367 - Leverage This Mid-Season Moment to Transform Your Season
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast!
On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon and Purple Patch Coach Max Gering discuss how the midpoint of any racing season is more than just a milestone—it's a vital opportunity to pause, assess, and intentionally adjust one's course. Dixon talks about the power of midseason reflection and how to leverage it for sustained high performance. Racing reveals more than just physical fitness—it reflects your mindset, habits, preparation, and resilience. This episode explores how athletes can utilize these insights to either stay the course or make informed, targeted adjustments that lead to breakthrough results in the second half of the season.
If you have any questions about the Purple Patch program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-1:18 Promo
1:47-8:00 Intro
8:07-16:51 Part 1
16:53-28:12 Part 2
28:15-46:32 Part 3
46:40-end Part 4
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Just before we get going with today's show, I should point out that I'm on location today. I'm recording the show in Montana, little place in my heart. My wife Kelli is, of course, from Montana. Today's show is all about assessment and reflection, and as you listen, you might have a spark of intrigue. So I want to give you three options to deepen the conversation with us and get a little bit of engagement going. The first is, if you would like a complimentary Needs Assessment help you understand where you should put your next path forward in your performance journey, feel free to reach out to us. We're happy to have a complimentary needs assessment with you. If you'd like to go really, really deep, you don't need to be a Purple Patch athlete to take advantage of the expertise of myself and the coaching team. If you'd like to set up a paid consultation, we can do that as well. We'll help you go through the process of reflection and assessment so that you can chart the best process forward, even if you intend to carry on self coaching or retain your coaching relationship. And of course, we're always here to talk about any Purple Patch program that you would like all of the above. Just reach out to us. Info@purplepatchfitness.com. We can set up a complimentary call see what is best for you and take next best steps. But until the end of the show, I'll say, have fun, enjoy. It's going to be a useful one, assessment and reflection. Enjoy the show.
Matt Dixon 01:25
I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time starved people everywhere integrate sport into life.
Matt and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever your host, Matt Dixon, but once again, I'm joined with my co host. Welcome back. Max Guerin, thank you, Matt. It's good to be here again. Where do we find you this happy morning of recording here in July, I am in San Diego, where I currently live with my wife, and everything is good. Have a lot going on with athletes all over the world. I am actually racing myself tomorrow morning, I'm embarking on a 50k trail run with about 6000 feet of elevation. So that is what is happening in my life currently. That's a big enough where's the where's the trail run, absolutely terrific. It is inland in San Diego, so by an area called Mount Laguna, which is not in Laguna Beach. It's inland a little bit,
just north of the border of Mexico, just just enough to where you, uh, you remove all options of getting any coastal breeze, and you just get it stinking hot. I'm assuming it's going to be nice and warm, but, uh, it should be fun. And type two fun, as they say, type two fun. I am as if you're watching the show on YouTube, You'll, uh, obviously see that. My backdrop is a little bit different, because I am at the in laws house. I'm in Helena, Montana, as we record, we just spent a lot of time, about 10 days up in Whitefish, our second home, I would call it, uh Kelli, obviously, from Helena originally. We spent a lot of time in Montana. So we did a a whole bunch of hiking, paddle boarding, trail running, fantastic stuff. We did a deep, deep glacier hike that ended up because of bear activity, but didn't see any bears, but a lot of fun, but, but we've got a good one today we we are going to talk all about reflection, a little bit of assessment. It is apropos, I would say, because we are right in the heart the middle of the year. And the mid season always proves to me, the time, which is really, really important to do one of the more
meaningful moments, as I would call it, to come out of the weeks, to step out of the day to day, and really look back.
Max Gering 5:23
And many athletes that are going to be listening here have already done some racing, if not even had some of their major racing. And as we know, racing reveals truth, not just about fitness levels, but preparation habits, mindset, many things that can go right, and of course, some things that can maybe go not so right? So we wanted to bring you a show and just have a coach's discussion basically around honest evaluation. How are you doing so far and ensuring that if things are off track, how do you get back on track? How do you prevent a repeat of the first part of the year that maybe wasn't as good as you hoped for when we had our season planning preparation discussions right at the end and towards the start of this year, maybe you haven't quite executed as intended. And so we want to go through and look at some of this stuff to help people get back on track. The other part of it, of course, is if you.
