It’s at the top of no one’s list, but it should be. Sports psychology and building mental strength can make a bigger difference in how we perform and how we approach our training than any workout or new set of shoes. Training may give us strong legs, but the thoughts going on in our heads determine how we approach the event and if we have the confidence that’s critical to success. Those same thoughts can also determine if we finish a set of intervals crushed and dejected or exuberant and excited for our next session.
We’ve talked about mindset in many episodes now, but most of it comes down to one important psychological tool—being present in the moment —whether it’s a race, training ride, or planning your season.
So, in this summary episode, our hosts coach Grant Holicky, physiologist Rob Pickels, and coach Trevor Connor start by explaining what it means to be present and why it is so important. Then they talk about how this plays into several important mental skills, including focus, emphasizing the process, and reframing negative thoughts. Ultimately, all of this ties into motivation and being present helps athletes stay internally-focused which is consistently associated with better outcomes.
Helping to explain these key concepts, we’ve pulled clips from a variety of past episodes bringing in top sports psychologists and some of our most popular guests. Several clips from Sonya Looney explain the key sports psychology concepts of motivation and self-determination. Ryan Bolton and Andy Kirkland talk about how being present has helped Ethiopian runners become the best in the world while enjoying their sport.
Canadian Olympians Erinne Zarsadias and Svein Tuft talk about the dangers of focusing too much on a future event, and neurologist Dr Scott Frey explains how even something as “real” as pain is actually still highly influenced by our perceptions. Pro Lesley Paterson talks about the power of focusing on process.
Those aren’t our only clips. We also hear from three top sports psychologists: Dr. Julie Emmerman talks about the importance of reframing; Dr. Simon Marshall explains how trying to control our emotions is a failing proposition; and Dr. Brian Butki explains some of the secrets of focus.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a summary episode if we didn’t hear from three of our most popular guests: Dr Stephen Seiler, Neal Henderson, and Dr Inigo San Millan who all stress the importance of focusing on the moment.
So, make sure you’re in the moment with us—and let’s make you fast!
Quotes from the Show:
- “What you can control is where you are in the moment. One of my favorite stories, analogies is the it’s stolen from Dallas mentality is that you’re on a boat, and you’re going down a river. And I know I’ve brought this up on the show before but I think summary episodes can do it again. You’re on a boat going down a river. And the only thing you can control is what you’re doing in that boat right now. Right? What happened, that rock, you hit up the river, you can’t do anything about that. Now, it won’t change anything. If you focus on what you did wrong hitting that rock, you got to patch the hole that’s in the boat, or you got to get some of the water that’s out of the boat that’s right now, and you can’t do anything about that rapid that’s downstream, you can’t do anything other than preparing in the moment, maybe taking a different course maybe rowing your boat in a different way. The preparation in the moment is what is going to help us learn from the mistakes in the past and help us to prepare for the challenges that are coming down the road.
- “If you go to a World Marathon major, and the day before the race, you see, the East Africans there, they’re very casual, they’re very light hearted. They’re very non stressed. They’re mentally prepared for the race and everything. But they really kind of even with racing, if you ask them you really like, aren’t you nervous about tomorrow, they’re like, Well, I did all the preparation that I can, and I’m going to run my best tomorrow. And, you know, so we’ll see, they always say God willing, we’ll see what happens tomorrow. And they’re really, like really relaxed going into the end. They just trust their process.”
- “A lot of people have very big objectives and those types of things, and quite often it won’t play out, like they thought. And then you run the risk of also being miserable after the event. So I think it could just be better to have like an overall approach about that journey of training and just the idea of like, health, lifestyle and focusing on those things, like the benefits of what you’re actually doing. The social aspect of cycling.”
- “When we can start to really reframe pain when we can start to reframe anxiety, right, one of the things we talked about is reframing fear as a challenge, right, reframing the unknown as an opportunity to challenge ourselves.”
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:04
Well, welcome to another episode! We’re here with Rob and Grant, and we’re doing another summary episode. But this one’s a little less physiology based. We are going to dive deep into that area that Grant absolutely loves, which is getting into the sport psychology, which I think is one of the most underestimated parts of training and sport.
Trevor Connor 00:28
We could all do the training, we can all do a good set of intervals, we can go into a race and race strong. But there’s a certain point where what’s between your ears, is really going to make that difference in how you perform. If you’re just out doing a Grand Fondo, and you hit that big climb, it’s what’s gonna get you over that climb, so I think this is really critical.
Grant Holicky 00:50
Yeah, as you said, this is a highly underrated aspect of sport. And you guys have done a lot of episodes, I’ve been part of some of those episodes that have talked about various aspects of this, right, and how mindset can put you over the hump and how the mental skills can put you in a place to do a little bit better, and race and all those things. But there’s two pieces to me that are really crucial. And one is that the body and the mind are tied together. They don’t you can’t separate those two things apart. So how you’re feeling isn’t just the construct of the workout you’re doing or the race you’re doing. It’s a construct of your brain. But the real tie that it will bind to this whole summary episode is the idea of being present. And that’s something we really, I really want to emphasize and really want to stay kind of present with in this episode is this idea of being in the moment, and what can we do right here right now. And how that can affect our training, how that can affect our racing, how that can affect our lives.
Ryan Kohler 01:53
lactate threshold, metabolic profile, and VO T max are key testing metrics for endurance athletes, whether you live in Colorado or across the globe, you can get the benefit from inside scientific monitoring and physiological testing for performance and health. at Rocky Mountain Devo we offer both in person and remote testing. Contact us today at Rocky Mountain devo.com.
