“If your bad days now are what a good day was a year ago, then you have improved…full stop.”
A mentor shared this pearl with me a few years ago and I think about it every now and again. Especially when I am coming down to the final days of a semester or a specific race preparation.
While the quote is closely tied to athletic performance, it is valuable in other domains.
I have made two major transitions in the past two years:
Undergraduate to graduate-level education
Swimming to triathlon
Neither one has occurred without difficulty.
During this process, I have tried to document as much of what I am learning either publicly or privately. I want to have an earmark of progress or lack thereof. Keeping tabs allows me to:
Share experiences with others
Offer myself encouragement on the “bad” days
Dial in how to take the next step
Save the roadmap for later
At the heart of the opening quote is the idea of comparison. I happen to like comparison as it provides meaningful motivation to take the necessary steps to trend toward better.
My long-term approach to developing my endurance profile is an excellent use case here.
In a recent training session, I was executing specific race-pace running at the end of a full swim/bike/run day. The session was 10K off the bike at target effort for my summer A race: 70.3 Des Moines.
In this session, I rolled through 10K in 38:33 and felt, as I reported afterward in TrainingPeaks, “good but not great”.
I would have liked to be better, but it was only after I looked back at my first triathlon, where I ran 38:20 for 10K, that I realized the power of making a small comparison.
That 38:20 was a maximum race effort. I was shelled afterward. The recent training session was just another day and a subjectively average one at that.
The comparison to my past self was all I needed to feel at ease with where I am at. The development process has been slow and steady as opposed to rapid. Rapid gains were what I was after at the beginning of my endurance foray.
Full speed ahead with no understanding of training stress, life stress, and ability to handle a long-term view.
Alan Couzens sums it up nicely below:
What does this mean for you?
Give some credit to your past self. If you are moving forward, your current bad day may seem bad, but past you would have been thrilled with that performance. Not only can that be motivating and reassuring, but it can also inform your future decisions.
How did I arrive here?
What is working?
Where are the current limiters?
In a sporting context, I am a firm believer that the recipe that worked in the past should look similar to what you are doing currently. You responded well to it and there is a mechanism that is working for you.
Keep the main thing the main thing.
The only difference now is that it may need to be packaged differently based on current demands.
Looking back provides valuable information. Expectations can become unrealistic if you are forward-center-of-mass all day every day. You may not want to live in the past, but peeking back at it is not to be ashamed of.