Had a magical year. Another key part of the assessment that we're talking about is when things are going really well. How do you avoid complacency? How do you build on that success and ensure that you can actually not just try and repeat, but even take another step beyond whatever your personal performance level is? And so we want progression.
Matt Dixon 07:52
We want improvement, whether we're slightly off track or, of course, whether we're doing really, really well. So whether you look back at the first part of the year and you think, pass, fail, whatever it is, reflection right now is key. And as we're going to talk about, reflection is a skill in many ways. It is a central part of our coaching model. It's a key habit of high performers. So we thought we'd have a discussion about it, and we're gonna go back and forth. We're gonna try and section it off so that we can be successful. First, we're gonna ground how we think about high performance globally, really, really important. The second, which I think is often skipped over with coaches, is redefining what we mean by assessment and reflection. What actually is it and and how can any listener really adopt it and be successful? Then, of course, we want to get to the rubber meeting the road. We want to talk about how give you some tools to actually be able to reflect in a really smart way. And then I did want to add in the end, and this was actually, I say I did want to end, but this is your thoughts. So thank you for doing this. A bit of post race assessment. We have a very particular, structured, programmatic approach to post race assessment. We've done a little work with, actually, the sport psychologists with the British Olympic Association, and received quite a lot of training on that. And it really could joins with much of the work that I did with the Purple Patch professional athletes. So that quite a systematic way for post race assessment in itself, that I thought would be good, or you thought would be good, and I'm stealing the the glory here, thought would be really good to to go through that give people some tools that have, maybe got some key races coming up, or maybe have just finished some great races, as I had with a couple of challenge wrote last weekend. So that's, that's the summary. Am I missing the thing there? Max, or I think, no you, I think you covered it all and framed it on nicely. I'm just confused. I thought it was Challenge Roth, but that may just be my American.
Matt Dixon 13:25
Yeah. That is heritage. Let's have a quick pause here. I'm afraid you are welcome to call it Challenge Roth. It is R, o, t, h, the but the German name is rot, so rot, but we will call it Roth for you. Why not Roth? Because I'm from East Essex. So I would also say Challenge Roth. I'm just trying to be a little bit aristocratic credit. Alrighty, I'm going to do you a great honor. You're going to be the first host to ever do this. You're going to introduce the meat and potatoes. So let's segue into it. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the meat and potatoes. You
all right, so part number one is, I think it's really important that we frame high performance so that all the listeners can be aligned on what it is that we're talking about in this episode, and what it is that we're really working for and optimizing for. So at Purple Patch, we talk about the performance base layer, and we have key parts of what it means to live a high-performance lifestyle. I think that's a good place to start and dive into what those parts are.
Max Gering 15:25
Yeah, I think it is because I think, I mean, we go all the way back to the work with the professional athletes, and, in fact, we can go all the way back to my my struggles and failures as a professional athlete. But you know when, when I started coaching elite level athletes, it was very, very important for me. I felt like any success was going to be built on the platform of every athlete having a really robust platform of health. And that is a a mindset and approach, a belief system that has permeated all through Purple Patch forever, ever since. If you want to perform well in any endeavor in life, by the way, not just at the elite level of athletics, not just at the amateur level of triathlon or marathon running or anything else. Whether you want to be the best pianist, whether you want to be the best leader, whether you want to be the best teacher, the best teacher, the best parent, we do best when we are physically on a platform of high health, and that's what we label a performance baseline. So when we think about achieving sustained high performance, that's that's the baseline, that's the starting point. That's what you want, but that's not a predictor of great performance. Ultimately, it's when you combine a great platform of physical health while, of course, doing the prerequisite of consistent training that's highly specific, to get you ready for the events that you're training for, but also developing your.
