What happens when things don’t go as planned? Everything was aligning perfectly for that key workout or race and then BOOM – things just fall apart. Dreams crushed, hard work goes fruitless, and you are left confused. What do you do? This is so important of a question to answer now when you are not smack in the middle of it. What are you going to do?
With this very important question, we are faced with two mental crossroads: acute or chronic. The chronic road takes you down a path of forgetting all the great workouts you did leading into this until you are brainwashed into thinking that your fitness is 100% defined by your performance today. This forces you to believe that you are no better than your worst workout or race and that your view of yourself should be completely defined by this one effort This gets really bad when this view permeates outside of sport into other areas of your life.
On the other hand, the acute mindset says that this is a one-time irregularity. With this mindset, you maintain your confident view of yourself relying on mounds of workout data that confirms your fitness and erase this singular effort from your mind (minus a few lessons learned). Sometimes this irregularity can be explained (poor nutrition, pacing, environmental conditions, pacing, etc) and sometimes your body for whatever reason was just simply unexplainably off. Regardless, it does not erase everything else.
Your choice here will vastly impact your future performance. Human tendency would steer us towards the chronic mindset – I beg you…choose acute.
Michael Harlow,
Founder & Head Coach,
Endorphin Fitness
