It's ok to fail

Goal Setting

Last year I wrote a blog about mental strength and my thoughts on its importance within our sport. Within that blog was a section on how to break down your targets into manageable chunks. This is so that you make it easier and less daunting to manage your goals and targets. If you think about revising for an exam, you don't try to memorise everything that you've learned or everything you think you should know on that subject matter all in one go. You break it down into small chunks and you work on that until you start to build up your knowledge and get ready for the exam. 

Similarly to academic progress, in order to progress as an athlete, if you want to really improve it's important to set yourself some goals. You may have a long term goal that may take a few years to reach, but within that you have to have short term goals as well and ideally these should be goals that will really push your limits and goals that you will sometimes fail at. They can be goals that you either set yourself in training sessions or in races, or goals that your coach will set for you.

Learn how to accept the pain

Part of our role as coaches is to identify areas that we can see where an athlete or club member can improve on. We've all got them, even the best triathletes in the world like the Brownlee's, Daniela Ryf, Jan Frodeno etc have all got areas that they can improve on. Granted, at that level of performance, the margins for gain are much smaller than they are for the majority of athletes of our level but they're still striving to find an advantage over a fellow competitor or to push themselves further and faster.

As a loose rule, I try to construct training plans so that they work out at about 80% - 20% with about 80% of the sessions being completed in zone 2 and the other 20% being really hard sessions. At the end of the day, triathlon is an endurance or aerobic sport, hence the necessity to really build the engine that we're so reliant on. Yes, we might be blowing and really fatigued at the end of a longer race, but there's no way that anyone can race a triathlon if they're working anaerobically for the whole race. 

Daniela Ryf said in an interview a few months ago that although they do so much work in zone 2, the sessions where they're really pushing themselves need to be really taking them out of their comfort zone. She said if it's not hurting, you're not pushing hard enough. If you learn how to push your limits in training, it makes it a bit easier for you to either break out of a pack during a race, to drop that annoying swimmer that's constantly tapping your toes, or to gap the runner that's on your shoulder and breathing down your neck. This is really where the really hard sessions come into their own. An analogy that I heard for this was on a recent podcast were they called it "visiting the well". Meaning when we have to really delve into what we perceive as our reserves, if we do it in training and constantly push the limits of those reserves in the hard sessions, the easier it is to push yourself in a race, when you're in a dark place and hurting. 

A study was done relatively recently with some track athletes. They were told to run a very hard 800m. Their times were recorded and they were given time to rest and recover before being told to do it again. What the scientists found was that nearly all of them ran the second 800m faster than the first one. At first they thought that this was because their pacing strategy had improved, but when they looked at it in more detail, it wasn't that, it was just that they simply ran faster. The main theory behind why this happened is that either consciously or subconsciously  they mentally accepted how hard the first time they ran and how much it hurt, but their brains thought "that wasn't too bad, we can push a bit harder next time". Again this links to part of my mental toughness blog were I talk about how your brain will give up before your body and the importance to train the brain to let your body to be able to push itself harder and further.

Failure IS an option

Going back to my original point of goal setting. It's important to realise that when we fail, it's actually ok, as long as it doesn't become a frequent occurrence. When we set a goal it can be anything. It can be to go a bit further in a run session. It can be to push yourself a bit faster up a hill on a bike. It can be to shave a few seconds off a pb. But they need to be goals that will push you. If you enter a race or attend a training session without a goal, it's much easier to become either a bit complacent or just go through the motions. 

With a lot of the people that I coach, the majority of them are coming into the sport as novices and they make rapid and big improvements in a relatively short time. This is because of the big improvements that they make purely from more structured or consistent training. Almost every race is a pb for them. However, as an athlete improves and gets fitter and faster, their improvements can plateau a bit as the huge initial jump in fitness levels out. This is where we need to start thinking about setting more and more goals in order to challenge us and push ourselves. 

If you sit down with your coach and talk about your race plans etc, they should ask you what do you want to achieve at a particular race? In a club environment this can be a bit harder because of time constraints etc. Nevertheless, there should always be goals. Some of these goals may seem out of reach, but they will be there to help focus you and drive you on in your journey. 

If you set yourself a goal, for example, to go under 50 minutes for a 10k but when you race you don't quite manage it. You should reflect on what went well during the race, how you felt, could you have pushed any harder and also reflect on what didn't go so well and what you can do to change that. Then take those thoughts into your training sessions. Train with a fresh focus and think how hard you can push yourself during the relevant sessions. These days I never enter a race with the mentality of "I just want to finish it". Some coaches and people say that if you start putting a time on something that you're just putting pressure on yourself. Yes, you are putting pressure on yourself, but it should be a pressure to focus on what you're doing in training and to push yourself towards your ultimate goal.

What you must never do though is just get used to having no goals, or if you do have goals and you keep failing to hit them, you mustn't let yourself get used to it. This will cause you to almost accept that you're going to fail before you've started and this is when you'll start to "choke" or "bottle it" during a race. You know you've done it in training, but you just can't perform on race day. 

If you'd like to speak more about your goals and ambitions and how I can help you on your triathlon journey, click on the link below which will take you to my coaching Facebook page, where I can be contacted through

Certa Cito Tri Coaching