We have 3-time Olympian, 2-time World Champion and all-around amazing woman Catharine Pendrel on The Consummate Athlete Podcast this week and we really loved what she talked about when she talked about redefining goals. For her, they were Olympic goals and her career, and for you, you might have lost your A race for this summer and not know what to do athletically. Both goals matter, and how Catharine dealt with the Olympics being postponed is a great way of looking at it.
Here’s what she had to say around redefining goals:
Cycling is a sport for life. People are racing into their 80s. We have to sit out and miss a race right now. It’s okay, those races will be there.
We’re all kind of grieving this loss of of what we wanted and, it’s okay to be bummed out. But we can rechannel that energy, and that work is never lost. It’s your base and it’s a foundation that you can build from for the future.
I’m trying to see this time as like, what opportunity is this time giving me? I’m not typically good at slowing down and focusing on the little the little fundamental skills that can feel tedious. Particularly for a lot of women how we get into cycling later in life, or we get in we’re really fit and we get right into racing, and we want to work on power but we’ve missed those 10 years of just playing around on our driveway on a bike that a lot of little kids have done. So I’m trying to be a little kid right now and I’m playing around in my driveway and my backyard and my basement. I’m doing hops in a circle and stuff like that. We have this opportunity to slow down and not worry as much about watts and just hone in some of these fundamentals where maybe if we were racing and traveling, we wouldn’t do as much.
So I’m trying to take it as an opportunity to do that kind of thing. You know, those, those races and goals, even if we don’t get to do them this year, they’re still out there.
And you will learn something during this time period that’s going to help you. Every time I’ve been sidelined with an injury, I’ve always gained something from that some perspective or something added to my training that has helped me later.
So I think it’s, you just kind of have to shift your goal your mindset to that long term.
Now’s also the perfect time to just take a step back and find that motivation and that drive again. For myself it’s like, okay, when you have the Olympics, it’s clear what you’re training for. But when you’re have no race on the calendar, currently, what are you training for?
You have to train because you’d like training and you’d like getting better. And you like how it makes you feel.
Listen to the full episode here: Catharine Pendrel on The Consummate Athlete Podcast
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