by Mimi Winsberg, M.D.

Stepping back and taking the bird’s eye view of a season offers a perspective that is not always available mid-season. In the tunnel of a build, the worm’s eye view predominates as we plow through the workouts, buried in fatigue, with a myopic focus on the next key session or event.

It’s possible to accumulate a lot of experience without stepping back to learn from it. Here are a few lessons from other fields to help analyze the big picture of a season:

A Lesson from Psychiatry: What Really Matters
We psychiatrists are prone to analysis, and our work is fraught with search for meaning. As you look at your season, ask yourself what really matters:

First, if you are after results, then results matter. While any individual result might be an outlier, general trends are likely reflective of where we’ve been are where we are going. Analyzing races in the moment can be puzzling. We don’t always immediately understand what went wrong in a disappointing race, and if things went well, we are even less likely to analyze. We usually need a window of perspective to make sense of results. Examining a season of results can bring our strengths and weaknesses into focus, and help us understand what has worked, and what we want.

Second, the journey matters. Was the season enjoyable? Was it plagued with injury or setbacks? Was there an overall sense of balance and health in the approach to training and life? Arguably a less than stellar but truly enjoyable season trumps a miserable season with great results.

Third, process matters. Did you go for it, and give it your best shot? Regardless of outcome, there is much to be gained from pursuing excellence and putting aside fears. It’s about the effort and who you become in the process.

A Lesson from Medicine: Pattern Recognition
An important analytical tool used in medicine is pattern recognition. There is an expression in medicine called an “Aunt Minnie.” An Aunt Minnie is a pattern of signs or symptoms that may be common on their own, but when seen together are so distinctly characteristic of a particular disease that you can recognize the pattern in a single flash, the way you would recognize your Aunt Minnie at a family gathering. Doctors spend a lot of time training themselves to recognize such patterns. The same sort of patterns can be seen in a training log. Understand the patterns in your training and your body’s responses that are associated with very specific outcomes. Knowing your own Aunt Minnies and being able to recognize the patterns in your logs that are precursors to sharp declines in performance or illness can save you a lot of grief in coming seasons.

A Lesson from Economics: Optimization
Where did you invest your energy this season? What risks did you take? Were those risks proportional to the return they could bring? Economists study how scarce resources are allocated. Given that energy is scarce resource, optimal allocation of energy is critical to getting return on your training. A speed workout that requires 48 hours of recovery may or may not represent an optimal allocation of energy.

Correcting misspent energy with more misspent energy is clearly foolish, but people do it all the time. How often do you see athletes dig themselves into a hole of fatigue, yet convince themselves that the only way to then get faster is to add more volume? Or work on a strength only to avoid a known weakness? I’ve been there more often than I’d like to admit. Changing training patterns is harder than just kicking the can down the road. Look for inefficiency in your training. Maintaining efficiency requires more vigilance than you might think.

An analytical tool used by economists is constrained optimization. A key principle of constrained optimization is that removing a constraint can only improve outcome if the constraint is really binding. So removing a barrier allows you to improve only if that particular barrier is the one that is holding you back. What are your real limiters? More training hours might not make sense if endurance is not your limiter. Use the off-season to address the constraints that are holding you back.

A Lesson from Children: Celebrating Accomplishment
If you are reading this, chances are that at some point in your life you’ve been called an overachiever. It may be worthwhile to distinguish achievement from accomplishment. Achievement can be seen as a treadmill of sorts that starts for some by going to the right kindergarten to ensure acceptance to a good college, and may now involve making the sacrifices necessary to qualify for Kona year after year. Achievement is a series of false summits, and it never really ends. Take a break, miss a step, and you worry you’ve lost your path.

Accomplishments, however, are the victories or summits that really do bring satisfaction. Though the distinction is a bit vague, I think we know when we’ve reached these summits because we intuitively feel them as such, and they don't depend on social approval or particular results. I have seen the deep sense of satisfaction my kids get from learning a song, drawing a picture, or swimming the length of the pool. They don’t need someone to tell them they’ve succeeded to enjoy these victories. Don’t forget to look back on the season and celebrate your accomplishments. They are there and they are yours.