Thank you for the poke @The Ouzo
Setting goals are relatively easy. However, are they aligned with your unique life situation with its social roles and work responsibilities, your age, mental health status and general medical condition, etc.? That’s the performance challenge.
5 generalised ideas with relatively loose references that may be useful for the year 2025:
1. GET REAL: Avoid being delusional and want to live the PRO life with a training programme that runs your health, both psychological and physiological, into the ground. Most high-performance athletes have a soigneur of sorts, a strength coach, a cycling coach and, most importantly, ample rest and recovery time to execute 20 hour weeks.
2. SELF-AWARENESS: The higher one's life stress, it is wise to lower one's training stress. The lower one's life stress, the more one can stretch oneself and upsize one's training stress. However, this thing called Life is not predictable and formulated as one's 4 month training plan on TrainingPeaks. Be self-aware (far trickier and complicated than it sounds) and adjust to life's crosswinds and remarkable dynamics. Lowering one's goals is not easy as it requires egolessness as the Ego wants more and more.
3. DISCIPLINE: The more ambitious and lofty your performance goals are, e.g. top 100 in the Cape Epic or sub 3 in the CTCT or *insert your cool outcome goal here*, the more one has to adjust one's lifestyle to support that goal - more sleep, less socialisation, apply more nutrition science, specific training on the yoga mat and in the gym room, less alcohol, more spiritual time, less junk miles, and so on.
4. THE HIDDEN TAX: Being elite or sub-elite fit does not necessarily mean being healthy. Many professional athletes consult me because they perform excellently, however they have mental breakdowns or struggling with chronic ‘whatever' or "feel empty" or "lonely" or both all the time because of the demands of a high-performance lifestyle. Have a look in the mirror and ask yourself how much of the quality of living do you want to sacrifice in order to pursue your goals.
5. THE POWER OF CONSISTENCY: There are many so-called overcooked athletes that look good on Strava with seriaaas mileage and training hours. When deep exhaustion inevitably arrives, they stop for a week or few, only to have to return back to day 001 to rebuild, that is if they are mentally capable of resetting. If you become gatvol of training and not even wanting to look at your equipment, you are 3 training sessions into overreach (different from functional overreach). If possible, even after an interval session, aim to have 10% left, so you are determined and motivated to go again the next day or, at the very least, after one rest day. That is where you can begin to push your limits further out.
Sterkte, julle!
"The greatest teacher, failure is."
- Yoda