Trevor Connor 02:17
So let’s start by really talking about why is being present. So important. I think before we hear from you grant, let’s throw one of our first clips here, this is coming from two people who I adore two Canadians, Swain. Tufte, Aaron Willock, both Olympians swains been on the World Championship podium, he’s been to the Tour de France, and this is them talking about the fact that you don’t control the goal. So you really just have to be present and happy in each day to hear from them. Now,
Svein Tuft 02:49
one of the things you start to realize is you don’t have control over any of those results. And and what Aaron experienced in the road race and all these different things, you you can’t control that stuff. But the thing you do have control of is your training, and the dedication you have to each day and the discipline that you have. So you tend to cling on to those things, because that’s what’s gonna get you through. And that’s the thing, you can actually take something from each day and have a like, just have a good view, whereas stressing about results or what’s going to happen in a road race or a time trial. I mean, there’s just a million variables that you can obsess about, that generally isn’t going to help you in the whole long run in
Erinne Zarsadias 03:40
when mechanicals or illness happens there’s there’s nothing much you can do and you have to be Zen about it and and go on with your day. But for sure the the obstacles that happen that you could have prepared for are very frustrating. So my Olympic experience was it was in Beijing, and it was supposed to be you know, 3540 degrees and we had done all this acclimatized thing for hot weather. I remember training in this like heat trailer for weeks on Dan trying to acclimatized to heat and then we went to Japan beforehand where it was 40 degrees. And then on the day of the race, it was out of our hands, and it was sunny in Beijing, but our race went into the mountains and in the mountains. It was 14 degrees and pouring rain, and we had no idea this was happening. I had frozen water bottles still that never D thought I had no rain jacket, no clothes. You had a 12 Kilometer descent where we were shaking and freezing cold at the bottom. So it was these obstacles that we had no control over and no idea were even happening because we did not have a coach or an official out on the mountain course. Communicating With the weather with us.
Grant Holicky 05:02
You know, I love that idea of being happy with each day and being really focused on each day. But one of the things that I think speaks to this a bit, but where athletes get in a lot of trouble and coaches get in a lot of trouble is that we’re just so result oriented, whether that be the big race, or whether that be who we’re beating, or whether that be any of those things, right. Are we ego oriented? That’s something we talk about in mental performance a lot. Are you task oriented? Is it the process? Are you ego oriented? Is that the finished result? We’re getting so caught up in what today means for that final goal, right? What is my five minute effort today? What was that average power? What does that mean for when I go race? And the reality is, it might not mean that much? Well, not
Rob Pickels 05:49
only that grant to I think, for me, what oftentimes happens is I am so focused on the end goal, that’s that’s weeks and months ahead of time, that I’m not even focused on what’s happening today or tomorrow with my testing. It feels inconsequential in comparison, but it really it shouldn’t be right, right, we do need to be celebrating along the way, what’s happening is we’re moving toward that goal,
Grant Holicky 06:14
right? And what does it all mean? Right? Like what does today mean? There’s so much mental energy and so much physical, ultimately energy that goes into this idea of trying to diagnose what we did on any given day. And it can be exhausting. And it takes energy away from it takes effort away from all these other things. And we really can slowly lose control. And I think one of the things that I’ve noticed through the years is the higher level the athlete, typically, the less they’re concerned with that snapshot. On any given day, I think this
Trevor Connor 06:49
is a good place to bring in your old mentor, Neil Henderson, who has worked with a lot of high level athletes, and he points out in this clip, you don’t control the outcome. So you really need to focus on the day to day and focus on the process.
Rob Pickels 07:04
So establishing what those goals are, and really kind of going through the aspects of what parts of this are like an outcome. And what parts are process oriented is really often a component that sometimes you need to have an establishment of really these process aspects that will then lead to the opportunity for the performance for the outcome. And we talked about that a lot of times in training, you know that I talk with athletes that we’re trying to build your capacity, your abilities, your confidence, and to be able to execute on that day. But you don’t have control over everyone else. When it’s you know, most mass start type events, unit and time trial, you can’t control what someone else is going to do. You can’t control whether the conditions for the early starters are better than for Late Starters. And if you’re a better writer, you’re going to start later or vice versa.
Grant Holicky 08:00
What you can control is where you are in the moment. One of my favorite stories, analogies is the it’s stolen from Dallas mentality is that you’re on a boat, and you’re going down a river. And I know I’ve brought this up on the show before but I think summary episodes can do it again. You’re on a boat going down a river. And the only thing you can control is what you’re doing in that boat right now. Right? What happened, that rock, you hit up the river, you can’t do anything about that. Now, it won’t change anything. If you focus on what you did wrong hitting that rock, you got to patch the hole that’s in the boat, or you got to get some of the water that’s out of the boat that’s right now, and you can’t do anything about that rapid that’s downstream, you can’t do anything other than preparing in the moment, maybe taking a different course maybe rowing your boat in a different way. The preparation in the moment is what is going to help us learn from the mistakes in the past and help us to prepare for the challenges that are coming down the road. And so it’s really this idea of how present can you be and understanding what that means. It’s just the day I set up before it’s just one workout. The great ones, you know, I’ll say this to athletes all the time. You can’t fake the great days, right? You don’t get lucky and have a great day. But there’s a lot of reasons why you can have a really, really bad day. And I think that might be sleep and might be any of those things he can’t get overly worked up about a bad day. And I think we have a great clip from Ryan Bolton, talking about Ethiopian runners that the really high level athletes don’t get too worked up about a bad day the bad days are gonna come.
Ryan Bolton 09:41
Another piece of that is they’re like almost like fatalistic with their training and or they’re okay with if they have a bad day. It’s not a problem. They move on immediately. They’re like today wasn’t my day. It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow’s another day. I’ll wake up tomorrow and give it a shot again and give it a go. And they don’t like discovery over having, you know, bad days over and over and everything, they just like, let it go. And really just focus on, you know, getting back and getting back on another workout and everything, they really don’t think about it. And bad races are the same way they care about not having a good race or not having a good day, but they really don’t dwell on it. And they’ll just like quickly move forward from it. And they don’t stress out about it. And that’s another kind of a long another thing along that if you go to a World Marathon major, and the day before the race, you see, the East Africans there, they’re very casual, they’re very light hearted. They’re very non stressed. They’re mentally prepared for the race and everything. But they really kind of even with racing, if you ask them you really like, aren’t you nervous about tomorrow, they’re like, Well, I did all the preparation that I can, and I’m going to run my best tomorrow. And, you know, so we’ll see, they always say God willing, we’ll see what happens tomorrow. And they’re really, like really relaxed going into the end. They just trust their process. And they trust their bodies, they’re very good at listening to their bodies. And I think that benefits them tremendously.
Trevor Connor 11:02
So grab what I found really interesting. So you’re talking about this, you really have to focus on what you control, which is right now, as we were going through the clips for this episode, that was something that I really saw when you’re we did interviews with top athletes. Quite often we heard them talk about how something made a big difference for them was moving away from focusing on that outcome way in the future. And really focusing on the process on the moment. And so we actually have two clips here. We’ll start with Leslie Patterson, who talked about this, that this was a big change for her.
