3 things I wish I’d Understood Before Starting College Athletics

A Reflection on a Brief and Disappointing Career

All the background information you need to know is that I was recruited as decathlete out of high school to an elite Division 1 track and field program where I attended 3 years, competed 2 years, and generally underachieved.

1. Will Power is a Limited Resource

There are various studies which have produced evidence to support this fact. You can go look them up if you don’t believe me. And with that is the fact that some people have more and some people have less.I have less. Doing things right when people are watching is easy because you are being held accountable. Things became slippery when no one was around to tell you no. This is where will power kicks in. For me, being in a situation with activities which were really fun, but detrimental to performance drained my will power. Make no mistake, I knew these things were going to hurt me in the long run, but after my will power was used up , justifications and excuses began popping up and made the activities seem harmless. Recognizing those things that killed my will power and learning to avoid them would have paid dividends.

2. Adrenal Fatigue is Real

This is something I wish my coaches understood too. Over-training is just as bad as under training, but I don’t blame most people for not understanding this. It’s generally counter-intuitive. Training is good,so double training must be double good. That’s how many of us think of it and what we are told our entire lives. Unfortunately, the reality is quite the opposite. The body is physically limited by how much stress it can endure. It is better suited for brief, acute stress opposed to prolonged, chronic stress. Many collegiate athletics programs push this limit and often exceed it. As a result, autonomic innervation becomes imbalanced and performance either plateaus or gets worse. In extreme cases, it can be obvious, but generally mild cases present few, if any, observable symptoms.I realize now that my lack of motivation during training sessions was not disinterest as previously thought,but a physiological imbalance of my nervous system. Biofeedback and autonomic innervation understanding and monitoring would have made a huge difference in my training quality.

3. Trying to Make Things Easier isn’t a Bad Thing

There is something about proving to yourself that you can achieve something that is rewarding. I think we've all experienced it and most of the time it’s a good thing, but it can also be a toxic philosophy. We are told doing hard things is rewarding and doing easy things is less of an achievement. However, given two paths, easy and hard, to the exact same achievement, the logic of the idea falls apart. Choosing to go out and wear down your body with lack of rest and improper fuel consumption the night before a work out will make it hard, but still achievable just as it would have been had you stayed in rested.Plus, working harder builds more character right? That insane logic was my mantra. Eventually, it became a vicious cycle of rewarding my self with harmful activities for the hard work that, had I skipped the harmful things in the first place, wouldn't have been hard! Worse still, my will power shrank even more and fatigue got worse as a result.Putting pride to the side and letting things be easy was the smartest thing I could have done.

All in all, I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity I was given and experiences I had. While it is too late to go back and retry becoming a great track athlete , it’s a perfect time to employ the concepts to a current situation to improve general physical and mental performance on a day to day basis. As the saying goes ‘better late than never.’ I couldn’t agree more.