Tools – watches, data, gear - are effective (and necessary), but they’re still a means to an end, not the end itself. If the information these tools provide dictate your every decision and move correlated with performing, then you’re screwed. Eventually, whatever natural movements you once exhibited become supplanted by mechanical movements. Flexible thinking turns rigid. Over time, prescription gains more value than your own intuition. This is not optimal.
Any deviation from expectation (or weather, terrain, pace, fatigue) morphs into an excuse. There are no excuses though. You have the gear right? Even then, the feedback it delivers you while trying to do consumes your conscious while doing.
This obsession with what the tool conveys negates any likelihood of considering other behaviors. Thus, you go deeper down the hole - narrowing your scope of focus - instead working towards being whole. Blind spots grow bigger. No degree of excess nor debauchery matters if you get in your 10,000 steps.
Strava might tell you “good enough”. Is it?
Why would you what the tool tells you to determine your effort? Aren’t you the one who is supposed to be determining that?
What percentage of time, energy, and effort are you actually willing to expend on the task itself, not the things that tell you about it.
Why would you let it hold you back?
A spectator doesn’t need a clock to determine whether or not an effort is honest. It speaks for itself. The individual exerting wears it and tastes it, just as the spectator sees it and feels it.
Ignore, then, whether you are tall and thin or short and stocky, whether they laughed at you at home (where they are often unkind) or at school (where they are mostly blind anyway). Indeed, to hell with the lot of them if you feel you can do it.
Percy Cerutty
Pay attention to the physical condition and let the numbers remain a byproduct as opposed to the other way around.
More elements than tools are needed to thrive in sport (and life, for that matter). You already have everything you need, but once you allow the tool wedge itself between your spirit and your sinew, your thoughts and your actions you turn into the tool and become increasingly devoid of the ability to completely saturate yourself into the hear and now. In doing so, you’ve let the number dictate the entirety of the experience, making it easier for you to quantity it as either in the binary of 100% ‘good’ or ‘bad’, absolving yourself the responsibility of looking for any nuance(s) that might help towards future endeavors.
The tool is not the answer; it’s merely a reflection of what you’ve done. Therefore, you should only concern yourself with having done after having done and not while doing. The irony here is that the result is a reflection of the doing; so if you focus on the result while doing you automatically separate yourself from it. At that point, the only doing you’ll experience is more of a reaction - and less responsive - which will inevitably do you in.
There are a number of high-profile coaches who have proven that we can not only do without these modern machinations, but we can actually do better than everybody else.
One of my all-time favorite coaches is the legendary Australian running coach, Percy Cerutty. Cerutty is not as popular as his contemporaries because his genius was outmatched by his unrelenting quest and eccentric approach towards challenging the status-quo. He coached a sub four-minute miler named Herb Elliot, who also won Olympic gold at the 1960 Summer Olympics.
Cerutty’s philosophy could best be coined as “Stotan” which was his attempt at merging the tenets of Stoicisim with the Spartan ethos. His athletes lived and trained with him at Cerutty’s beach compound in Portsea, Australia. His coaching style eccentric in that he never had his athletes run around a track. Never. That included Elliott who proved to be the best in the world. Always barefoot, Cerutty’s style was avant-garde. He and his athletes ran up and down sand dunes daily and lifted weights frequently. Variation was mandatory and best conducted in the elements.
In a sport obsessed with data and structure (and during a time when the norm was staunchly opposed to strength training), Cerutty went against the norms by not letting his athletes follow some fixated schedule. He believed how other athletes were training was not only wrong, but lacked style and spirit, two ingredients absolutely necessary for a total effort. For that reason (and more), nature became the grindstone upon which his athletes whetted their spirits. Via repeated exposure, the minds of those who trained at Portsea became more malleable, their bodies more solid, and spirits more rugged.
When an athlete goes out to train, his body should dictate his needs and he runs according to its capacities and demands.
Percy Cerutty
Fast forward 60 years and the performance-related gadgets permeating the athletic world would make would wonder how we ever thrived, much less survived, without these tools? The last six months have underscored this reality as many people have learned that a gym isn’t necessary in order to build fitness. Instead of chasing the next “thing”, cultivate your relationship to your effort during training and not some device. A result of that is a more clearly defined intuition making you less reliant on these externalities.
The ability to go internal, when necessary, will directly determine your capability in handling whatever external variables come at you. If you can’t trust yourself, nobody will. Through building that trust, you’ll be more equipped to harness that intuition when your senses are heightened or when unforeseen variables appear (because they inevitably will). When you’re able to really tune in, everything that is irrelevant – or, in other words, doesn’t matter - fades into background noise. Then, not only will how experience what you’re doing be more enriching and satisfying, but your performance will be 100% better.
Many want the having done without the doing, but that misses the entire point. The latter just is, while former is a result of. What also remains true is the probability of your desired outcome is more likely once you let go of concerning yourself with it.
Tools only provide are a modicum of information. Yet still, people allow these so-called “wearables” to encapsulate the entirety of the experience. Numbers can’t quantify spirit. Data - though it does to a large extent - cannot fully explain effort, unless, of course, that is the only means by which you determine effort (or let it determine you). Therefore, your adherence to any one prescription is best served when it ranks secondary to your intuition. Always.
A tool might help you climb the mountain, but it need not became one. No tool, no matter how advanced or sophisticated, can offer the depth of learning that nature - or reality - can provide.
Onward!
