Time to start thinking about your goals...

This is the time of the year that you start to look at your season and either say "WOW that went really well" or "WOW, I have some work to do". For those of you that work with me or really any coach, you should be able to ask your coach what you have done well in the big picture and what areas could use improvement. In looking back at many athletes that I have worked with over the past year I seem to see a trend, those that really push themselves out of the comfort zone with Ironman and Half Ironman races on the schedule tend to do better overall. I think this is for a few reasons; one is that they are challenged and they know if they skip training it will come back to haunt them on race day. As a coach I actually like this because it creates a much better source of motivation (internal) vs. your coach begging you to get the workouts done. The fact is that anyone doing triathlon already has a pretty high level of motivation but unfortunately sometimes motivation is undone by life responsibilities. The other reason I feel athletes with these big races do better is because they have a clearly defined GOAL that will take most of the season to work up to. If the work is not done, the goal will be impossible for most to achieve. Just to be clear, I don't think you have to do an Ironman or a Half Ironman in order to have a clearly defined goal but I do think that lack of true goal setting is a problem, this includes working through the steps in order to make the goal a reality, even down to micro-managing your schedule in order to make it happen. In 2017 this is going to be a very important part of my coaching. In the past it is something that I would mostly leave up to the athlete, but in thinking about ways I can be a better coach in 2017 this is at the top of my list. So if you are starting to think about 2017, you better start writing down some specific, measurable goals to bring to me as we start the planning for our biggest and best year yet.