Triathlete EQ

The longer the triathlon, the more training time required, and concurrently, time away from other activities like family, friends, home projects, and other hobbies. Make no mistake — this sport requires a major investment of personal time and money. Yet, despite the significant investment triathletes are committing to the sport, there is almost no time dedicated to training for the one dimension that comes into play in all three facets of the sport: emotions. The central premise of this book is that triathlons are as much an emotional endurance test as they are a physical ability test. If you do not believe this, then this book will be of little value to you. If you do, then the next logical question should be: What do I do to prepare for the emotional endurance test? The USAT estimates that less than 5% of triathletes spend any amount of time on training emotions and the resulting thoughts and monologues. Triathlons are an endurance sport, especially half and full distances or Ironman. It takes hours to both train for and compete in these events. During these long hours, the sheer volume of monologues that occur is quite unprecedented. Each monologue on any leg of the triathlon is a natural human response to the stimuli of the ever-changing environment. Whether it is other athletes swimming around you or the temperature of the water, riding through miles of roads in wind or heat or hills, or running on changing terrain, the environment in a triathlon is constantly changing and challenging. Compound this with the competitive environment of a race with other athletes, fans around you, no teammates or coaches to help you, as well as the myriad of things that can go wrong, and we are talking about a totally unique environment that will challenge your emotions to the core. These emotions, both good and not so good ones, will dictate the tone and content of the monologues and critical subsequent decision-making. In Chapter 1, we will share several stories that almost all athletes will be able to relate to—where they had some issue in their own way, failed to execute their strategy for the race, and underperformed. Yet despite powerful personal stories of underperformance and many more well-documented ones from professional triathletes, the average triathlete still spends almost zero time training his or her emotions and thoughts. We researched dozens of training plans for all distances of triathlons recently and found none that had budgeted time for this kind of training. This is the reason we came together to write this book. We believe that most triathletes are grossly under-training in an area that has the potential to be a game-changer in performance. The inexplicable reason, we believe, that very established tri coaches and very intelligent and hard-working athletes are under-training in this area is simply that they do not know how to do it.