German-born Canadian spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now has sold more than three million copies. I know this because it says so right on the cover. In the book, Tolle encourages readers to “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.”
If this advice sounds familiar, it’s because it is. First popularized by the Buddha in the fourth century BCE, the idea that happiness and enlightenment are to be found in the act of letting go of the past and ceasing to yearn for a better future has been a consistent theme in alternative spiritual doctrine in the West since the hippie era. Indeed, The Power of Now is in some respects a rehash of Ram Dass’ 1971 bestseller Be Here Now.
Living in the moment has a lot of merit, not just for spiritual seekers but also for athletes. Mindfulness training, which entails practicing being wholly present in the now, has been shown to alter brain function in ways that enable athletes to recover and perform better. A study conducted by Chinese researchers and published in Neural Plasticity, for example, found that five weeks of mindfulness training improved aspects of executive function in the brain (executive function being the faculty that allows us to override the desire to quit when we’re really suffering in a workout or race) and increased performance in a time-to-exhaustion test compared to controls.
As a coach, I routinely see the harm done by athletes’ failure to be here now—the discouragement an aging runner needlessly causes himself by comparing his current abilities to his lost youthful capacities, the anxiety a triathlete gins up within herself unnecessarily by brooding on how much work she has to do before she’s ready for her race, etc. Here’s the thing, though: Aren’t cows really good at living in the moment? No, seriously! While I recognize the value of mindfulness and I embrace the science showing its benefits for endurance athletes, I often see athletes sabotage themselves by living too much in the moment, forgetting to make use of the uniquely human capacity to consider now in the context of the past and future.
The most troubling manifestation of this phenomenon that I see in my coaching work is something I call workout myopia, where athletes forget the context of today’s workout and consequently inflate its significance, overanalyze it, and draw too many conclusions from it. A properly planned workout is just that—part of a larger plan—and is worth lingering on only to the extent that either A) the athlete’s performance falls below expectations in a way that demands modifications to future steps in the plan or B) something of such significance is learned in the workout that subsequent training modifications are called for. Relatively few workouts meet these standards for qualifying as worthy of analyzing and drawing conclusions from, but athletes prone to “cow consciousness” linger on many if not most workouts, as I suppose any athlete would if they forgot they had ever done a workout previously and that they had many more workouts already planned for the future.
The consequences of this maladaptive form of living in the moment are many, and include seeing small problems where there are none, perceiving small problems as big ones, worrying when there is no need to worry, and wanting to change things when there is no need to change things. For athletes afflicted with workout myopia, a middling or poor workout is always an unprecedent crisis. If they feel a bit flat, they’re out of shape; if their times are a tad slow, the plan isn’t working; if their tummy is a little off, they need to radically overhaul their diet; if they feel a touch of pain, they’re permanently broken. Yet I’ve also seen athletes behaving myopically in relation to especially good workouts. An athlete experiences one of those rare and wonderful sessions where they feel like an Olympian, only to tear their hair out afterward trying to figure out how they can catch lightning in a bottle and replicate the experience in every future workout. Was it the breakfast I ate? That nap I took? The socks I wore? No, silly, it was the result of your coach methodically balancing hard work and recovery over time in such a way that you’ve gotten incrementally fitter without ever falling behind on recovery, a process that maximizes the likelihood of experiencing workouts like today’s but does not make their occurrence predictable or controllable in the mechanistic way you’re looking for.
As a coach, I sometimes struggle with this type of athlete because it’s almost as if we’re seeing two different realities. Think of the training process as a human form, where the head represents today’s workout and the body represents the temporal context in which it occurs. I look at each workout straight on, seeing mostly body (context) and less head (present moment). Athletes afflicted with workout myopia seem to look at their workouts from above, a vantage that distorts the form so that it appears to be almost all head. Left to their own devices, such athletes train erratically, continuously overcorrecting their training in exaggerated response to workouts interpreted out of context.
What is the solution to workout myopia? I’ve had some success with simply explaining the phenomenon to its sufferers just as I’ve explained it to you here. It’s much easier to fix a problem you’re aware of than a problem whose very existence you’re oblivious to because you’re too busy being here now. You’re welcome.
