Obsessed with Improvement

"Obsessed with improvement". That’s a line from famed FortyNiner football coach, Joe Walsh. I recently read his book, "The Score Takes Care of Itself". I heard of the book from the blog of Sami Linkin. The blog is here: http://www.samiinkinen.com/archive I highly recommend it. Sami’s theory is to have a spread sheet for everything and keep track of details. If you’re not seeing improvement (this is for training and every area of life), then adjustments need to be made. Either in training or rest.

So this morning as I prepare for Ironman #6, I was doing 1 km intervals. Recording the time in my spreadsheet. Earlier I’d done a 5km time trial on the same course. We’ll see if the times can come down this summer.

In my training spreadsheet I’ve got columns for strength, body weight, VO2max (my Polar heart rate monitor has a quick & easy test), time trials for cycling and swimming, weekly hours, mountain peak running time trials, summer skimo transitions and sprint course test (more on this in another blog) and summer bootpack course.

When you actually record yourself you find that you give it just a bit more effort each time to improve...and improve I’ve done. One of my goals is to get up to 20 pull ups by the end of the year. In May alone I’ve gone from 11 to 15.

Each Mon. A.M. I pull up my 4 spreadsheets and review the last week....see if I improved and make a plan for this week to get better.

They say that the difference between an Olympic champion and the other Olympians, all at the very top of their sport in the world, is that the champion sets and achieves goals in the sub areas that make for success in the sport, while the others simply have outcome based goals such as "winning a gold medal".

Man, if I’d only have discovered this 20 years ago! If incremental improvement is striven for and accomplished consistently over the long haul, there’s no telling what someone could accomplish!