Immediate Inspiration

These are crazy days and fast times we live in, guys and gals. You want a burger? BAM – there it is, mamsir. Can’t bear the thought of waiting till you get home to check your emails? BOOM – get a face full of iPhone technomagic, email man. Had a random or ill-conceived thought about triathlon – KERPOW, you’ve already broadcasted it to the world via your blog, Matt.

We don’t have time to go the supermarket, so we order online. We don’t want a 120 page book, we want a 120 minute movie. A philosophy, religion, or complex set of morals and beliefs? Pah, we’d prefer a sound bite.

And I’m more guilty than most. As my long-time blog readers know, I’m a sucker for a good quote. I love it when someone neatly sums up in one sentence what it takes me hours to explain haphazardly and unconvincingly. And I borrow their words liberally.

But surely sports are the antithesis to this quick and easy results-in-a-can stuff. Sports, and endurance sports in particular, take years and years of hard training; they require meticulous preparation and absolute understanding. Athletes must work and work at improvements while coaches must fine-tune a strategy shaped by year after year of experience. Maybe that’s what we love most about endurance sports and triathlon; their ability to cock a snook (how I love that expression!) at these million-mile-an-hour times?

But, a couple of days ago, Ironman champ and all-round superhero chiselled from the bulging biceps of Zeus himself, ChrissieWellington, asked her Twitter followers for the single best piece of coaching advice they’d ever received... in 140 characters or less, of course.

Given that this is Twitter and, therefore, any loon with access to a laptop and half a brain cell can reply, there were of course a few responses that were so saccharine that Monsieur Camambert of Roquefort Square, Cheshire Row, Stiltonville would dismiss them as being a wee bit on the cheesy side. Try these on for size:

“ I was told ‘never forget how lucky you are to be doing what you are’. In other words, it's your pain, enjoy it.”  VOM!

"Do your best, forget the rest." EUUUURGHHHHUP!

“On eve of 1st IM, was told 'you don't HAVE to do this, you GET to do this!' With that, the nerves were cut in half :-)” AAAARGH! And an extra AAAARGH for the smiley face!

Slightly better than these were the ones that tried to be profound but came across a bit odd. I quite liked several of these with my favourite arguably being:

“Most useful tip from a friend when I was first contemplating the marathon: just keep running. and eat bananas." 

While wading through some utter dross, I was surprised to find a few titbits of genius, however. Of course, coaching is a precise art but, just once in a while, there’s a sentence that helps to make everything you’ve heard before make sense. For example, as a tall-ish triathlete with a background in swimming (broad shoulders) and beer drinking (broad gut), I sometimes find the whole weight/food balance thing problematic. I’ve gotten gradually leaner over the years (to the tune of about 30kgs, as it happens) and I’m now not big by any stretch of the imagination, but I reckon there’s another 4-5kgs that could be lost by IM Austria in July to make me a faster and more economic biker and runner. But that needs balancing with a shedload of training and propensity for bonking after an hour or so if I don’t take on calories. It’s hard to know where the line lies. Then I saw this:

“When I was concerned about cutting weight, a rowing coach said to me: 'Eat to perform and let the rest take care of itself.' “ Ahhh, suddenly it's so simple!

My favourite post, however, for being simultaneously a training truism and a Carry On style innuendo, was undoubtedly this:

“Chrissie, I found this Brett Sutton quote while researching you! ‘If it's not long, make sure it's hard’.”

So, what’s your favourite training or racing maxim? Is there a one-liner that helped the scales fall from your eyes? A simple piece of advice that made the world a clearer and more intelligible place to be – and train? If so, let me know - now, immediately, ASAP, this instant...