In many ways, a toolkit of traits might the right mindset to drive that and and this is really, really important, because when I think about training an athlete, we are looking to obviously provide a training stimulus that that needs to be the magic work is always consistency, but they need to be able to absorb it physically. So we're looking for positive adaptations. And as they go along the journey, we're looking to hone and ignite and develop all of the traits of high performance, high adaptability, focusing on the right things, etc. And that really emerges and and then when, typically the individual athlete who is going on an individual quest to get ready for their in this case, triathlon, they tend to do better. It tends to go to the next level when they have a really good support system, teammates, mentors, coaches, etc, feeling like they're a part of community. That's where we start to see these things manifest. And so that's really the anchor point, I would say the core components, the
Matt Dixon 17:21
other part of it, though, is, is, really, how do you apply this? So those just that's, that's what we're seeking to achieve with an athlete. The question when, when we talk about assessment, is, how do we actually apply, and where does assessment fit into it in many ways? Wouldn't you agree? Yeah, and I think something that I've learned from from Purple Patch, as you mentioned the beginning, is that assessment is one of those key habits of being a high performer, and therefore, since it's a habit and a skill, it fits in at many different points along one's journey, whether it be a weekly basis, via what we do at purple packages, the Sunday special post race. So after a big event, quarterly based off of the annual calendar, it's not a one and done once a year only do it going into the New Year type thing.
Yeah, there's, you know, I was listening to a great podcast, actually, with a couple of good friends of mine, Brett Stalberg and Steve Magnus. You've heard of them. They were talking this. They have a new podcast called
Matt Dixon 20:21
excellence, actually, and in their second episode was about obsession and balance, and big part of it, one of the themes that came through, which is, I think, really appropriate for this discussion, is finding space number one for recovery, but also consistently, not just grinding day in day out with your head down in the weeds, but consistently building up the habit, the skill of reflection and and I think that reflection, you say it so well, that it is a core trait, like if we labeled 12 traits of high performers, there is focusing on the right thing, not getting distracted. There is high coach ability. There's obviously adaptability. We need to be mentally resilient. Reflection of one of those. It's also programmatically built into our coaching model and and I think it's it's worth having a little dig into this. I'm just going to summarize for listeners. We've done whole episodes on this. I'm going to summarize for listeners our coaching model, and the coaching model is adopted by business leaders that we work with leadership teams, that we work with the structure of the Purple Patch professional athletes. Every athlete that is a member of the Purple Patch ecosystem basically follows along with this coaching model and and it's very, very easy for listening coaches or listening athletes to apply to their own journey. It's not a rigid model. It's just a mindset. And I want to fuse in where reflection fits into this. So the first part of it, and you do this typically, obviously at the start of the season, is, let's define what success is. What are we looking to achieve here? What's our purpose, and so why am I looking to do what I'm looking to do when I go in a year's time typically, what does success look like? Now you can say, Okay, what does success look like at the end of this block? Even, what does success look like at the end of this week? And we're going to get into that. But what does success look like at the end of the season? And then out of that, what the goals are? So there's a first phase of that, very simple, what are our goals? And they're the stepping stones to achieve our purpose, basically our mission. That's the first thing. It's very, very important coach and athlete is aligned on that. The second part of it, then is really contracting and saying, Okay, with that. How do we roadmap? What are the things that we are going to focus on? What are the things we are not going to focus on? Where do we actually have clarity across these are the steps that we are going to take to drive towards what the success looks like. That's phase two, and that is a very, very important planning phase, roadmapping and focusing, filtering out things that can be.
Scraps, etc. Then you get busy doing the doing. That's where you and I coach, coach the athletes, obviously holding them to account to those promises and contracts, giving them feedback, helping them course correct when things go wrong and the athlete is in the weeds, that all leads into. Then you want to think about this as an ongoing infinity loop. It leads into the fourth and final phase, which is assessment and reflection our focus on today, and that is a hugely important component now, when you see an individual, a team,
Matt Dixon 20:21
organization, follow this success flows, and this is a part our corporate leadership program is called Win cycle. Is trying to help the athlete or the leader or the leadership team or the team of athletes, try and get into these ongoing win cycles. I don't think anyone can be successful, be it individual or team, without consistent
reflection, pausing, getting out of the obsession, coming back to Steve Magnus and and Brad Stulberg, coming up a level and looking back, and it's a huge component. It reinforces your commitment. It keeps you on track, and it helps fuels motivation. So that's our sort of model, as we think about this, in many ways, fantastic. I think that's a really good thing to frame out for the listener to make sense, that it's something that's infused in the way we work with athletes, and that it's something that happens on a quarterly basis. It's something that happens on a post race basis, on a weekly basis, it really depends on the athlete and what they're going through. But now that we know that, what is assessment, what is actually happening, how would you define this assessment and reflection?
