158 days until IRONMAN 70.3 Chattanooga
The wind was cold this morning. Even in North Carolina winter approaches with a bite. The five mile run with Marty and John was probably executed with more intensity than necessary today. At least for me it probably was. The upside is that running with those guys is always, and I mean always, fun.
I just signed up for the paid version of TrainingPeaks, because I used to get my data analyzed through an ancient copy of the WKO+ program, which lives on a computer so old that Moses complained about how slow it was. With the paid version, you can set up and manage an annual training plan very easily. This is exciting… for me.
Managing an annual training plan is easy on TrainingPeaks
Mental Skills
One of the sections in The Triathlete’s Training Bible discusses mental skills. It comes complete with a Mental Skills Profile questionnaire which, of course, I completed, digested and studied. At a glance, the questions (actually they are statements) look simple, but once you get started on the answers you soon realize that they are very difficult. The difficulty, for me, was in the ability to assess the statements honestly. For example, the first statement is
I believe my potential as an athlete is excellent
I could be full of myself and just answer, “Yes, Always”. Or I could just second guess that and try to be humble by answering, “Maybe”. If I let self doubt take over, the answer would be, “Not Really”. So the thing to do here is remove all emotion and second guessing from the process.
The mental skills profile from The Triathlete’s Training Bible
There are six possible responses :NEVER, RARELY, SOMETIMES, FREQUENTLY, USUALLY, ALWAYS: The respondent, me, has to choose one response that best fits the statement. Each response is assigned a number: NEVER=1 to ALWAYS=6. The statements themselves are representative of five different mental skill sets, but you don’t know that until the end of the assessment.
Thirty statements later, I added up the numbers of my responses within each mental skill set. Then after some easy math and a bit of trust in the process, a score is produced for each of the five skill sets: 1 = sorely deficient, 5 = very proficient. Here are my results:
Not surprised at all. Visualization is my specialty. Unfortunately, focus is not and never has been.
I guess I know which mental skill set I need to work on.