And they should be.
It is easy to get distracted by the bright lights of professional sports on Prime Time TV. Our sport heroes living out the worlds’ childhood dream of playing sports for a living. It seems their lives’ revolve around rivalries, bowl games, Olympic and International competition. We see them step off the bus in thousand dollar suits, the highest fashion, and the newest sneakers. What we do not see is the 50+ hour week that led up to that moment. The 6 am trainings every morning, the choice to eat nutritious food while those around are less disciplined. We do not see the choices to go to bed earlier because you train in the morning or the hundreds of other sacrifices all athletes make every single day.
As athletes, we spend an overwhelming amount of our athletic lives working in the dark. In dirty weight rooms, empty fields, spectator-less arenas, and lonely quiet pools. We do not train in the spotlight, we toil and train with our teammates but no one on the outside is really watching. Fans only care about game day results but they miss the countless hours it took to get there. Appreciating what happens in the dark and recognizing that performances in the lights rely on the mundane days in the dark. One of the biggest misconceptions about sports, in my opinion, is that athletes train for performances. Sure that is a motivation, but we compete so rarely compared to our frequency of training that it cannot be the driving factor. Instead we train to be the best athlete possible, and only then do we get to demonstrate it against our opponents.
In my experience as an athlete, coach, and mental performance consultant the best training is not sexy. It is not fancy or overly creative. Good training is simple training repeated over and over again. Repeated to mundanity and beyond. The people who can withstand the boring day to day and stay focused on their goals are the people who rise to their heights in their sport. Athletes chasing the spotlight often burn themselves out by rejecting the boring.
Embrace the mundanity. Embrace the day after day mentality of slowly chipping away at your goals. Rather than heroic performances once a season, focus on the day in and day out. Focus on the mundane. What separates elite athletes from the chafe is how they do the little things. A tiny change repeated over and over will always outperform a big change made once and forgotten. To be the best, you have to continue to do the boring and mundane details to the best of your ability EVERY TIME.
How do you do the small things when no one is looking?
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