lightheir wrote:
I think for AGers especially, mental toughness is tri is farrrrrr overrated. Yeah, I said it.
I think far more important in AG tri is DISCIPLINE. Specifically, the discipline to get up and do those workouts, day in, day out. Even if there are life obstacles and other constraints you have to work around.
You gimme a budding AGer who is highly disciplined and can do the entire coach plan year after year for several years, and even if they are afraid on race to go 'all into the pain/suffering zone', they'll wipe the floor against a similarly genetically talented AGer who can suffer to the MAX on race day, but has been semi-inconsistent with training or trains either too hard when it doesn't count and then pulls back too far otherwise.
I've been racing running/tri for 20 years now, and all my best, fastest races have come with the LEAST amount of personal suffering on race day. Literally every time. But those races have all come with the best training blocks (sometimes multiple prior training blocks) that led up to it and made those conditions possible.
Now if you're a pro/elite, ok, the differences can be small since talent is so high - suffering for them may literally mean the difference between winning the world championship vs nothing, but even so, look at how Tim odonnell took 2nd at Kona - even he says he suffered relatively little compared to prior years despite his great result.
I think you mean discipline is underrated. Discipline and mental toughness are two different concepts, and one need not take the place of the other.
Part of what I really liked about
Endure, which I plugged earlier in the thread, is the demonstrated link between mental fatigue and physical fatigue. If you do a taxing mental exercise before a workout, you will fatigue earlier. This is not impacted by discipline.
If you want to race at your best, you want both. Of course, discipline plays a large role, but the difference between equally talented, equally disciplined athletes can very easily be mental toughness. For all the talk of marginal gains and watts saved around here, the mental aspect is worth consideration. So much so, that before I read
Endure, I didn't even realize how much some of these effects could play a role. Especially placebos and really believing in something, even if it doesn't actually help (ice baths is one example from the book). I think compression socks are probably a similar case, personally, because they cannot be tested against a true placebo treatment.
I used to think about mental toughness along these lines, I just didn't realize it. I still recall waiting on a T platform in Boston for 45 minutes when the wind chill was below 0 thinking that if I could suffer through that, my upcoming HIM would be fine. Embrace the suck. Learn to be uncomfortable. Train for the worst and hope for the best. And sometimes it's mental toughness that is needed to enable the discipline.