near enough by age group triathletes. It’s a skill which cannot be successfully practiced when you’re very tired. It shouldn’t be practiced after alcohol or stimulants, like caffeine. You need a clear head. A good time to practice this is after a relaxing stretching session or massage.

Be careful to visualise exactly what you want. It might be linked to the cycling technique or running technique which is most relaxed and most efficient.