Lesley Paterson 11:37
And I think that’s when you really have to drill down on your why behind the sport, if everything about your Y is purely outcome driven, ie, well, I reached this time will I beat this person will I win the race and so on, you know, you’re fighting a losing battle, because as you see, you can’t control any of those elements. So you know, a huge shift in my attitude towards my racing personally was actually process focused goals, not outcome ones. And as soon as I shifted this whole attitude, everything changed. And that was kind of a beauty and really mastering every little thing that I could. And knowing that, you know, if I could get to RISD feeling like I’d done that, then then it was very liberating to just go out there and let it all go, because I’d done everything I could already. And so instead of fear, there was excitement. And yeah, it really has changed my outlook on everything.
Trevor Connor 12:33
Let’s jump right to Sep cucet. Here’s somebody who was a star at last year’s Tour de France. And he said, obviously, the exact same thing that he really stresses the process, and actually focuses more on process goals than on outcome goals.
Sepp Kuss 12:49
Yeah, there’s, there’s only so much you can do. For me, the most stress I have is in, in the training because that’s, that’s what I can control. The race is you, you can only control so much. So if if I’m in a in a mental rut or something, it’s usually something that’s like, oh, I don’t feel good and training or, Oh, that’s not where I should be kind of thing. So that that for me personally, that’s harder to break out of, because like you said, it’s, it’s it’s processes and in training, the process is all on you. But in the race, it’s multiple things, you can adapt
Chris Case 13:26
better. Okay, step so we got you on the clock for one minute, your, your takeaway for the listeners out there, your your tips, top three, top five tips on how to step up to that next level,
Sepp Kuss 13:39
first of all, would be just setting realistic process oriented expectations. If you want to call them that expectations for yourself. If you don’t shoot too high, don’t shoot too low. You’re going to be pleased with with how you do so long as you you do everything in your in your power to to get the 100 percenter. Yeah. Yeah, we have it all out there, whatever, whatever that means. And the second would be Yeah, just keeping keeping perspective. There’s, there’s always another day, always another race. Try not to dwell on things. I mean, analyze what went wrong, what went well, but don’t, don’t dwell too long, and always look forward and positively to whatever’s coming next.
Grant Holicky 14:27
So one of the things that talks about is because we mentioned that the process the along the way, and the only way really to be able to focus on the process is to get a bit removed from this idea of the outcome. And one of the things we talk about a lot is this idea of goal setting. And goal setting is a major piece of mental skills. It’s one of the mental skills that we learn about, we teach about we do all these things. But my mentor in sports psychology, Dr. Seliger really talks about trying to show shift that from an idea of goal setting to an idea of goal attainment. So how are we going to get there? Right? It’s one thing to put the pie in the sky goal up there. But what’s the path? What’s the process of getting to that goal. And when we’ve set the path, right, and you can almost envision it as truly a path of stones way markers along the way. And those waymarkers are going to come on a, you know, not a daily basis, but on a weekly basis are some of those things. So it’s been in that place, that along the way you get to see this. And what we want to push athletes to do is not just to see where they are along the way not just to see the path, but to really take some time along the way to celebrate, and to really enjoy when you’ve knocked off one of those waymarkers Because that final goal can feel a long way away.
Trevor Connor 15:53
Think this is a great place to throw in a clip from Joe Friel, who talked about exactly that how important it is with him. To celebrate those accomplishments with his athletes along the way.
Joe Friel 16:04
There’s definitely a need to to celebrate achievements. As I mentioned, a while ago, I celebrated achievements with my athletes, when they achieved something along the way, improved a limiter, something we had been aiming at for weeks, if not months. And they achieved that we would celebrate that in some way, and then move on with celebrate now let’s move on, you know, but we’d never liked, just pass it over and say, you know, it wasn’t important. Let’s go on to the next thing. Because that that becomes theirs. We’re humans and humans like to celebrate. When we achieve something, that’s a good time to say, you know, we achieved something, let’s congratulate ourselves about that, pat ourselves on the back and say good things about each other and have a good time here for a few minutes. And then we’ll get through it again about whatever else is on the agenda. The I think you have to celebrate along the way. And the big celebrations are at the end, when you finally achieved the overall goal that you’ve been aiming at, hopefully, for that season. That’s a lot of fun. And I can still recall some of those with my athletes over the years, where they achieved things that were of gigantic goals, but we celebrate it.
Grant Holicky 17:14
So I think one of the things that’s important in this is we talk about celebrating along the way. But it’s really important for athletes to have some of that support. And that guidance from the other people in their lives, whether that’s their coach, whether that’s their loved ones, to kind of take them back to the present moment, right, we get so focused on the outcome. And we can get so myopic about that goal, and where we want to be at the end of it, that we’re tunnel vision to end all this along the way gets blown out the periphery. And even that idea of that, listen, the whole idea of chunking things in our mind, right? We want to break things down into pieces, because the big picture is overwhelming. Right? When I started grad school, I thought about it and I’m like, Oh, got two years of grad school. It’s overwhelming. That overwhelming nature made me almost not want to go. But then as soon as I got into it, now I’m on the path. It’s broken into semesters, I know what I’ve got to do, I gotta do this, I got to do that. And I don’t think we do that enough with athletes, we certainly don’t do it enough with young athletes. So if we’re talking to a 16 year old kid and say, You’re gonna go to the Olympics someday, they’re going great, that’s awesome. But how, and it can be downright overwhelming. Scary.
Trevor Connor 18:33
I agree with you. There’s a flip side to this, that if you all you ever do is focus on the outcome. There can be negative consequences of that. I think we got two great clips here. So let’s start with Swain tuff who talked about the fact that often that big event you’re focusing on once you get there, it’s kind of a letdown.
Svein Tuft 18:52
I think it’s dangerous to put so much into one day, no matter what level no matter what it is, I think I get it more at the world championship level, the Olympic level for a lot of athletes, that’s just what you have to do. But that’s a different scenario than someone who’s trying to go out and get the most out of a GranFondo no matter what level that is, you have to go back to that whole idea of, of trying to build a good experience up to that moment, where it’s been more a part of the journey, then the outcome of that result on that day. Because what I think a lot of people do is they they stress and do so much crazy stuff in between with blinders on looking just towards that day and what they think it’s going to be and quite often those days are never what they think. And then they’ve been kind of miserable in the build up. And then maybe the day goes great and that’s that’s nice, and they’re happy about that. Hopefully, that’s the case. But quite often it’s not because A lot of people have very big objectives and those types of things, and quite often it won’t play out, like they thought. And then you run the risk of also being miserable after the event. So I think it could just be better to have like an overall approach about that journey of training and just the idea of like, health, lifestyle and focusing on those things, like the benefits of what you’re actually doing. The social aspect of cycling, just looking at all these other variables as as part of the build up to that, as part of that’s what you’re getting out of this experience. And then the day is gonna be whatever it is. And if it’s awesome, then that’s a bonus. But yeah, I think, I don’t know. That’s how I would hope I would look at something like a grand fondo later on in life. And I actually feel I do that even now. Like, I go out because I love biking. The end outcome for me, yeah, I have an idea of how trips gonna look quite often. It never is like that.
