A former client referred me to How to Skate a 10K, by Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel, an Olympic gold-medal winner and world record holder. [1] It includes a great deal of information that's only of interest to aspiring speed skaters (including a detailed training regimen that fills a 33-page spreadsheet!) But it also contains several passages that are relevant to anyone who's serious about their profession. I've reproduced them below and appended a set of related questions:
Keep It Simple
My training program was very simple and therefore very robust. It was cheap and reliable. Not fancy nor extraordinary. I tried not to involve things that I could not control. I did not become reliant on equipment that I could not easily access. I did not make plans that I did not understand. I did not follow a culture of buying a bike too expensive to bring about in the rain. To me speedskating was just a one legged squat, repeated over and over during maximum heart rate. It was all just very simple and I kept it that way. [2]
- How might you simplify your work?
- Where have you created or tolerated unnecessary complications?
- What is within your control? What is not within your control?
- What are you pretending to control?
- What expensive tools are getting in your way?
- What is the most basic repeatable motion?
Creating an Environment, Part 1
My job as an athlete was simple: set myself up for success. I could not control all aspects of the outcome of the competitions. But the things I could control I made sure to give an effort to control, at least to the extent I was willing to go to. I believed that the more stress stimulus I could give my body through training the more my body would develop. But the thing is, I could only withstand a certain level of total stress in my life. If I had problems in my life outside of training this would increase the total amount of stress on me and so I had to drop the amount of training I could perform, in order to drop the total stress volume to a comprehensible level. So, therefore, in order to be able to train at a high level I also needed a good social environment. [3]
- What enhances your capacity to tolerate stress?
- What diminishes that capacity?
- What stressors in other domains of life are undermining your work?
- To what extent are you tolerating stressors you could eliminate?
Creating an Environment, Part 2
I tried to only work with people I liked, I was fortunate enough to be able to choose this to some extent. Also, I always aimed to solve problems as soon as they occurred in order not to ache and waste energy on things not worthy of my attention. I was the one held responsible for solving those problems, even though my friends, family, coach etc. would help me. But since I held myself responsible for the solution to resolve itself, I wasn’t able to be upset that other people had not solved my problems for me. In this manner, I didn’t get stressed over other people not doing their job properly (or the way I wanted them to) and I had more energy to spend on training. I held myself responsible for setting myself up for success, but whether or not I succeeded in the end was not only up to me. I didn’t consider losing honorably a waste of time either. Since losing didn’t scare me too much, I was relaxed and could take on even more stress and more training. [4]
- What do you like about the people you're working with?
- If you're not working with people you like, why?
- What problems are you allowing to linger?
- How are you asking other people for help?
- How are you blaming other people?
- If you weren't scared, what would you do?
Creating an Environment, Part 3
I aimed to lower the resistance as much as possible, by creating a smooth environment, free of hassle. It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit. I wasn’t proud when I hated my session because I knew that in the long run I risked starting to drop hours if they weren’t fun enough. Doing boring sessions I considered to be a failure of making the training stimulating. I assessed this issue. For example, I hated bike trainer rides, so I bought Gore-tex clothing, mudflaps and spike tires (for the winter); I did not enjoy running in the fields, so I moved to the mountains. I set myself up for success by regarding my weaknesses. [5]
- Where is there resistance? What could be made smoother?
- What makes work fun? What would make it more fun?
- What are your weaknesses? What weaknesses are you hiding from?
- If you couldn't hide from those weaknesses, what would you do?
Being Serious Enough
It’s obvious at this point that I considered my performance to be altered by numerous different factors. I realized this in my early teens. However, back then I put lots of effort in trying to control all these factors and it drained me of energy and motivation. Then, very unexpectedly, I won the junior world championships and I came to realize that the award was not worth the cost. I felt like I had turned every stone and struggled so hard which had totally drained me of my motivation. When I was 18 years old I was going purely on autopilot. A few years later I accepted that my motivation is not infinite, but rather finite. Some efforts helped me approach my goals very rapidly while other efforts, also helping me fulfill my goals, did it a lot slower and not as efficiently. Some of these actions inspired me to take on even harder challenges, they increased my motivation! But some of them drained me of motivation instead. My entire training program was predicated on a foundation of inner motivation. If it ran out I could no longer keep up the hard work. Therefore I did not only evaluate my training, food, sleeping [and] living strategy on how successful it was, but also on how it made me feel and what it did to my motivation. The Olympic season of 2022 I was very dedicated to reach high goals and live up to a high standard on the competitive stage. But other years having fun was a lot more important as that made me want to keep on going, and to achieve big goals I had to keep on going. Therefore, even though it was sub-optimal considering my physical development, most of the time, for the sake of my long term inner motivation to keep up, I was just serious enough about being an athlete. [6]
- What awards are you striving for?
- What is the cost of your regimen?
- What practices boost your motivation?
- What practices demotivate you?
- Are you having enough fun? If not, why not?
- What would "just serious enough" look like for you?
Thanks to Nils van der Poel for the advice and to my former client for the pointer.
Footnotes
[1] How to Skate a 10K (Nils van der Poel, 2022)
[2] Ibid, page 18.
[3] Ibid, page 23.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid, pages 27-28.
Photo by Thomas Hawk.