Matt Dixon 23:35
Well, I'll say something that.
I'll answer it with one of my most annoying traits, I'll tell you what it isn't. It isn't about putting yourself on trial, and it is not about pass fail. I think that's very, very important. It is a it is a tool. It is a practice. And if you think about assessment or reflection, by definition, you are taking a pause. You are proverbially coming up out of the weed. So I always talk about the day to day being at the 1000 foot level, like right in there in the weeds. You're coming up to not 10,000 foot. It's not the major component, but you're coming up to 3000 feet, and you're looking back first. That's what assessment is. And you're looking at things, and you want to look for clarity, to say, what are the things that were done that was really, really good, executed relative to intention, maybe even above the level, some things that we did really, really well, there, secondly, what were some things that maybe we didn't execute as well? And and you take it that all through the pursuit of defining what your actions should be, moving forward, where should I shift, modify or double down my focus? That's really what it is. So it's a it's a practice, and it is very deliberate. It's very, very important, and it enables you, it's a tool, to define your actions, to do two things in parallel. Number one, build on success. What's going really well? Don't change it, because we're getting traction here. The second is course correct on the things that maybe haven't to be executed. And that's that's a really critical component in many ways. So really is action oriented? That's where it goes back into that high performance, it really is pausing to understand, what do I need to keep doing, and what do I need to do better? Have you found that it's again, we've mentioned before, that it's a skill. So skills are something that you build and you work on, and therefore they're not always things that you're good at, right, right from the jump. Have you found that athletes have struggled with reflection because it is something that needs to be worked on and developed and can be emotional? Yeah, it is. I mean, I you know, I think doubling down on that as not just a habit is a skill. And if you think about anything, if I pick up a golf club for the first time, it's not easy, and it's going to be pretty ugly, especially with my big honking, you know, six foot, 295
Matt Dixon 26:21
frame trying to swing a club. It's going to look pretty ugly, but if I do it repeatedly, then I'm going to gain skill acquisition. I'm going to improve. It's it's really challenging for an athlete that's not used to it before. Imagine if I start coaching an athlete or someone comes into Purple Patch, because we have reflection assessment infused into programming all the way. It's sometimes a bit strange, and I think one of the big parts of it is emotion. It's quite challenging when you first start to really
integrate reflection as a consistent feature.
Fabric to remove the emotion from the logical side of things, it's typical for athletes to look back and think didn't do this well. It's that pass by or mentality and and I would, I would just add here at jungling, that athletes are always more prone to reflect when things have gone poorly. So if they've had a bad race, because they want to find the culprit, they want to find like, what did I do wrong? How? You know this is terrible. I need to course correct. And it's and it's fueled with a lot of frustration, emotion, etc, etc, and so it's quite challenging. Athletes tend to skip reflection when things are going really well, or things have gone well, like a great race and so and in fact, that is the time that is equally as important to reflect and to actually say, okay, not just it was a great outcome, but why? Why was it really, really important?
Matt Dixon 29:21
So, yeah, it's it. It's a a
very much a skill, and you need to infuse it in a really programmatic way. So the way we do this, I'll give listeners a little bit of insight of how we do this at Purple Patch. It's obviously a part of post season. At the end of the season, there's a whole bunch of season planning that occurs, whether you're coached, whether you're a part of the squad program, defining success. What we talked about ensuring that you're focusing on the right things at the end of the year, you're looking back. So that's a big reflection, what went well this year, what didn't go well, so that you can inform the next year. That links on the next part of the process. We also have moments we tend to love to have a team atmosphere, even though it's an individual sport. So whether you're coached by me, coached by Max, or one of the other coaches, a part of our squad program, on a quarterly basis, we have a moment where everybody looks back and says, Okay, based on this block of work, based on this quarter, even though athletes are at different phases with different goals different levels, you can still all look back and reflect together individually on what your actions are. There's post race as well, really important. We're going to talk about that at the end of today's show, and then even on a weekly basis. And this is where we get it ingrained, where you start to remove the emotion we have the Sunday special. Sunday special is a prioritization tool. It's a weekly activity that emerged out of our pro athletes, all of our very busy executives that we work with leverage it, and it integrates all components of life to prioritize and plan your week ahead. But the first step of your Sunday special is to reflect that is that word again? Look back on the last week. What went well, what didn't go well, what do I need to take into consideration when I plan my next week? That's how you get skill development. You do it every single week, then you do it post race, then you do it on a quarterly basis. By the time you're reflecting the year you've got, what's that word, self awareness? If self awareness, you understand yourself, and that's how I think you diffuse a lot of emotion out of it.