Trevor Connor 21:02
And then here’s one that I get really concerned about. This was a great interview with Dr. Hugo Sol, Milan, who’s taught a PokerStars. And I’m sure I just butchered that coach. So as worked with with athletes at the very highest level, but this is him talking about juniors and say it how often he seen athletes absolutely fall apart when they’re really focused on an outcome. As they get close to that big event. As they get close to that target. It really takes them apart it really they struggle with it. So let’s hear from him. Now.
Dr. Inigo San Millan 21:37
We all probably have heard about Michael Phelps was one of the first ones to come on and say, Hey, I’ve been going through all this my entire career in like, this is a reality. And he happens, you know, I like in many athletes. So I personally have for decades, you know, since I started I think like a sports psychologist, is a very important figure, not because you’re crazy, but there are a lot of insecurities. I always say that there’s the fear to lose, but it’s very natural, but the fear to win. And I’ve seen many athletes getting to the top of the game, not in cycling, but in other sports and, and then like, wow, this is what I’ve been dreaming on my life and falling apart. Because they got finally there are being being so close to what they’ve been dreaming the entire life and Alzheimer’s, you know, get frozen, get their fear to win because Well, man, this is going to change my entire life. I’m going to be in a whole different position on if I do it is not easy. And I mean, it is not not rare, right? So anyways, this, it might not have nothing to do with what I’m just going through the forest psychologist figure, but he is important in these days.
Grant Holicky 22:40
So one of the things that you have you alluded to when you talked Well, you didn’t allude to it. But you talked about Todd apricot char with an ego. And Dr. Saw Milan. And it’s one of those factors that I see a lot with Bogota is that he looks like he’s having a lot of fun, right? He looks like he’s enjoying this as he goes through it. The tour last year, he’s losing, he’s getting his butt kicked. Bingo is smacking them around. And there’s this interaction at the end of every stage that is Todd a enjoying it. And I think one of the things that we miss as athletes is the simple joys of why we’re doing this in the first place. Right? If if we all got in this just to win, none of us that this table would be in sport anymore. I mean, I don’t win very much anymore. And if I win, it’s because I’m racing only guys my age. So why do we do this? What’s your why? Right. That’s something we’ll talk about a lot. But I think trying to find that joy on a daily basis. I’ve talked about writing without headphones. I’ve talked about some of those things that just like take it all in man enjoy it.
Trevor Connor 23:48
I think there’s a good place throw in a clip. This is from Episode 255 with Andy Kirkland, where he talks about the joy of just running and zigzags.
Andy Kirkland 23:57
Mike and I are from we’ve lived in the same city. And I remember reading Mike, you talked about running around the meadows and that it’s a park and in the city, and it’s somewhere I’ve run to, and there’s paths that criss cross the park, but runners tend to go around the big loop or smaller lips. And Michael wrote about coming back from Ethiopia and zigzagging all over the grass. And not just using these predefined paths fall and what everyone else does, zigzagging over the park and taking different directions. And I found that really meaningful. And I thought about it in terms of say, Steven, Sylar is at 20 ratio. And when I adopted these training practices just going out and having a run, not having any predefined path running over grass running through trees going through mud. The time passed really quickly. It was so much fun, and it was far easier to maintain a relatively lower intensity because the focus was on other things, and not waiting on the peak of the Garmin to say that I’ve done a kilometer in a predefined pace. And it became easy to be doing two hour runs without even thinking about it or being unduly fatigued. Whereas if you go around the tarmac, or a concrete pass, that fatigue soon comes in the mental fatigue, sun comes in, it becomes boring. And after 90 minutes, you’re thinking, I want this to finish. So it was easier to moderate or intensity exercise, just using the environment.
Grant Holicky 25:43
One of the things that the joy gives us is this, the ability to focus on that on the process on the moment, because we’re really enjoying where we’re at. And our brain really doesn’t have it huge capacity. It’s interesting, you can only really focus on a couple things at a time.
Trevor Connor 25:59
Yeah, I’ve got to take it further and say I think we can only focus on one thing at a time. We talked about this in Episode 55 with Dr. Brian, Bucky. This is the story of the pink elephant, where you could hear the whole thing and that episode, but it’s basically you tell people to close their eyes and then not focus on a pink elephant, you start describing a pink elephant. And of course, except for Rob, who can’t visualize. Everybody pictures, a pink elephant, because it’s called the dominant thought in psychology, you can only really focus on a single thing at a time. And that’s very important. Because if you’re focusing on on your outcome, you can’t focus on the moment. If you’re focusing on the pain, you can’t focus on on the joy that you’re talking about. So that’s very, very important to think about what is your focus, and let’s hear a quick clip here for Dr. Bryan, Bucky talking about that, and the fact that we’ve truly only can focus on one thing at a time.
26:55
You’re exactly right when I work with my athletes, and one of the first things we talked about is attention and what you’re capable of as an attender. And we usually use two different analogies, most people think they’re either a bucket or a funnel. And the way we look at that, for from a cyclist is, if you’re if you’re a bucket, that means you can put several different things in your bucket that you’re capable of attending to like maybe you can ride your bike and focus on the road and listen to whatever is going on in your ear and sort of follow along with your teammates, and maybe even think about what you’re gonna have for dinner later. And all of those things can simultaneously be in your brain. So we call that multitasking. The fact is, that that’s impossible. Neurologists tell us that there really is no such thing as a bucket, we’re all funnels. And the way to think about what a funnel is, if you think about a funnel has a big opening at the top, and then a small opening at the bottom. And what that would mean is we have at all times many different stimuli coming in. Some of them are internal, many of them are external. But in fact, we’re only able to focus on one thing at a time. So when your pink elephant story you just said, no matter what we were thinking about when you told us to not think about a pink elephant, that pink elephant took over our funnel, it is the one thing and the only thing that was getting through our attention span at that point, everything else was was was secondary. And in real life, what that means is usually people who are good at multitasking are really good at switching back and forth, what they allow into their funnel, and then they just fill in the gaps of what they missed in between. So when you give us something dominant, like the pink elephant or when a rider is riding and they’re thinking, I should give up, I should drop now, that becomes all encompassing and then funnel and nothing else gets in there so that they don’t allow them to think anything positive. They don’t allow themselves to think any strategy that just becomes a dominant thought and it it hogs our fall. So what that means is and what what I think the rest of this conversation is going to be about is how do we control what controls our funnel.
