Build confidence and be realistic

Overview

I was listening to a podcast earlier (That Triathlon Show – EP282 Sports Psychology with Simon Marshall and Lesley Paterson), yes a triathlon podcast, but they have some of the most knowledgeable minds on there, it’s great. Anyway, they were talking about how success builds confidence, which gave me the idea for this article. One of my biggest pieces of advice I always give, is to set a realistic target and work towards it by building confidence. If you do what I did in my first Transcontinental and burn yourself into the ground, the failure can be overwhelming and actually mentally disastrous – on reflection I am proud of how I dealt with that and grew. However if you can set stretch but realistic goals, and achieve them or come close you will thrive. Your confidence boost from a ‘success’ will be incredible. A high confidence in one’s ability is perhaps one of the best performance enhancing drugs out there, one only needs to look at teams that get a win on the board, and then go on a winning streak (see Mark Cavendish in Turkey 2021). Success breeds success.

A warm day in the plains of Western Kyrgyzstan

Building confidence before the main goal

Generally I am now more of a process orientated person (ie. trying to improve myself iteratively) and base my self-worth on meeting those processes goals. In the earlier days, wins or losses would define me. These days, I really don’t care where I placed in an event as long as I did my best, I say really as I am a competitive person and I love to compete. I would by lying if I said I didn’t care at all about coming second, it burns, but does not define me. Interestingly, often when I do come first, I am still left with dissatisfaction because I believe I could have done better – but that is another story and one I think athletes find common, yet to outwardly say “so I came first and yeah I am not that happy about it” just sounds bad, so it’s a silent one. The point is, we all do have a goals we reach for, even if they are part of a longer process.

To explain myself, I wanted to race Silk Road Mountain Race (SRMR) since I first heard of it in 2018, however I had no off-road or mountain experience. I knew I needed to build that experience, so I could have confidence in myself, before even entering the race. Therefore, in the year before SRMR 2019 I began to collect the experience I needed. I did races that would expose me to similar conditions, these races were more about building my skill-set and confidence in ability than outright performance at said race. I then travelled to Kyrgyzstan six weeks before the race started, and went touring around the country. As well as allowing me to breath the culture I was able to really begin to feel ‘at home’ in the conditions there. So when the race started, I had the experience I needed for the conditions and knew I’d been through whatever the race could throw at me. I had confidence in myself. Had I not done those preliminary races, or spent time in Kyrgyzstan, I would have been on the start line with quite a high level of trepidation and lack of confidence. All of these factors combined would have lead to me having a higher level of stress and likely a lower performance. Or at least not as fun.

There is nothing more powerful than having an assurance in oneself. Being fit is great, being mentally resilient is obligatory. But having assurance will allow you to unlock your potential.

You don’t need to enter races or go to Kyrgyzstan to get assurance.

Kyrgyzstan at 4,000m, getting the experience I needed

What does this look like?

If you have an end goal in mind, let’s say a race. You need to sit down and do an analysis on that race. Once you have done your analysis and you know what the race is about, you will be able to spot the gaps in your experience and abilities. These are the gaps you need to plug, and NOT at the race itself. The whole point is that when you turn up to the event you have as a goal, you’ve build your experience and abilities up so that you are brimming with confidence. Plugging these gaps involves designing situations to put yourself into in order to get the experience or skills you need, so that you can have the confidence in yourself that you have been there before, experienced it, debriefed it and importantly learned from it. Getting experience is not a singular act, it is an iterative process, and you debrief at each step to work out what went good, what could have gone better and learn. You then start again with your learnings and so on. You will never be able to fill every gap, however when doing your analysis you can identify the important ones. One way to do this might be with a Fear / Experience level chart. Simply use the list from your analysis, put it into the chart (honestly) and then begin with the area in blue, ie. Low experience, high fear. If you have lots in this area, you could always then weight each one based on importance. But it could get complicated quickly and I like simplicity.

Once you start to tick off some of the items in the blue box your growth of confidence to carry you in perpetual motion. Some items you might put on the diagram are: never ridden through the night, never bonked super hard, never bivi’d out in the rain, never ridden in torrential rain for hours. Whatever you do though, do not shy away from the blue area just because it makes you afraid. It can be easy to say, oh that won’t happen in the race, or I’ll just deal with it when it does. But trust me, get that hard experience where you are most afraid and you will become unbreakable.

Set realistic aspirations

Before my first transcontinental race my aspiration was; ‘to win’. If you ever ask me now before a race it will be; ‘to do my best’. A stark difference. You will often hear athletes say oh I just want to do my best, perhaps it can even seem self-degrading, or nonchalant, but do not confuse it as such. Being realistic, and process driven is an incredibly powerful tool to maintain a healthy mindset. And if you didn’t know, ultra-endurance cycling is ‘basically’ all mind over body.

Say you have set yourself a silly schedule, to ride X kilometers per day. That is great, however on the third day, when it rains crazy and you get off the schedule what do you think will happen? I can guarantee it will likely be negative thoughts entering your brain, degrading yourself on your pathetic ability. And once these thoughts creep in, getting them out is very hard. Whereas, if you goal had been to ride as many kilometers as you can each day, when it rains bad, you will celebrate that you were able to ride so many kilometers even in terrible weather. The framing of outlook is an incredibly powerful tool.

Failure (Growth)

I want to write pages on failure some time. However for now I will be brief. While you are getting experience and lancing away your fears, things will go wrong. It would be easier for you to rebuke yourself for being a failure. However you MUST do the opposite. Praise yourself for having the courage to set beyond your comfort zone and grow. You are a champion and hero for trying. Learn from where things could have gone better and blow smoke up your arse like you’re the best for just simply trying, because you are.

Failure is not found in the act of trying, it is in the act of not trying at all. Success is found simply trying