Matt Dixon 32:25
Yeah, I love that. And I think you start to crave it. I actually had a conversation. I had a consultation with an athlete the other day who has an Iron Man in three weeks in Ottawa. And she said to me, can you make sure she's on squad? She can you make sure that when I'm done with the post race recovery, you guys drop into training peaks for me, the assessment, reflection check in week that I missed because she was doing the Iron Man build. And I said, of course, that's fantastic. Just out of curiosity, why? And she's like, well, I love the questions and and she knows that she's already craving that post race moment to check in and to separate the emotion and then the Okay, what do I now need to do differently with the rest of my season and everything that's important to me? So that's a really good example. If you start to really crave wanting to do it, what's, uh, what's the athlete's first name by chance? Ruth. Ruth, okay, can you, can you message Ruth and let Ruth know that I will be at Ottawa so so we can meet up pre race, and anyone that's listening, if you happen to be at Ottawa Iron Man, reach out to us. We're happy to get together share any wisdom before that race. I've got a lot of time. I'll be up there Friday, Saturday into obviously race day on Sunday. So there you go. Same applies for Oregon, 70.3 as well. Those are two races looming that I will be at. So if you're listening and you're going to be at Oregon, we do also have a Purple Patch meet up Saturday before the race. So, uh, so feel free to reach out, even if you're not a Purple Patch athlete, I'd love to meet you as a listener. If you'd like to join, just reach out info at Purple Patch fitness. People can reach out and connect the team. Will connect you with me. I will say, by the way, I think one thing that's important, and you mentioned this as a consult, and it sparked a thought as well. I.
Matt Dixon 33:12
Partnership in this. I do think that reflection is magnified when you actually are doing it in partnership. The power of coaching. You know, big part of big part of my role as a coach. Your role as a coach is to firstly prevent people from doing silly things, but but also help them as a sounding board, leveraging our wisdom to help people craft their actions, to get the most yield from it. Ultimately, we want to get the most out of people as a partnership, I think is really, really important. And, and I know you, you do a huge amount of this, because not only do you coach a good amount of athletes, but you also do a lot of consultations with athletes, both who are inside the Purple Patch ecosystem, but also not coached by Purple Patch. And you said you are one of our key coaches. Of those consultations to really help people think through and I think you see the power of that with consulting with athletes. Yeah, yeah. And I think we'll really cover it in this next part, part of how to do the assessment. I mean, it's really a question asking exercise. You ask better questions, you get better answers, and then you start to have better inputs and get better outputs. And a lot of athletes, it's our job as coaches to help athletes tap into what they have inside of them. People are experts in their life. When you meet a new athlete and external console. They're much more of experts in their life than I am. I don't know them. I just met them for the first time, and so our job as coaches is to help go through this process of reflection, be that sounding board so they can have a little bit more of objective, objective opinions about what's going well and what's not, and then help them continue to tap into their potential. And we'll move on to the how. But I will just say, by the way, you mentioned leveling up
Matt Dixon 36:21
the best athletes that I ever coached, folks that many people have heard of, whether it's Chris liedo, Meredith Kessler, Sarah piampiano, Jesse Thomas, Tim Reid, these, these real, enduring champions, all of them were not just hungry for coaching in partnership when they thought through their strategy, they demanded it. And the same goes with very well known high level executives and CEOs that, obviously I've worked with a lot over the years, and it tends to be the higher up in the organization, the more demand there is for that. They absolutely want partnership in their own reflection journey. And you know, I'm not going to help them with their algorithms of their tech companies and, but I can be a coach to help them come to their best answer in their performance and and that's a key component. So if you want to level up. I just think it's very, very challenging when you're doing the doing, to see the hard truth in yourself and and it's only with support that sometimes you can really gain the whole perspective. It's not that someone else has given you the answers, but it's a facilitator for you to get the clear picture and to be able to say, Yes, this is what I need to do. And that's really, really empowering. So maybe we should shift on to the meat and potatoes. Of the meat and potatoes the howia, yeah, what are athletes needing to be thinking about, thinking about when they're doing mid season, reflection. That's the that's the big thing that we're going to cover here. So I think we should really start with the first part of it, which is going over what went well. As you mentioned, it's important to do assessment and reflect even when things are going well. So question for you, Matt is, what are the buckets that athletes need to be asking themselves about when figuring out what went well?