Rob Pickels 29:04
Hey, listeners, it’s Rob pickles. co host of fast talk, we have some exciting news to share. Fast talk is now on Patreon. Patreon is a social platform that helps us keep creating the fast talk podcast you know in love. As a fast talk supporter, you can help us stay independent, just log on to patreon.com and search for fast talk podcast. Personally, I’ve really loved creating fast talk. Being able to share a little bit of myself with you every week has been a lot of fun. And I’m happy that I’m able to give back to a community that means so much to me. I’m inspired every day by your emails, comments and feedback. And I’m constantly looking for ways to improve the podcast experience for our listeners. Honestly, we couldn’t do any of this without all of you. So thank you for your support and thanks for listening.
Trevor Connor 29:51
So carried on with this idea that we can only focus on one thing I think this leads to another very very important concept in sports psychology which is is how we frame things and making sure we reframe, you can approach the same thing for two different ways. One is a negative one is a positive, because you can only focus on one at a time, if you’re focused on the negative, all you’re going to see is the negatives. And that’s going to take you in one direction,
Grant Holicky 30:16
right. And I think there’s this idea theory in sports psychology called reversal theory that you can see anxiety in two different ways, right, you can see anxiety as a benefit, or you can see anxiety as a detriment. And trying to teach people to reframe that idea that just all anxiety is bad, right? And that anxiety can be a good thing, it heightens our awareness, it heightens our blood pressure and opens up our blood vessels. It does all these things, it triggers fight or flight. And the fight or the flight is kind of good for us, right? In sport, it makes us better athletes, we can do more impressive things. So I think one of the things that’s really important in this concept is, we’re not going to eliminate the bad emotions, we’re not going to eliminate the fear, we’re not going to eliminate the anxiety. Instead, we have to learn the skills that allow us to reverse that or reframe that, right. That’s the thing that I think is a huge misconception about sports psychology is that we’re trying to eliminate the bad thoughts. They’re always going to get through. We just have to reframe those bad thoughts.
Trevor Connor 31:21
So I’ll give you an example of this early in my cycling career, I was a pure Flatlander. And I turned into a climber. And one of the ways I did that, as I noticed every time in a race, we came up to a climb, I would get fearful I would get anxious. Okay, go on. Oh, no, it’s a climb. So what I started doing as we were approaching the climb, I would actually say out loud, and I’m sure people around me are kind of look at me, God, who’s the crazy guy, but just go out loud. All right, climb. Right. Right, it was that reframe it, it was making myself look forward to the climate. And believe it or not, it works.
Grant Holicky 31:54
It works. I had a buddy who used to talk about faking it till they made it and he swam at college in Kansas, and he was turned a butterfly. And they started every season with 2200 Butterflies as a set while on minimal rest. And they used to joke of like, here we go, we’re so excited for this set. And he said, by the time I was a senior, we were so excited for that set, because that thing got changed from a fear to a challenge. And if we can get to that point in as athletes to frame our fears as challenges, then the failures don’t really matter. Right? It’s a challenge. It’s a learning process.
Trevor Connor 32:32
So Greg, I think this is a really good place to put in a clip from Episode 158. This is from Dr. Simon Marshall, who’s talking about exactly what you’re saying, which is we can’t control our emotions, you just have to learn how to accept them.
Simon Marshall 32:46
One of the big take home lessons from some of this research, of course, we should know because the Buddhists have been telling us this for 1000s of years, right now we have scientific evidence of it is that you don’t have as much control over your emotional life as you think you do. In fact, you have very little control over it, I can put a thought in your head right now, by saying something and you are almost powerless to not start thinking about it. And this is the silly adage of, okay, don’t think of pink elephants or, or you know, don’t think of Green Deal those which is our example in athletes, and it gets a chuckle, but you can’t The moment someone has said something, you start thinking about it. So we don’t have as much control. And we’ve learned that because we’ve studied about how sensations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings are interwoven and then how they filter into behaviors. And so when you start off with it’s okay, and it’s not your fault, it gives us a little bit of permission to say okay, but how do we now start to rein this little thing in and, and start to shape it so that it starts to work for me instead of against me? And that’s quite an important lesson because many people think that they I can’t be successful or I can’t be fully happy until I’ve managed or conquered this surely, you know, the flora Duffy’s of the world or the jam for dinos of this world don’t think negatively they all think they’re all super confident. They’re just nonsense. We’re all given born with the same kit the same soup, right? The same neurological soup. And so it’s how we use those to our advantages become important. So you’re not in your career we, we often give I get the metaphor and this is borrowed this metaphor is borrowed from a strong psychotherapeutic condition. therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy act. And the metaphor is imagine you’re standing on a hillside looking down a battle raging beneath you think sort of a medieval Braveheart type battle. Big swords broadswords big shields, blood and gore and you’re watching them on one side is is the side of you the good the good means you know, the people, the kind of life that you want to live the kind of thoughts you want the life you want. On the other side is all of your demons. This is your kind of the chimp of the negativity, the bias and, and we’ve been sold a turd really, particularly by the self help world is that to be happy, we have to win the fight the good, the good side has to beat the bad side. And finally I can get on and be peaceful and calm for calm about life. And unfortunately, now know that that’s a battle that is not winnable. In fact, don’t even waste your time trying to win it, you won’t. We’ve never met anyone who has been able to win it. And certainly the psychological Neuroscience tells you there’s probably unwinnable but what is winnable, instead is to say what we’re going to do is teach you not to get a necessarily a sharper sword or a bigger shield so that one side can win, we’re going to teach you to turn away from the battle, don’t worry, it’ll still be there when you get back. In fact, you can still hear it raging behind you. But we’re going to learn some turning away from the battle skills, we’re going to give you an hour break from the fight. And that hour might turn into a day turns into weeks, months years, and hopefully eventually a mindset so that you can know when to just tune it out. And this really is the heart of this big paradigm shift in psychotherapy as well moving from a control model and some of the cognitive behavior therapy work is a control model. And moving to an acceptance model.
