Most Days Are Just Days
The end of a long race day where it never felt easy. Ironman Mont Tremblant 2015, 2nd place.
Over the last month, I found myself using the phrase, “most days are just days,” in two different contexts. In one discussion, the phrase came about in reference to training. In another, it came about when discussing racing. The general idea is that I believe there is a misconception that certain days are almost deliberately set aside to be magical outliers, but the reality is that more days are alike than they are different.
Most days are just days.
When it comes to training, I think that a lot of athletes that stay in the game long enough will come to easily comprehend the idea that most training days are just days. Training entails most, if not all, days of the week and the number of cumulative sessions starts to really add up over time. With that being the case, I would be willing to posit that many athletes will come to understand that, while really good and really bad days do occur, most of their days are falling into a median range of performance. They are not really exceptional in any particular way.
Most days are just days.
I had a swim coach in Boulder that worked with me for many years. One day she had assigned a set and I was having a particularly above average day. In fact, it was a great day. She knew it and I knew it, but I stayed very quiet. After the set, I remained quiet and she sort of jokingly asked whether I ever showed any emotions. Ostensibly, she wanted me to express some sort of joy that things had gone well.
What I came to realize afterwards was that I would have tried to respond similarly if the day had gone really poorly. If I swam like complete shit, I hopefully would have tried to not complain to my lane mates and feel bad for myself. I would have simply done my best to execute the session and come back the next day hoping for a reversion to the mean.
I’ve seen a lot of athletes get distracted too easily by the emotional swings of performances within their own training. A great day and bad day do not define them. It is what they can do on_most_days that counts.
The next piece to the puzzle comes in the form of daily motivation. From 2008 to 2018 I took part in many different age group training camps with the highlight being the Endurance Corner Tucson Camp every spring. During those camps, athletes would train in the range of 25-35 hours, often breaking through new barriers and setting personal best training volume outputs. At almost every camp, I was asked some version of the same question:
“How does this compare to one of your normal weeks of training?”
My response would entail some of the technical differences between the session and discipline breakdowns, but my primary response was that my normal training was much more boring. A camp environment was very stimulating and motivating and it was easy to get out the door every day. The other 51 weeks of the year weren’t like that. Which wasn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy them, it’s just that there wasn’t anything about them that made them special. Author James Clear encapsulates this idea rather brilliantly in Atomic Habits by saying that “the greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom” (237). Learning to cope with training one day at a time is paramount to success because most training days are not special.
Most (training) days are just days.
When it comes to racing, accepting this same concept can be almost perceived as antithetical. Even if most athletes are willing to accept that most training days won’t be magical, they will still easily place that magical expectation on the days that they pin a race number on.
Something that often comes to mind when I try to convey the idea that most race days are_still_ just days is an excerpt about tapering from the book, Complete Conditioning for Swimming:
“Too many athletes think that the taper phases will result in a good feel… ...your body has been prepared through systematic training… …but it might not feel great” (193).
I don’t know when I read this book, but this one particular phrase stuck out to me all those years ago and I still remember it. I thought about it all the time when it came to racing. While this quote is referencing how tapering is designed for performance, and not about how that performance will feel, I see it in a much broader scope. Even when all the training and tapering are geared towards the performance at one particular race, it doesn’t change the fact that:
Most (race) days are just days.
The main point I want to drive home is that athletes need to work with what the day is giving them. Learning to maximize performance is not always about achieving personal bests or winning races, it’s about maximizing what is available on that day. With enough racing and competition, the results will be reflective of this on the average even when they may not be on each day. When I was racing, some of my best personal performances were not necessarily reflective in my overall placings. As I often said, some of my best races came in the shadows of others’ greater performances. However, some of my best results came in spite of what I believed were not necessarily my best personal performances.
Some practical takeaways:
When it comes to your training, try thinking in terms beyond the scope of good or bad days, and instead view the totality of your training in longer terms to evaluate its efficacy. Even then, perfection is not the goal. As I told my friend Tony D some time last year, “a training build is never perfect, but when you do it long enough you know if it’s going better than usual.”
When it comes to racing, try to incorporate more events where you are not fully prepared, not fully rested and/or not fully tapered. Practice the process of maximizing the day rather than allowing the time on the clock, or the place in the field, determine if the race was a success or not. There is a lot of satisfaction and skill that comes from racing in these circumstances. Combining these racing skills with diligent training is what enables the best athletes to thrive.
Magical days aren’t given to us, they come from us. By applying yourself in training and extracting the most out of your performance on race day, there will eventually be a day(s) where you can make the magic happen for yourself.
-justin
Sources:
Clear, J. (2021). Atomic habits: Tiny changes, remarkable results: An easy & proven way to build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. CELA.
Salo, D., & Riewald, S. A. (2008). Complete Conditioning for swimming. Human Kinetics.