Focus Phase

I’ve been having conversations with current and prospective athletes recently about their race planning for 2020. The challenge is two-fold: 1) Which races to pick (covered in a recent blog post) and 2) What should athletes be doing in the “offseason.”

There’s the trick, right? What offseason?!

“Offseason” implies “off.” As in not training, to many. For Type-A personalities, you’re playing with fire automatically. That’s just not going to fly.

The smart folks at Endurance Nation like to use the phrase Outseason. Which, I get. I don’t think they’re wrong in focusing on bike power and run speed in the winter months. But what if you’re a weaker swimmer? Then what? You just don’t swim because it’s cold and dark?

That is very un-David Goggins! I can’t let that slide.

I’d like to think of postseason training as the Focus Phase of training. Tower 26 calls it a technique block, which also works. I like “Focus” better because it’s a call to action for the athlete. “Hey, it’s time to focus on the future.” Or focus on our limiters. Focus on our goals. Focus on technique.

I think this works very well for the kind of person who gravitates towards triathlon. Or put another way, the kind of person who gravitates towards Good Wolf Coaching. We’re all looking to constantly improve. We like to win. We like to be great at everything — it drives us mad when we aren’t.

So we focus our energy, our intent, our vision and determination on improvement. It’s a process, a journey.

Here’s one to ponder as you think about the Focus Phase.

We typically race anywhere from one to five times a year.

If there’s such a thing as an offseason, aren’t we in that phase for most of the year if we purely measure it by racing or preparing to race?!

How much pure “offseason” do we really need then?

Better to focus our training to accomplish specific goals throughout the year, I think.