Grant Holicky 36:30
You know, we’ve talked a little bit about not being able to control our emotions and remembering that, you know, the negative emotions often come in, because we’re worried about the outcome, right? This all is going to start to circle back to are we worried about what the result is going to be? You know, maybe that anxiety is about other things. And we’re gonna get to that in just a second. But a lot of time that anxiety is about how’s this race gonna go? Right? And how do we define how’s it going to go general, it’s the result. And one of the things that you start to get into as you get to become a better athlete, and you’re worried a little bit less about the result is, at least for me, and I think you guys can probably attest to this too. Sometimes at the start line, what I’m actually worried about is pain. Yep. Like I’m about to do a cross race. I know how deep I’m gonna go. And I’m sitting there on the start line, and my brain is justifying not doing the whole shot.
Trevor Connor 37:24
But I think this shows the power of what you’re talking about with reframing. Yep, so we have a clip here. This is from Episode 261, with Dr. Scott Frey, who points out that you think pain is the most real thing in the world? Well, pain is actually a perception. And if it’s a perception, you can reframe it.
Scott Frey 37:42
Well, I’m a cognitive neuroscientists, which means that I’m basically spent the last 30 years most of my adulthood studying how the brain creates our behavior. And the reason that that’s pertinent to our topic today is that pain is in fact, a perception. You might think that pain is coming at you from the outside world, and so forth. But in fact, pain is a creation of your brain, like all of our perceptions, context is absolutely everything. One of the important things that pain researchers have discovered over the years is that pain isn’t really about damage to your body, right? A lot of the pain that we experience is anticipatory or predictive, it’s trying to prevent us or give us an early warning signal to stop whatever you’re doing, right, in order to ward off pain. And so those nociceptors that I was saying kick in, when you have a painful experience, they also have an anticipatory quality to them. They’re not only sending information up to the brain, but the brain is sending information down to them to tune their sensitivity. And that’s where the role of context right the brain is perceiving the context you’re in.
Grant Holicky 38:51
One of the things that I think is really important is when we can start to really reframe pain when we can start to reframe anxiety, right, one of the things we talked about is reframing fear as a challenge, right, reframing the unknown as an opportunity to challenge ourselves. By definition, a challenge feels like something you can fail, right? This is gonna be an odd thing to say, but I was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the other day with my four year old sure it was with your four year old dude, I was into it. But shredder that sensei for the Ninja Turtles, asked one of them to define what a fair fight is because one of the new sterols came back and said there wasn’t a fair fight and he said what is a fair fight? By definition, a fair fight is one you can lose. Right? Challenge is by definition, something that you can fail at. And that makes it okay because then we have this opportunity to learn from that failure. We have this opportunity to get better to redo things to train harder to train differently, whatever that is to come out of that At a challenge that we failed as a better athlete, and that that idea of failing and learning moving forward that feeds resilience more than any other aspect of anything that we can do. And learning to reframe failure as a learning opportunity is super important in terms of resilience.
Trevor Connor 40:23
Can I just say I love the fact that the one bit of wisdom you’ve brought from a famous or subsidiary cultural hero was gleaned from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shredder specific witches? Was a splinter died I don’t remember which one it was shredders, the bad guy.
Grant Holicky 40:43
splinters the good guy. I always thought
Rob Pickels 40:46
and he’s a rat.
Grant Holicky 40:47
He is a rat. Right? The guys well, we can get into that later. But I always thought they needed to have the good guy and the bad guy. Their names shouldn’t be so similar. Splinter and Shredder totally confusing.
Trevor Connor 41:02
That’s a good point. But here’s the most important question before we continue on old 90s movies. Yeah, sure. New 2000 movies with
Grant Holicky 41:10
the old 90s The old 90s cartoon was fantastic.
Grant Holicky 41:14
It was great. It was sad. It was there.
Trevor Connor 41:16
I grew up on that
Grant Holicky 41:17
there was words of wisdom in every episode, and it’s just nice to see those words of wisdom come back.
Trevor Connor 41:22
Also, I picked that was the first cartoon show to ever break the fourth wall really? Yep. So they had a scene where Splinter said he was going to feed them when the turtles lose them goes, You’re not gonna beat us, David, the show’s the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles course we’re gonna win.
Grant Holicky 41:37
So anyway, the whole point of this was to say that one of the things that we’re able to do with reframing is develop our resilience. And we have a great clip from Julie Everman, in Episode 105, that she talks specifically about resilience is about reframing.
Julie Emmerman 41:56
A characteristics of somebody who is resilient include somebody who is able to view change as impermanent. So if you’re experiencing a negative change, or a positive change, just remembering that things are always in flow in a flux, people who can reframe to see things as opportunities, people who are aware of and can catch themselves in cognitive distortions, people who are able to manage strong emotions and impulses, people who can focus on events that are within their control, people who choose not to see themselves as victims, people who are action oriented and thoughts and behavior, people who are able to commit to various aspects of their lives to make those areas proceed forward in various ways that are available at the time. Again, a positive outlook on the future, using faith humor, remembering to surround yourself as much as possible with positive minded people and to have patience.
Trevor Connor 42:51
Well, let’s shift gears here a little bit. I think that was great conversation about resilience and reframing. But I think there’s another important part of this whole being present of how you’re being focused. And that’s whether you are internally or externally motivated. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Because we’ve covered that a few times on the show. And I think that’s really important, because the argument I’m going to make here, but let you take it is, if we’re saying that being present is really important for you, as an athlete, that internally motivated athlete is going to tend to be more in the moment because that externally focused athlete is going to be much more about the what are the outcomes? What are the results?
Grant Holicky 43:32
Yeah, there’s there’s some really, really cool stuff in the area of sports psychology that talks about this right? What is internally motivated, what is externally motivated, what do they mean? And how we actually define those two things. And I think that that’s a great place to start. And we have a great clip from Sonya Looney that talks specifically about how do we explain these two things, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation?
Sonya Looney 43:59
I think that first of all, I don’t want to say that one is always better than the other. And I think that a lot of people will have both of these types of motivation going at the same time. But intrinsic motivation is about doing something for the sake of the task itself. So you’re doing the work or the training, or whatever it is, because doing that thing is actually rewarding in and of itself. Whereas extrinsic motivation could be because you’re doing it to win something to get validation, recognition, money. So a lot of times those things are both on the line at the same time, but it’s what are you focusing on between the two? And I think that extrinsic motivation can be demonized a little bit. But intrinsic motivation is going to make you grittier, it’s going to make you more persistent over time. Because doing the task and loving the task itself, is going to keep you going because whenever you are looking for a result as motivation to keep going and then you don’t get that result, then you might want to stop and a lot of times you You can’t control the result of something that you’re doing, you can only control doing the task and loving the work for the sake of the work.
