Stop Chasing Peak Performance, Aim for Average

“We don’t rise to our expectations, we sink to the level of our training”

- Archilochus

On average, we have an average day. It’s simple math. 

Most days we don’t go out and crush our PRs or do better than we ever have by large margins. In fact, after the steep learning curve at the start of your athletic career, .

When we look at elite athletes, we often see the tip of the iceberg. We don’t see the years and years of microscopic improvements. We see someone who is performing at their “peak” but don’t realize that for them, it’s probably just a standard day. They might have a PR every now and again, but they’ve probably done hundreds of workouts that indicate they are capable of that PR.

It’s not individual heroic efforts that count. It is the repeatability of … 

No one can perform better than they are capable of, but it’s possible to perform worse than you’re capable of. Sometimes we try to be heroic and blow past our limits. This strategy rarely works unless we drastically undersold ourselves to begin with. In this case, it’s not exceeding our limits, it’s that we’ve been under-performing for a long time…

So, on average, we have an average day. The important thing is: it is a moving average.

We can make tiny, 1% or less improvements that compound over time. When we focus on taking the actions that make our average days just a little better, eventually our standard days become superior to the awesome days we had before. 
The best news is that this means when we get to training we don’t always have to do our best. We simply have to stick with it long enough to see the more subtle effects of consistency. These are nearly invisible at first, but become exponential over time. 

A practical way to think about this is that instead of comparing your race or workout to your PR or best performance, aim to improve your top 5 or 10 average performances in that area (the number depends on the number of times you’ve done that workout/race - for example, if I try to improve my top 5 average 5k times there is only a 3sec separation between them, but top 10 would be a wider gap and make it more attainable). This way you still get the satisfaction of the “win” without needing to exceed every performance you’ve ever had before. 

Embrace the ups and down and fluctuations in training and racing - create ways to see improvement without needing it to be a linear progression!