Your winter season only has a 20% chance of success. It falls apart through a series of small, repeated errors, that compound over time to put you on the sidelines. And your goals are in the dumpster.
Failure isn’t a lack of willingness to work. 95% of athletes show up in the winter like a kid on the first day of high school soccer tryouts. Ready to go, ready to do anything!
But that six shots of Red Bull energy might have you good for a day, but it doesn’t have you good for the entire block. We don’t need your muscles on fire, we need your brain on fire to be successful this winter.
This is the winter training paradox: bringing summer energy to a winter problem.
Dynamite Decembers = March full of Mehs
Instead of just sitting at my desk and complaining about it, I figured I should give you the six top traps that, combined, take out almost everyone I know.
Yes, even you.
The Unsustainable Load Trap
The unsustainable load trap sneaks up on you. One hard workout seems fine and the second one went pretty well too. Why not do another? Before you know it, you’re putting more things inside your cart than your cart can actually hold.
People typically call this overreaching. I think it’s a crisis of self-confidence. The need to continually prove to yourself that you are strong and capable.
This unhealthy relationship with your athletic identity leads you to push yourself beyond what you can do over time. It’s not what you can do today. It’s what you can also do tomorrow and the day after that.
Making longer-term decisions, even if it’s just looking seven days ahead, will be a strategic advantage for you. When faced with the choice of “do I go harder or do I back off?” almost everyone chooses to go harder.
Do yourself a favor and try the smarter option at least 50% of the time this winter.
Great Britain’s Hayley Carruthers falls at the end of the women’s elite race. REUTERS/Paul Childs TPX IMAGES OF THE DAYGreat Britain’s Hayley Carruthers falls at the end of the women’s elite race. REUTERS/Paul Childs TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
The Fuzzy Background Fatigue Trap
This iconic picture of Hayley Carruthers captures the intensity of her effort. I like how everything else behind her has fallen out of resolution.
Welcome to the fuzzy background trap. In this trap, athletes overemphasize the performance in their workouts as an indicator of wellness and health and ignore clear warning signs that exist everywhere else.
As long as you hit your numbers on the bike, it doesn’t matter how you feel in the morning. It doesn’t matter how you treat your family. It doesn’t matter if you’re full of road rage. It doesn’t matter if you’re dozing off on the train.
It doesn’t matter if your patient notes sound like a chapter from the Iliad instead of about that person’s iliac crest. Life’s good, right?
Pro tip. If your everyday life is bad, your workouts are not good.
Being slightly tired all the time might feel normal, but this physical state quietly blocks adaptation and growth.
The Stuck in the Past Trap
The stuck in the past trap isn’t limited just to exercise, but it can have devastating athletic consequences.
We all know someone who is stuck in the past as an athlete. They don’t tell you last year’s race. They still have the receipts from 10 years ago on some incredible and epic personal best.
Being stuck in the past is just another obstacle to overcome. It holds you back. Failure to be present today means that you will make decisions based on what you were capable of last year. And not just last year, but your best part of last year.
By ignoring who you are today, you’re making sure that the person you’ll be tomorrow will only be 80% of what’s possible.
Read that again.
Every year, every week, every race is an opportunity to reset. You can bring your lessons learned, but you can’t bring those expectations with you. You have to check those at the door.
The Simpsons, Money Bart Episode
The Zero History Planning Trap
Ignoring the problems that you’ve had in the past dramaticall increases the chances that you’re going to experience them again. And again.
Those mistakes are part of your athletic identity. They are who you are. They are small signals into those places where your personality intersects with your physical capacity.
Instead of closing-your-eyes moments, these are the leaning-in-learning moments. Done right, you have options. You can build with your lessons learned or you can build around the problem.
Failure to create training plans to take into account your personal weaknesses, your common pitfalls, or the things that have sunk you in the past is not only disappointing, it’s like Groundhog Day.
Let’s face it, the idea for the movie was great, but in reality, every time you have to go around and find that you made the same mistake again, it’s just demoralizing.
The Left Lane Only Trap
Not going to lie, I’m a left lane of the highway kind of guy. Not because I want to go fast, but because I know on the right hand side of the highway people are merging on or getting off or pulling over on the shoulder to do God knows what. It just kind of slows you down. Left lane only athletes are another breed altogether.
These are folks who want to reach their destination as quickly as possible. They’re the athletes behind you flashing the brights so you can just get out of their frigging way as they march towards success.
Being a left-laner is tempting. In those moments when you get passed by someone, we often attribute to that individual all of the things that we feel as though we lack. They have speed, they have strength, they have grace. They’re just better than me. I want to be like that.
The hard part about being a left-lane-only athlete is that you never incorporate other components of your training that allow you to grow. Great athletes have a variety of workouts in their portfolio. A diversity of things, from strength to speed to flexibility to strong functional movements.
This complete package is what makes endurance athletes ultimately the most successful. If you just index on one thing or set one measure of success (faster at all costs!) you won’t get the results that you deserve.
So use that left lane for sure, but don’t be afraid of the other ones either. Mix it up!
Wil E. Coyote, courtesy of Looney Tunes
The 7-Day Looney Tunes Trap
I’m pretty sure a large portion of my brain and childhood memories are dedicated to cartoons. Yours are too.
Cartoons are a great parable for how people typically treat their bodies from week to week.
Despite being devastatingly smashed by an anvil or a train, our favorite characters come right back in the next scene completely healthy. And we too imagine that we will come back healthy just magically on Mondays.
Example scenario. Monday last week was tough and Saturday’s workout was super hard and didn’t feel great on Wednesday and Sunday I could barely pull myself out of bed. Despite all of this, we expect to be rejuvenated at the start of a brand new week.
Our body doesn’t follow a calendar. We don’t recover in a magical seven-day window. Failing to account for the stress you’re experiencing right now as you move into the next part of your training plan is like deciding to close your eyes, walk into town, buy a nail gun at a hardware store, and go do a project before you come home and open your eyes again.
Possible? Yeah. Sounds epic. IF you pull it off! Will it to work? Definitely not.
Your ability in the winter to listen and adapt to the training load that you are currently experiencing is the unlock your true potential.
Yes, this means that you’re going to have to move things around on your calendar. Yes, this means you may have to lower your expectations at some point. Yes, your nail gun project is going to have to wait.
But all of those decisions are made in the pursuit of your goal. Like the character of this mini hardware horror story, if you really want to have a fantastic project, then get yourself set up for success. Make a plan. Buy the materials. Book the time. Check in regularly. Continue to measure cut and nail, right? Like do it right. Don’t just do it blindly.
Resources and Next Steps
If you want to go deeper into the methodology behind winter training—and understand exactly how the OutSeason® model works behind the scenes—download the full OS Blueprint here:
https://www.endurancenation.us/blueprint
Prefer to watch something? No worries. Why don’t you go ahead and check out our perfect winter season webinar. Sorry, our perfect master season part one the winter webinar. It’s up on youtube now. Here’s the link.
And if you’re curious about the full OutSeason® program, you can explore it here:
https://www.endurancenation.us/outseason