Trevor Connor 45:07
So I think what goes hand in hand when you’re talking about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is another concept of whether you are task oriented. Or whether you are ego oriented. So task oriented is, I’m thinking about what I have to do your focus on that moment, what is the particular task I have to perform? Ego orientation is much more about how do I compare to everybody around me. So if you’re in a race, the task oriented person is sitting there thinking, How do I get over this climb? When should I be hydrating? How much food am I eating? The ego oriented person who’s going? That person next to me isn’t breathing hard enough? Are they stronger than me? Or am I stronger than that? That’s, that’s how they’re looking at it.
Grant Holicky 45:48
Right. And these two things are definitely tied together, right. It’s really hard to extricate these two things from one another, the intrinsic and extrinsic and the task and ego. But what we want to talk about a little bit when we talk about task versus ego, is that it comes back to this idea of the process, right? We mentioned this earlier in the conversation, and all of this stuff starts to tie back to one another. And we want to stay in the moment because if we’re thinking about everybody else, or we’re getting pulled out of ourselves, and we’re pulling, getting pulled out of what we know is our job, we’re going to lose track of that job. And that’s super important. How do we stay in the moment? And how do we stay on task.
Trevor Connor 46:31
So that’s a great place to put in a clip from Episode 55 with Dr. Bryan Bucky, where he defines this concept of task and ego orientation and points out the fact that it’s actually very hard for ego oriented athletes to be motivated to train.
46:46
So before we get started, we got to give a little shout out to a woman named Joan Duda. Dr. Duda is she was at Purdue at the time. And this is kind of her theory that’s really taken much more like it’s kind of a huge area of research and sports psychology and, and it’s held a goal orientation, and you hit it right on the nose, when you when you sort of define this, some of us are task oriented. And I’ll go on and say some other people are task oriented, because that’s certainly not me. But a task oriented individual measures success, by self competition by bettering themselves. It’s also known as a mastery goal orientation, where at the end of the day, you deem that day a success if you did well, based on your standards for yourself. So if you wanted to have a better sprint, start, if you wanted to get a paper finished, if you wanted to finish a podcast, if you did what you meant to do, and you feel good about yourself, because of yourself, then your task oriented, ego oriented folks, on the other hand, are, are much more other oriented. One of those, the people that really they don’t like to exercise on their own, because they don’t have somebody to compare themselves with. Right. So as long as they’re racing, they’re motivated. And it’s one of those things where even if you PR if you lose your dean that day on successful,
Trevor Connor 48:09
it’s so grab, continue with this whole idea of task orientation versus ego orientation, I think this is a great place to put in a clip from Sonya Looney, from Episode 249, where she talks about the fact that being very task oriented does keep you in the moment, it keeps you present.
Sonya Looney 48:25
So there’s a really interesting study that shows four different quadrants. So you can have high task high ego, low task, low ego, you know, all the four different quadrants of that. And the flow state, you know, the me Hi chicks in my high flow state theory, the people that we’re getting closer to that flow state, we’re always people who are in that high task area. So even if they’re high task, high ego, or high task, low ego, those people were more in the present moment, they were more without, you know, having all of these different thoughts that are distracting them. And then this high ego low task orientation, people are not in that state of flow, because they’re thinking about themselves, they’re thinking about potential risks and how they’re not performing and how they’re not stacking up instead of thinking about the task that they’re doing in the present moment. So I think that coming back to thinking about the task does bring you into what you’re doing in the moment, instead of all the threats on your self esteem or your ego or your worth. So something else that I wanted to come up with and tell you about whenever you’re talking about this freethrow competition and just competition in general, is coming back to that intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation piece. And sometimes when people are doing something primarily from a place of intrinsic motivation, and then now somebody is trying to reward them for that thing that they were already doing. The extrinsic motivation can actually be demotivating because of something called the over justification effect. And studies have demonstrated that offering excessive external rewards for something that somebody already wanted to do can lower their motivation because now While they’re not thinking about the task at hand, they’re thinking about this thing that they could win. But that also wasn’t the case for unexpected external reward. So if you randomly give somebody a reward for something that they’re doing that does not impact their extrinsic motivation.
Grant Holicky 50:14
An important piece of this is the idea of motivation. How do we stay motivated, and it’s come up in a couple of these clips. And we’ve talked about that one of my favorite theories of motivation is self determination theory. And there’s there’s three major parts, we don’t need to get into it. We’ve, we’ve talked about it a lot in the show at other times, but competence, relatedness and autonomy. Those three pieces are the things that an athlete needs, and we need to remember to foster those things. And being present allows us to foster these things because we become self oriented, right? And I think that’s really important. We’re looking at our self understanding, hey, we are pretty good at this. If we get too much looking at the other people, it’s really easy to end up in a world was like, well, Todd, epic Archer is better than me. So I’m not very competent. Right now. That’s not what it’s about who you around. Who are you with? What, what’s your context. And those pieces of the puzzle really drive your success and drive your motivation keeps that fire burning hot. And one of the most important things we can remember throughout all of this, when we’re talking about an individual athlete, we’re talking about a team, we’re talking about coaches, with athletes, how do we stoke the fire of motivation? We brought it up before but self determination theory is just a fantastic definition of what athletes need for motivation. And Sony have learned from Episode 249 does a great job of kind of explaining it defining the pieces of SDT self determination theory, we’ll listen to that. Now.
Sonya Looney 51:44
I think that one of the primary theories of motivation, especially as it pertains to athletics is self determination theory. And most people listening have probably heard of this. But the people that do the research the psychologists are, and scientists are DC and Ryan, and they talk about autonomous motivation, meaning acting from a place of personal choice, having three psychological needs. So the reason why you do what you do is because you’re trying to fulfill the psychological needs. And those psychological needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And we can go deeper into what those all mean. So why
Trevor Connor 52:18
don’t we dive into the man, I think autonomy is the fairly easy one, that that’s really you want to have a sense of self that’s independent, or how would you define it,
Sonya Looney 52:28
it’s feeling like you’re in control of your own behaviors, and that you can take action to impact your goals. So if you don’t feel like your actions matter, and then you don’t have a sense of control, then it’s really difficult to be motivated to work towards something whenever you feel like you can’t impact that. And it also comes from a place of willingness, volition and choice. And that can be contrasted with control motivation, where you’re doing something for a reward or to avoid punishment. And that often comes from a place of pressure, or somebody putting demands on you. And those two environments feel really different.
