Adjusting expectations during COVID19

COVID-19 re-defined what normal is

It's day 852 of the COVID19 quarantine. People on Instagram have stopped posting photos of cute and crazy ideas they've come up with and replaced them with old holiday pictures of what normal used to be. Being a runner, I've started going through my Garmin log to look at the stats of all the races I can't do at the moment with the same affection.

We lost our sense of purpose

At the start of our quarantine in Ireland, I was mostly frustrated by the fact that the Paris marathon had been cancelled 4 weeks before the big day. All the training I had done was going to the bin and I didn't know what to do about it. My big goal had been taken away from me. With only 4 weeks to go before the marathon, my training was coming along nicely and I felt confident I could achieve a new PB. I had just run the Bohermeen half marathon with a new PB and all of the sudden, boom! There was nothing to train for, no Paris, no purpose. I didn't feel like running for a couple of weeks so I only went out for short runs to get some exercise, not cause I wanted to.

COVID-19 is not a marathon, it's an Ironman

In the old normal, we were used to being parents, athletes, professionals and what not. We managed cause had set schedules for work, commute, training and that brought order into our lives. During this pandemic we have been asked to be all of the above plus the roles of teachers, entertainers, coaches, cooks, dog walkers and cleaners. Am I missing anything? The problem is that we still try to do them all to the highest standard and we are missing the mark on them all. That causes anxiety and it's quite tiring to be honest.

Think about it this way. You're a decent marathon runner and you decide to enter an Ironman. Technical details aside, you wouldn't realistically expect to complete the marathon portion of the race in the same time as if you were just running that event, would you? Then, why do we expect to achieve the 100% at each one of the new roles COVID dumped on us without any warning? It's all about adjusting expectations!

The pandemic will come to pass. We've seen the first shoots of hope in a few countries around the globe. When it does, we'll get some of the old normal back and some of the new one too. At that point we can decide what of the roles we keep and which ones deserve the 100% of our effort and output. We can go back to running the 26.2 miles at that point.

Comments

Visualization for beginners

I've been a competitive athlete all my life. I've been involved in different sports at different levels since the age of 8 and along the way, a lot of coaches have spoken to me or my team about visualization. "See yourself scoring that try" "See yourself winning that match". Only now I realise that I never understood what they meant. It's easy to close your eyes and see yourself scoring a try, a winning goal or whatever, but all boys do that when they play footie on the street. So how does that help you achieve anything in a proper competition? That's the piece I never understood and maybe my coaches never did either. I think the confusion comes from the overlapping of two concepts: imagination and visualization. Imagination allows you to see yourself on the pilot seat of a spaceship to Mars to rescue Lady O'Mygodyouregorgeous but has nothing to do with reality. Visualization on the other hand, is about seeing yourself achieving things that you

The hidden benefits of sport for teenagers

Following up from my last post , I have been giving some thought to the topic of teenagers and sport. Having a teenager in the house has taught me a thing or two about the way in which us parents, create a work ethic that will help them later in life, and the struggles we go through in order to turn actions into habits. Be the example We're all familiar with the old saying "Do as I say, not as I do" and it makes sense in a convoluted way, but not to a teenager. Imagine we tell them to get off the phone/tablet/Playstation and go to bed early, but they see us staying up till midnight browsing Facebook in bed. It sounds hypocritical, right? To a teenager, this feeling is amplified tenfold. If, on the other hand, we get proper rest, if we are commited to training, to fueling properly and we can show the results consistently, there's a better chance of the message sticking in their minds. Responsibility is personal When my son was younger, we would always mak

How will races look like post COVID-19?

I think racing the way we're used to is gone forever. There! I've said it. No more long queues at the portaloos before the start. No more corrals with 1,000 runners touching, shaking hands, and wishing each other luck. No more post-race hugs and tears, not unless you're part of the same household. So let's reverse engineer a race and see if we can come up with a picture Social distancing So, there are 10,000 of us converging into one spot in the city. How can you make sure we all observe social distancing? That's a bit of an issue unless we're running in the desert or high in the mountains where there are acres to spare. The queueing system We start by creating an orderly queue. In fact, we create many orderly queues around the access area to prevent overcrowding. First of all, the zone must be cordoned off for the queue system to work. Otherwise, everybody does what everybody does when there's no system in place: we invade the zone. So, all ru

26.2 Ways to Run

Search This Blog