End of Season Reflections - Part 1

Some collegiate track and field athletes will be competing in their conference and or last chance qualifier meets before nationals.  For a majority of athletes, their seasons have come to a close.  Now is the time to reflect upon your season.  Reflecting gives us an opportunity to pause and look back upon the previous season.  A lot of athletes competed for the first time in over a year this past season.  Others may have run into a slew of COVID-19 restrictions at their college/university.  Now is a good time to sit back and reflect for a few reasons.

First , when reflecting back on your season, it’s important to consider if you met and achieved the goals you set out to accomplish this season.  Nobody could have predicted the number of restrictions we would have faced and encountered this season.  With all the trials and obstacles in your way, how well do you think your season went?  Did you accomplish your goal(s) (yes, no, both)?  

Second, when reflecting back on your goals and if you accomplished them or not, another idea to consider is did you live up to your standards?  Did you hold yourself accountable to your goals, and did you spend purposeful time during the season on completing the mundane tasks that may have been required to achieve your goal(s)?  When you look back and think about the intermediate goals (microscope goals) you set for yourself, did you do what it would take to accomplish them?  A microscope goal may have been to get at least 8 hours of sleep per night, go to the trainers room when I needed to, did I ensure I completed 3 or 4 weight room sessions a week, did I watch film of my throws, etc.

Finally, I ask you to consider two final thoughts.  First, how did you expect your season to go?  What were you expecting was going to happen?  In September or October what would your ideal season look like?  How did you expect it would end?  Why did you expect it to go that way?  Second, how do you feel your season went?  Did your early season expectations manifest themselves?  Did you envision yourself standing on the first place podium at the end of the season?  Did you expect your bench press or squat numbers to increase by 10% or 15%?  

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I have written a lot about your window of excellence.  In essence, we only have a short amount of time to achieve greatness.  In this sense, the greatness I’m talking about is on the track, runway, and circle.  

When you take the time to answer the questions above, I want you to be honest with yourself.  Did you achieve what you set out to do?  If you did, that is amazing and I applaud you for it.  When you think about all that you accomplished this year, what made that possible?  Now, on the flip side, if you didn’t achieve your goals, why do you think you didn’t?  What stood in your way from achieving your goals?  If you can answer these questions honestly and truthfully, you will better prepare yourself for the 2021-22 season.