Matt Dixon 37:24
Yeah, it's when, when we talk about this, saying, I want to give people some context in this, and then I'll talk about the buckets of an athletic sense.
I often remember working with pros where, you know, a professional race, there is a cluster of athletes that could potentially win the race overall, many, many times when I was coaching athletes, they might have won the race or been on the podium, but their actual performance wasn't great. They maybe weren't, almost in spite of themselves, relative to themselves when they looked in the mirror, whether it was potentially a weaker field, or other people had bad races, but when you actually objectively looked at their performance, there are a whole bunch of things that we could build on that was successful every time, but also things that we wanted to course correct on. And if we just got blinded by outcome, I won the race. Yippee. I got the prize money and I got the notoriety we would miss the opportunity to improve ongoing. So I want to double down with this. It is really, really important for athletes to go through this process when things have gone well, when things are going well in training, in racing, equal to when your channel.
It's, it's a skill, it's a development, it's a habit, it's a practice. Great. So to your point, Matt, and to your question,
let's start with that. It's always, I think the important part, and I think that starting with what has gone well is a good first entry point to fuse some of the emotional side of things. So let's just use this for people on a weekly basis, on a quarterly basis. Let's let's anchor it right now, though, today's discussion in mid season. So we are in mid season. It's the main point of of the topic. You're halfway through your year. Maybe you've had a couple of races. You've got some key races coming up on the best part of the year. We are reflecting. When I look back objectively, I want to get piece of paper, my Excel spreadsheet, whatever works for you, and identify the things that have gone well. That's your training.
Matt Dixon 39:01
So how has your training consistency been?
How's your execution been relative to it? Some of the things that perhaps you define that you needed to do with training, did you apply that focus? So maybe you're having a heavier emphasis on swimming this year. Maybe you were starting at the start of this block, the start of this season, to say, I'm going to reduce so much intensity in running, but I'm going to run frequently. So the things that you defined, whether you defined it yourself as an athlete or together with a coach, did I actually execute relative to intended? Has my training been really consistent? Have perhaps my metrics and my fitness? Where is it now? Where is my state of fitness, etc, and I think that's a really good thing and and that is highly individual, because there are a million different methodologies. There are a million different athlete needs and goals, but having a really look down and say, identifying the things that I have done really well. Give yourself kudos on that.
It's all also really important to look at your supporting habits. These are things like your hydration, your nutrition, your fueling during training and racing. Did you execute a well, your sleep habits, whatever it is for you go through and look at those, because we know these are catalysts to develop that performance base layer, the platform of health. We know they're critical. We know they yield adaptations. So what are the things that I'm doing really well, perhaps one of your markers of success was you're really going to prioritize sleep. So how was that you might be able to look back at your gadgets and tools that track, that you might be able to look back and consistently, but look at it and say, What did I do? Well, here. Okay, great. Then I would actually the third bucket is management.
Matt Dixon 42:20
You have the best laid plans. You've defined what your focus is going to be, but you know what happened next is life, and life is not a spreadsheet. And the one thing that we can be absolutely definitive on is things aren't going to happen as planned. Over the course of half a season, there's going to be shit that happens in life, and there's going to be change, and there's going to be unexpected stuff. So how did you do what are the things that you did well, and identify the areas, the moments when you look back at things that you do well, when change occurred when adversity happened, where things that were unexpected, when you took opportunities. How did you manage training, injury, sickness, life, whatever it might be. And really look back, and then the final thing is the things that are just out of your control. So everything we talk about there, how did you execute training? How do you manage training? What else occurred in your life that was really positive, or things that you did well, relative to your work, relative to family, relative to health, etc, and be really positive on the first lens, then I guess you go to and I'll hand it over to you, areas that perhaps didn't go as well, things that felt off track or you didn't execute as intended. Why don't you lead us through that section? Yeah, and I think a lot of the things that you're going to be thinking about in this part are similar things, right? You're just approaching it from a different lens. So you're still assessing your training, you're still asking yourself the same question of, What were my goals? What what did I set? I did I wanted, as you mentioned, maybe I wanted to work on my swim, or I wanted to change my run. And so you're asking yourself is, where do I stack up?
