It’s that time of year where it seems like everyone is headed somewhere be it to the cabin, the lake, a road trip or a destination vacation. How fun! We can’t wait to hear about all of your adventures. Every year, we get questions about how to keep fitness in your vacation and travel plans. 

In a perfect world, travel and vacation plans are perfectly timed with our training plans and goal events. However, In reality, when we take into account vacation time, kids schedules, family requests and availability, it seems that more often than not travel and vacation plans intersect in perfectly horrible timing for training and goal events. 

So, what to do? Give up on a goal? Not schedule an event? Not really what we have in mind! Instead we’d like you to approach the challenge of sensibly adding training to your travel  routine. This means finding the balance of time to train and time spent seeing the sights or playing with the kids. It means being creative and re-framing what “training” looks like and it means including the challenge of eating and drinking in a way that will support your training goals. 

And yes, it is a challenge!

As we are heading into the new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about resolutions, goals and intentions. A new year brings a lot of possibilities but understanding how last year’s goals played out can have a profound effect.

It might seem like an odd time to be talking about post event emotions as we are all excited about picking new events as we start a new year. An athlete can be coming off a big season, can be unsure of the year ahead, have been stressed by the holidays or even just in a funk. Jumping right into the new year sometimes can be harder than expected.  

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had two or three athletes reach out to me about being in a “funk” after completing their goal event for the year. First, kudos to them to acknowledging the “funk” and reaching out! The “post race blues” or “post season blues” are always a consideration for me as a coach as it is important to help my athletes understand that recovery is not just about physical recovery but mental recovery too. And it’s something to consider when signing up for those big events or planning for resolutions!

It is so easy to get so bogged down in the day to day grind of life that often we forget why we are doing some of the things we are doing. We all do it!

I was reminded of this while frantically trying to get all my end of year required coaching training done. I was listening to a coaching seminar where the keynote speaker, Chrissie Wellington (a world champion triathlete), was talking about her regrets. Her biggest regret was not slowing down enough to celebrating her successes. She challenged us as coaches to remember to celebrate our own successes and to make sure that we celebrate the successes of our athletes.

I thought a lot about this after the seminar was over. I always love to acknowledge everyone’s successes and try to make sure an highlight them through the year but many often get missed unintentionally. More than this though, the talk made me really wonder what each member of the CLA team considered success for themselves in 2018. As many of you know I sent out an e-mail asking this question and it has been fun to see the results and I want to make sure to share with the team. This list is by no means complete as we got some responses late. If you have successes you’d like to share, please send them along!  

The beauty of this shout out is that everyone’s successes are different and reflect all of our journeys. I hope to inspire you all to continue building on these successes in 2019 AND share with pride what you learn and accomplish. It truly is inspiring and humbling. 

We are nearing the end of a beautiful summer and for some this is the start of the off season while for others, there are still some big races ahead. Regardless. it seems over the past few weeks I have heard from several athletes that this is the time of year they start to struggle with motivation. They are asking if it is burnout? Change of weather? The let down of a busy summer or maybe just that life is too busy and something has to give?

It is hard to really know why sometimes it is hard to be motivated for a workout even when we know it gets us closer to a goal we have.

Don’t despair though, at some point or another even the most dedicated athlete gets on the struggle bus and has a hard time motivating for workouts.

Truly this is a part of training. The best thing to do when this happens is to try and step back and evaluate why you are really struggling. There may be many reasons but hopefully some of our tips and ideas will help you figure out how to stop that bus and tell the driver you want OFF and are ready to find that motivation again!