How to really set your goals
Every year, or indeed every four years, when working on an Olympic cycle, we get to this point in the season where we need to start looking forwards and what we want to achieve next year. This is a really important time and as coaches everywhere will testify is usually our busiest time of year.
So what goes into goal setting? Well most people will have heard of SMARTER goal setting. Goals need to be specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, time-bound, exciting and recordable. Often, an athlete will say something vague…. “I want to be faster”. Which in itself is a goal, but in reality, we need to ensure things are slightly more focussed.
We like to take athletes who dream. One of the first questions we like asking is: “What is your dream? What is it that you really want to do in this sport?”. Things have already started to get fairly deep fairly quickly. But that is the point. People are very good at playing down their goals, ambitions and desires in the sport. (As a side note, they are also very good at justifying, excusing, our accounting for poor performances too.) This is because saying out loud what you want to do is scary. It opens up the very real opportunity of failure. The modern day relationship with failure is not usually a pleasant one and so we hide from that experience by never truly admitting what we want to do. If you struggle to say your goal out loud, you will always struggle to ever achieve it.
This doesn’t mean that athletes should go around, opening up about their vulnerabilities for everyone to criticise, offer ‘advice’ and compare. However, it does mean that, at least in the safe environment of a conversation with your coach, you can say out-loud what you want to do.
Triathlon offers such a rewarding way of planning out a season that once you have identified your dream the plan can easily cascade from that. First we use the “SMARTER” approach to place this dream or goal in time and space. In other words. When will it happen, where will that be, and then we start making it tangible.
Let’s play this game: If we decide our goal is to break the IRONMAN World Record. This currently sits at: 7:40:23. The first thing we need to do is make this tangible. We can work out how fast the swim, bike run needs to be. We work our which course will let this happen (conditions need to be good) and we work out when the athlete is likely to be able to do this. From then, we start breaking down into the sports. We now know the speeds we need to achieve to record that time. We are fortunate enough to be able to have really good data on what that means we need be able to hold in terms of critical points: our FTP, our CSS, our VDOT score, or Threshold Running Pace. We could then even break that down and ask the question: what do other races need to look like: Park runs, Olympic Distance Triathlons, 1,500m swim races, 25M Time Trials etc.
Finally we look at what the athlete is capable of doing. Then the question is raised. How do we translate the athlete in front of us onto their dream goal. What is the journey that needs to be travelled? There are clearly many ways to get there, but what is the agreed way of doing it. It may be that the athlete and the coach go through this iteration and the dream a few times to get the best plan, over the best timescale in order to make the whole process realistic. When that point is reached, both the coach and the athlete will have a really clear goal and pathway with tangible and purposeful objectives along the way.
If you can work all that with your coach, or if you are a coach who can do all that with your athletes, then you are in for a very exciting season ahead.
Good Luck!
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