When I played college football I was a defensive back and our Defensive Coordinator was Steve Saulnier. If you’ve not noticed football is an emotional sport filled with all manner of high fives, helmet slaps, celebrations and people running down the sidelines. Coach Saulnier was no exception usually leading the charge down the sideline when a touch down run or interception had happened.

But there was a statement he used over and over that I’ve come back to in sports — and life — countless times. “Don’t let your highs be too high and your lows be too low.” Sports are filled with emotion and you can’t deny yourself the ability to celebrate accomplishment, or to mourn and learn from disappointment. But you can’t let them cloud your focus or judgement.

Many times a team or a player has had recent success and they let it go to their head. They think winning or success is automatic and they start to float through workouts, training, drills and focus on the competition. They may float through a couple games and still win from the previous focus they had, but then you will see them start to lose or fail inexplicably to teams they “should” beat.

Similarly, a player or team that has had a recent loss, injury, or disappointment carries the emotion from it into everything and starts to wear the mantel of a loser. Too much of this and they start to lose the love of the sport, the fun of the challenge, and they end up quitting.

The highs and lows of sports are the mental and emotional game — the Mental and Emotional TSS that we need to self-monitor. I’ve found that EVERY TIME after a big priority race the few days after I’m very “low.” Getting amped up for the weekend, the excitement of competition, the fun of seeing results is an impossible “high” to keep. Your body has to adjust and it brings you out of big racing weekends with low-lows.

A few weeks of this routine and it can start to feel like you are on a racing roller coaster. This is especially true for those of us who race a lot (at any level) and are also working full time, present with our friends and families and into a schedule of every day life. Learning to manage your energy — mental, physical and emotional — is the #1 priority to success in anything.

How to embrace the highs, but not let them distract you.
How to learn from the lows, but not let them demotivate you.
These are the hardest battles in sport.

This past weekend with the OKC ProAm Classic, the coming weekend with Tulsa Tough and the Firehill Crit State Championships — these are the biggest race weekends on many of our racing calenders here in Oklahoma. I guarantee any of us that participate in these will all hit a huge LOW coming out of them — irrelevant of the results. We will feel burnt out, not want to look at our bike and just want to sleep.

All three of the TSS numbers — physical, emotional, and mental will be tapped out. It doesn’t mean we hate cycling, it just means our body needs to find balance again. It has to swing Low first to come back to normal again. There don’t need to be any red flags when we feel low — in fact I have come to expect and schedule for it leading up to big events.

In expecting the Highs and the Lows we can learn to journey through them back to the normal that is the balance of our life. We can also learn to appreciate them and their part in the journey of going after things that are really hard. No challenge is ever chased and conquered without Highs and Lows.