SPORT WALK

When you have a goal of some sort, whether it’s a fitness goal, a challenge ambition or a bigger adventure, it’s very easy to get too fixated on the end point – achieving whatever it is you want so badly and this can steer you off course.

By Sport Walk Founder – Roger Burlinson


A good friend, who just happens to be an Olympic medallist, recounted once that the breakthrough moment for her was a conversation she had with her coach, after a bad period where nothing seemed to be going right. He told her to stop focusing on the destination – what she was trying to achieve (getting to the Olympics and medalling) and to just enjoy the journey.

This is such good wisdom to tap into, regardless of whether you’re an aspiring Olympian or just seeking to get fit. You can’t achieve what you want by fixating on it – by wanting the outcome. You can only achieve your goal by doing things to the best of your ability day in day out and you’ll only do that if you enjoy the process.

You see, as healthy as it is and as valuable to progress as having strong goals are, they’re a distraction and my friend was struggling because she was constantly measuring what she was doing each day, against her expectation of how she needed to be performing to get selected for the Olympics and this was affecting her performance.

Now don’t get me wrong, goals are really important for motivation and are an integral part of Sport Walking but the goal itself is a distraction when you’re training or preparing because it leads you to project yourself into a hypothetical situation in the future – something you have no control over – rather than being present in the here and now and simply applying yourself to your training today – the thing you can control.

If you’re trying to get fit for instance and you’re continually measuring your progress against your perception of what ‘being fit’ means, then your progress will feel painfully slow and it may affect your motivation to carry on. But if you reframe things – focus on what you’re doing, try to enjoy everything you do and seek to make the process as fulfilling as possible on its own, then you’ll do things in the right way to be able to achieve your aim.

You can check in from time to time to get a feel for the progress you’re making but just remember that it takes a long time to build fitness, so park the goals and just make the most of each walk you do and seek to enjoy it for its own sake.

So goals, objectives, targets – they’re an essential part of Sport Walking – but don’t let them rule your everyday process. They’re not something to constantly check yourself against – am I walking fast enough, am I feeling fresh enough, is this working? This is where goals, which are a very positive thing, can become toxic and counter productive.

Your day to day activity is what sustains you, not whether you’re five tenths of the way to achieving your goal! You can’t accelerate your progress either by analysing every walk against benchmark expectations. Perhaps you won’t make the fitness gains you want by the target you’ve set yourself. Perhaps you won’t be as fast as you want come your challenge and therefore you might miss your time goal. Perhaps all sorts of things. What’s for sure is you won’t change the outcome by fretting about your progress.

The interesting thing is, when you remove the pressure of expectation, you improve your performance. If you’re relaxed and not concerned about achieving something, you’re more than likely to exceed your expectations. So try to remove consequence from your goals – don’t think, “I need to walk this fast otherwise…..” Instead think, “if I can walk this fast, I could achieve this time, which would be great but if I can’t I’ll still have other options and the experience will be just as good”.

You still have the goal deep down. You still want the outcome you set yourself in the beginning but you’re not sabotaging your success by pre-judging the outcome based on one walk on a Thursday evening after a hard day at work. If you feel that your training or just walking isn’t quite where it should be or where you want it to be, try to look more at how you can add value, interest and fun to your walks, so that you can relax and enjoy them, which will mean you perform better.

Be aware of the progress you need to make to be ready to take on your challenge but don’t fixate on what you need to succeed. Success will come with good preparation, good work, so let go and focus on the journey itself. It’s the best move you can make!