Trevor Connor 53:04
So tell you how powerful this is, I found this really interesting. I was reading a study the other night, where they took cyclists and had them do the same interval workout. But one time they did it in ERG mode. So the trainer, the bike was controlling their power. And the other time, they did it, where they controlled their pace. And what they found was universally all the athletes could do it harder, when they were controlling their pace. And their theory was ERG mo takes away autonomy. And that kills motivation.
Grant Holicky 53:37
I think the pieces of this that are so relevant are just like where do you see yourself as a competent athlete. So often we watch athletes burn out because they don’t see their place in the cycling world or the sport world anymore. Like I’m not going to be good enough. I’m not I don’t belong. And it’s really up to coaches and programs and things like that. To keep everybody engaged right not to get up on one of my soapbox is but don’t coach to the top coach to the middle coach to the bottom. The top is going to be great no matter what.
Rob Pickels 54:06
Yeah, I had a conversation. The other day, I was at Boulder Junior cycling practice with my kids talking to another dad. And he had a daughter, great writer. But she was comparing herself to some of the top male riders in the BJC program who are national and international Alaba riders. And her feeling of competence was very low. But when she and her dad were out trail riding, she’s cleaning obstacles and making switchbacks that other people aren’t making. And that is very important to reframe that competence is relative. Right and, and so as coaches, we need to be ensuring that the contrast between riders is not causing some of them to have this low feeling of competence.
Grant Holicky 54:49
Yeah, and I think what goes along with that is that feeling of competence. And then I think this is super important for individual athletes is the idea of how do we get back to an idea of we Right, how do we put the we in an AI sport, there’s individual sports. And that’s where relatedness comes in. Right? If you are around other people that think the way you think that are doing the things that you do, that are willing to make the sacrifices that you are willing to make. That’s why we see cyclists, Master cyclists hanging out with other masters cyclists, I’m talking about cycling, because they talk to their friend that most long on the weekend about what they do, they can’t relate and it feels weird. And then they feel weird. And it really is important to understand what it’s important to the individual athletes to stick to sport, that’s the biggest job, how do we keep people engaged in sport,
Dr. Michael Crawley 55:41
the main thing well would be just to kind of embrace this idea that they have fun. And creativity is like part of training or part of keeping people interested in the sport. So I would emphasize the fact that a lot of the time in Ethiopia, people were like, actively trying to make their runs, it feel kind of adventurous. And that that was, you know, part of that was about making them feel the way they described, it was like dangerous athletes. So they would do things like go and look for where the hyenas were in the forest on purpose. Or they would plan a hill rep session at like two in the morning. So that they could know when they got to the start line that they were the only people who had done that.And so you know, things like that, where you’re just you’re doing things that are creative, a little bit unusual, you know, if you were wearing like a whoop strap like the one I’ve gone, it would probably tell you that you’ve done something really stupid if you went if you got up at two in the morning and wet and run up and down the hill. But for them that is kind of like an important part of their preparation for a race to know that they’d done something like that. So I guess it’s about just trying to think of sort of fun and creative things that you can build into people’s training, especially when, you know, the majority of people are never going to perform at a really top level anyway. So they might as well be trying to enjoy it, especially if the best athletes in the world are making an effort to do that. So yeah, looking looking for fun and adventure and training, I guess would be the main thing.
Grant Holicky 57:03
So I think the fun is so important is because the fun is what it allows us to show up every day, right? It allows us to go out on a rainy day when maybe it’s cold, it allows us to do hit those intervals when we’re feeling like we’re dragging. It’s gotta be fun. And the fun ties us back into the process. And the process fuels the fire and keeps us going toward that final result.
Trevor Connor 57:27
And I think that’s a
Trevor Connor 57:27
good place to put in a clip to take us out which is Dr. Steven Siler talking about enjoying the process,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 57:35
it really does come down to enjoying the process, find beauty, find rhythm, find flow in the daily workouts in, you know that long to that two hour boring ride indoors on the train, or when it’s pouring rain outside, it’s 40 degrees. Think about breathing. Think about rhythm, you know, there’s always something we can get into. I find, but but enjoy that we are so lucky. So let’s you know, let’s enjoy the aesthetic of the rhythms that we create as athletes. And you know that that’s the grind and it is a it’s a it’s a wonderful thing that we get to do. So if we embrace the grind embrace the, you know, the what is it the CEO say embrace the suck or, but I didn’t see it that way. I think you know, I do think that there is something special about the fatigue about feeling there. And let’s enjoy it.
Trevor Connor 58:46
My listeners? Are you looking to gain a deeper understanding on how your body uses energy and fuel? Look no further because Steve Neil Performance Coaching is exactly what you need. For limited time, you can get a wide range of data and Steve’s testing package that includes metabolic efficiency test, respiration test, functional movement screening, for hours of consultation and q&a sessions, plus an hour follow up consultation. This program is designed for all endurance athletes at any level. Check it out today at Steve Neil performance.com. And of course is my final one minute to take us out. Don’t forget find somebody you hate getting. Hatred is fun.
Grant Holicky 59:30
We’re not gonna go. We’re not gonna go on the whole tangent of eyes off and individual zones of optimal functioning again, you might not all be like Trevor, but for those who are find someone you hate, and just fuel the fire baby. This was another episode of fast talk.
Rob Pickels 59:48
No, this is my part guys because ironically, I could not focus during an episode about focus, but I can read the script.
Rob Pickels 59:56
Rob was not in the moment.
Rob Pickels 59:57
That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast.
Grant Holicky 1:00:03
On target.
Rob Pickels 1:00:03
Be sure to leave us a rating and a review. The thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those enjoy the fun of the individual. We love your feedback, join the conversation at forums.fasttalklabs.com Or I’ll give you Trevor’s phone number and you can just call him directly or tweet at us with @fasttalklabs and fasttalklabs.com. To get access to our endurance sports knowledge base coach continuing education as well as our in person and remote athlete services
Grant Holicky 1:00:33
Well done!
Rob Pickels 1:00:34
For Grant Holicky and Trevor Connor split the rules. I’m Rob Pickels. Thanks for listening!
