This is really simple. You are as you practise. What are you practising?
Specificity
Performance is the sum parts of what you have practised both physically and psychologically. In other words make your training specific to what you are going to do, keep yourself within the bandwidth of reality, not fantasy.
Trust
Trust your body to do what you trained it to do. There’s no point in training if you are not going to trust your body to repeat the training patterns automatically. If you lack the trust, you will lack the thrust.
Instincts
The rule of automicity gives you the ability to use instincts to race. If you look at any champion athlete you will see they race by instincts. Automicity and Instinct frees up your hard drive to focus on your inner fire that is driving this whole process.
Anxiety
Don’t agonise, surrender to the process, give up trying to know everything, you are only hampering your own ability to thrive, trust your training and leave the obsessing alone.
Muscle memory
Muscle memory and mental focus are one and the same. They are wired together, your focus is always best directed into your body, lose the me and my training idea. If you want your body to remember something your focus has to be with yourself.
Movement patterns
Pattern is the correct term here. You have to be with what it feels like. If you want it to surface automatically on race day you need to take in the pattern, and that means fully allowing it, being present enough that your body can take in the pattern and create a automatic patterning of it. How many sessions are actually present with?
Presence
The more present you are with training the more automicity you can expect one race day. Race day is the sum parts of your attention, focus and level of presence in training. Ticking it off doesn’t get the job done.
Mental Patterns
Your mental patterns will follow you into the race, observe what you are thinking in training and you will know the nature of what you will be thinking on race day.
Non reaction
Let the impulse be there but don’t do anything about it. The more you can stay out of reaction, the more you will be out of reaction on race day. Non reactivity is one of the biggest assets you can have in your racing tool box, practise in training.
Ritual
Change your mind, change your energy, change your future. Yes we all have this power. Create some rituals around your training that keeps your mental space positive and engaged.