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POSTED IN 01/10
CHANDRA CRAWFORD
Contributing Editor
Chandra Crawford is a current Olympic Champion and World Cup medal winner. She is a member of the Canadian National Team and one of the top sprinters in the world.
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If you are sufficiently motivated, physically inclined and smarter than your average can of paint you need only two things to live a satisfying athletic life: Goals and Training Partners.
Regardless of your sport or level of engagement in it a fabulous array of rewards and benefits is available to you by simply incorporating these two elements into your daily life.
The Arthur Ashe adage “Success is a journey, not a destination” serves as a poignant reminder to find satisfaction in every day.
In sports the key to this is pursuing goals and enjoying it with your training partners (friends).
I keep coming back to the endless pursuit of improvement in skiing because of an epiphany I had one sunny day in February 2006 when I looked down at my feet and found them planted atop the Olympic podium.
The realization I had even while watching the flag be raised and belting out the Canadian anthem was: “It is the journey after all!”
It was a day equal to some of my prior best days… pushing the limits in uphill interval battles with my teammates all summer long.
Goals. Because you get to make them up yourself it’s all about tailoring it to your personal quest by breaking down your dream goal into steps and then adjusting along the way through the ups and downs.
An autograph from Beckie Scott signed “Dream big!” inspired me to make wining the Olympics my goal.
This guided me to break things down and work backwards to make process goals for the training it would take to get there.
Once you have the Dream Goal in mind, make each month, week, camp, weekend, day and hour really count.
Set goals that are realistic and measurable, write them down and evaluate them after. It’s a very rewarding process in itself.
On the harder workouts the goal-setting process helps me prepare to squeeze every last drop of “my best” out of myself.
I know that the flood of lactate is coming and it’s going to hurt but with my goal of “stay relaxed and focused to stick on Sara (Renner)” I finish the session having pushed beyond my limits thanks to my goals and training partners.
I truly believe that the energy created is more than the sum of the parts when you have good training partners.
I appreciate them the most in the tough workouts and adverse conditions. When it’s cold and raining it is the fact that I’m meeting someone that gets me out the door for a brutally hard workout.
When we go stride for stride running all-out up a hill I’m ecstatic regardless of the winner.
If my teammate beats me (which happens more often than not with the likes of Sara Renner and Perianne Jones around) I’m grateful that they dragged speed and effort out of me I could never have mustered on my own.
The internal reserves you discover make it so intensely rewarding and the high five at the end seals the deal.
Training partners are the fast friends I can relate to because we’d like nothing more than to push each other to reach our goals.
I don’t cry when I stand on the podium because it’s always such a fun surprise, but when a teammate stands up there getting her just deserts the pride and joy streams down my face because I know how hard they’ve worked and I’m so happy we’ve shared the journey.
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