Defeat is a state of mind

No one is ever defeated until defeat is accepted.

Defeat takes many forms; competition loss is only one form of defeat. You are defeated every time you mentally capitulate to your sessions, because mental capitulation is the precursor to the physical capitulation.

Don’t train looking to make your racing easier, train for the strength and resilience to endure that which is truly difficult.

Observe don’t absorb!

Your triggers are your teachers, whatever triggers you must be worked on. The triggers you avoid are the same triggers that will be loud on race day.

Keep in mind that every great athlete is built from every mistake they ever made. Mistakes don’t equate to defeat or capitulation unless you allow them to.

Resilience is a choice, not a result. Nothing will make you resilient until you decide to be resilient.

Mental strength, physical strength, endurance, speed and resilience cannot come to you, it has to come from you. Don’t look for it out there in the world, you won’t find it. All of it is inside you, in the choices you make to take the challenge: the discomfort, the setbacks, the mistakes, the successes and the failures and to let them melt your physical and mental process into a solid called experience.

Experience can only serve you while you are absorbing the incoming information, if you turn it into a measure of likes and dislikes the process will defeat you, your passion has to overcome your discomfort. Remember the first paragraph, defeat is only defeat when it is accepted.

When you observe capitulation you will always find doubtful thought at its root. The programming is the script that runs the doubtful thought: watch it, observe it, write it down so you can see it, become aware of how you do doubt, and you will begin to truly understand the threads of your own tendency towards apathy, capitulation and defeat.

This will give you the power to override the thoughts and keep them at that, “a thought” before it becomes an entrenched belief that you need a pick axe to remove.

Your mind is a powerful tool, it can help you enormously or utterly destroy you; you have to make a choice to use it in the direction of your own growth, and realise that ultimately no matter what you do physically, the mind is the program that informs the body of what it is capable of.

We are never defeated by the situation, we are only ever defeated by the thoughts we have about the situation. If you can’t control what you think, you can’t control what you do.

You are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be.  ~ Epictetus