Matt Dixon 45:21
Where did I fall off track relative to what I wanted to accomplish? Same question about your habits. Think about your habits. Think about the habits that you said you wanted to work on, or just think globally about the supporting habits, sleep, hydration, nutrition, stress management, all of those things, and think where, where could I have done a little bit better? Maybe another way to think about it is to reflect a little bit about what.
Where you struggled and where it was hard for you, and then within those moments, think to yourself, was there something that was in my control that I could have done that would have helped me navigate these situations better?
So I think that's something I like athletes to think about. I want to hover on that because I think that's really important, is a part of this isn't trying to find areas that you failed. And so you come back to your your sort of emotional side of of things. It's you go back and say, What could I have done different? There are some areas that maybe that are under my control that could have made this less of a negative impact, or remove it as a negative impact that I can build on. What were some of my behaviors, some of my actions that perhaps I'm empowered to course correct on? It's really it's really useful. You should never have nothing in the negative column. Let's call it that. You should always an opportunity, isn't it? And I'm thinking of good example. Is that meat with an athlete. I think this point was maybe three weeks ago, and he booked a call with me because he wanted to talk about some post race reflection. This is when we were doing this. We were having this moment within Purple Patch, and specific, specifically, wanted to talk about some fatigue that he felt in the previous quarter between two races. And wanted to understand, you know, better, what he didn't do so well. That led to this accumulative fatigue and feeling like he could have managed his training better. And one thing that we did, and I think this is important for figuring out what you could do better, is I asked what was happening in his life at the time, to put the training into context. And what we came to realize is there was a little bit of added stress in his life at the time that he doesn't usually have, in addition to the regular work and family stress. And that came to the helped him come to the conclusion of, I need to do a better job at understanding when I have extra added stress into my life, and therefore make a better effort to double down on managing my training load and go with the ebb and flow of life and maybe change sessions on a weekly basis. So in the end, we got to a very specific thing that he took with him of, I'm going to do this differently in q3
Matt Dixon 47:21
but it comes from this initial question of, where did I struggle? Okay, what could I have done differently to minimize that struggle or to have overcome it better? I had a very similar athlete, and athlete that I coach individually, who's and it can be incredibly liberating, by the way, and empowering to get to this because you're like, Okay, I can take action. A guy who loves to do triathlon, half Ironman athlete, at the moment, very, very busy at work, is also in the process of moving home. Got a whole project that is going on there, and doesn't really have massive race goals coming up, but everything is all consuming, and we're trying to apply a training program to him where 345, days in a row, he's effectively failing, is not able to execute the program. But when you go through a reflective exercise and you say, Okay, what could you have done differently there? He had the pass, fail. This was the workout that was written on there. If I can't get it done, I can't squeeze it, it takes an hour, I'm not going to do anything. And suddenly, this shift of having a little bit more time when life is really flowing and really chaotic, to say, actually, I'm doing this to ultimately become a faster athlete, but I also want to leverage this to be a really healthy human being. And I want to leverage this because I enjoy it. It's fun. It's a stress processor, etc. And so if life is really chaotic for three or four days, why don't I just shift that harder run interval session to a soul filling 30 minute easy run, why don't I actually just do at least half of the bike ride and do it really, really well, and then course correct on it, and as soon as he shifted from the pass fail, must get it all in, or there's nothing at all, because I don't have time to a bit more of a fluid approach. He started self managing the program, and then we created the other part of it was a better communication system to say, Okay, here's how I build the workouts. It's almost an A, B, time rich, time starved approach, which we do with our squad athletes. But I did it individually, do this, and if not do that, suddenly there the weeks become really fluid and and it starts dancing with life a little bit. It was only through his reflection and me drawing it out of him that he suddenly was empowered. So this is a really important component of what am I what am I not doing well here? So how can I course correct on that? And it was a shift of perspective and ultimately, action. Yeah, I like how liberating it was. I think that's really a good a good word. And to recap a little bit about when you're reflecting on what went well and also what didn't Well didn't go so.
