Strength & Speed

I think we can all agree that 2020 was a weird year. With limited racing going on, it left many athletes in limbo. This was a small taste of what others have felt over the last couple of years when things like injury or decreasing performance has led them to question their desire to be an athlete. If you’ve been racing and competing your whole life and you can’t anymore? Now what?

Create Other Pillars of Strength

Just like investing money you should be diversifying your life. While it is okay to have one of your main pillars be athletics, if you don’t have other pillars you are setting yourself up for failure. Using myself as an example, I have family (my wife, children, extended family), my church (Orthodox) and my job (Army) as the other three big pillars.

Theses pillars of strength create resiliency because when one falls apart for whatever reason, you always have something else to fall back on. You’ll also find that building strength especially in topics like family and church can often further strengthen the other pillars like athletics.

Since you are reading this, I’ll assume athletics is a large part of your life, as it is mine. Bottom line though it is just part of your life and not your whole life. If you want to achieve peak performance in fitness you’ll have to prioritize it near the top but it shouldn’t be the only thing you have going for you. As you can see from the last year, sometimes your decision to leave a sport (hopefully temporarily in 2020) is not 100% in your control.