Why So Serious?
I was just listening to this podcast, and one of the things that came up was “what are some of the biggest differences between the approaches of amateurs and pros?”1
And the answer was something I totally agree with in my experience. I’m going to put it a little differently than they did, and dig in a little deeper, but the main gist is that, weirdly, from the outside it seems like amateurs take their training much more seriously than pros do.
What I think is going on is that amateurs spend a lot of time worrying about the recipe, and pros spend a lot of time worrying about consistency. The pros know (whether instinctively or through experience), that shit is going to wrong, and that they can’t control everything, and that really what matters much more about the tiny little details of today’s workout is what I call The Body Of Work. Pros know what makes people fast: years of good workouts stacked up. Amateurs on the other hand, think that what’s important is making the day nearly perfect.
The result of this difference in perspective or mindset is that on a given day the pros manage what they can. They calmly eat pretty well (but rarely “perfectly”), warmup pretty well, and hit the workout to the best of their abilities that day. Wasn’t a great day? Oh well, that’s happened hundreds of other times, nothing to freak out about.
Amateurs, on the other hand, I have seen lose their fucking minds if there isn’t the right kind of oatmeal in the hotel before a race. Or if their HR is three beats too high. This comes from a place of thinking that anything other than a fucking awesome workout is basically worthless, and that if it isn’t perfect, they just wasted 90 minutes of their already over-scheduled lives.
What’s the lesson here? Mostly that the thing that’s holding many people back isn’t that they’re doing the wrong training. If you’re making some days hard, and some days easy, and getting in enough volume to push you a little, and fueling well, and sleeping a lot, then the only thing holding you back is how long you’ve been doing it. Largely pros aren’t better than similarly talented people because their workouts are better on average, they’re better because they have more workouts that aren’t shit!
Note that of course this is nuanced. Of course not every pro does X, and every amateur does Y. In my experience this is a rough correlation (which I’ll try to explain), but certainly not the whole truth.