Matt Dixon 51:07
Well, think what we've said here is the key is your locus of control needs to be within yourself. So you're it's always going back to, what could you control? And I think athletes tend to when they say, what didn't go well, it's, oh, I didn't they can be very metrics based. So I didn't improve my swim time by this much as I wanted to, or my run didn't get better in this sense. And so even when you're looking at what didn't go so well about the first part of your season, and you're getting very analytical about the sport specific stuff, you need to bring it back to asking yourself the question of, what are the habits, what are the things that I could have done differently to get these outcomes? Was that I needed to be more intentional in my training? Did I need to run easier days easier? Did I need to bring it a little more on hard days, whatever may be, you need to bring it back to something that you can do differently in the future. It's gold. It is internal locus of control. What we're not yet this is we are diving very, very deep into the weeds of this, and we want to make sure that sunset. This is a process that doesn't take that long, by the way. We just really want to hammer it out and and ingrain it. But this is not what went what? Okay, what did I do? Really? Well, I improved my PR in the swim time. My FTP is better. What did I go? Well, my running speed sucks. That's not what we're talking about here. It's everything that that actually informs the outputs, and that's that's everything you can control. And the more you do that, the more empowering it is, yeah, which takes us to this next part of Okay, so, so then what right this is all it's action oriented, as we said in the beginning. And so from this, you need to create an action plan of what are you going to do about it? And that also then sets up the groundwork for the next time you check in, because this is you defining success. So in whatever time frame it may be, when you look back and you say, what went well relative to what I defined as success, this is where you define the new version of success for that path forward,
Matt Dixon 53:21
and then and defining focus and action basically exactly, yeah, and and very simply, you go back and you look at your your list of everything that went well, you build on those key elements, and what are the things that are really important, things that didn't go well? What could you have done differently? What should you do now? And you course correct on those, and you're, we're back into our process. We're back into that infinity loop. Okay? Re engagement, recommitment, okay. This is this what success looks like for the second half of the year. These are my goals. What now, with this information of reflection, what should my focus be? What should my action be? And and it off. It relates to, obviously, what you did at the start of the year, but it's refreshed, and it's a great moment. It go through that contracting of which then, of course, if you're coached, then coach an athlete, you're like, great. Let's go and do it. Let's go and hit that last let's go and hit the World Championships. Let's go and hit the next diamond. Let's go and hit the full marathon that we're deciding to do. Let's go and hit integrating into life so we can set up a great 2024, 2026 I should say, goodness me, I'm going back in history. So, yeah, it's, it's a huge action plan that wants to come out of it. That that's why, in our athlete profile, that we leverage with our individual athletes this mid season. Will say this is what we define, and same process as what our squad athletes go through as well. Yeah, I wanted to ask you, do you think there's some mistakes? So you've talked about, mentioned focus. So what am I going to focus on? We talked about, what am I going to change? Do you think there's mistakes, common mistakes, that people make when emerging out of this checking process of figuring out what to focus on,
Yeah,
Matt Dixon 56:21
one of the big ones is over complication, and we might be leading to a bit of that, because we're we're speaking a lot about it, but this is about boulders and not saying so if once you have gone through what you did well, what didn't go Well, and you're creating your action plan. Your action plan, you should be able to tell your coach, your family, your friends, your training partners in the duration of a very quick elevator ride, like it is almost elevator pitch. This is what my focus is. This is where I'm doing right now. Bang, bang, bang. Three things, and the most important thing are, because we only have so much capacity. What are the key things that are going to drive performance change in the positive? So I would say try and that's number one. Number two, which is joined to it, try and change too much. So everything you've listed here, it's not about doubling down on everything is what are the things that are going to elicit the best performance, and going from there? And then the third thing, which I think is it's actually more common you might imagine, is going through the whole process and then just going straight back to your own routines and habits, not actually taking action and changing.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Midseason reflection, Race performance assessment, Athletic performance review, Course correction, High performance mindset, Endurance athlete strategy, Post-race debrief, Emotional decompression, Performance habits, Training evaluation