Beat Decision Fatigue: The Secret Weapon for Peak Performance
Don’t start the race already tired!
Have you ever felt drained after a long day of doing mental tasks? I know I have felt it after a busy work day with lots of thinking and decision making. I come home exhausted even though I sat a desk most of the day. Mental fatigue, the exhaustion from constant choices, can zap your energy, focus and your ability to make fast decisions in challenging situations. It can have a negative influence in our daily life, but can have an especially negative influence on race day. For female endurance athletes, pre-race planning and preparation are the ultimate weapon against this silent gremlin.
Why Decision Fatigue Matters:
Every decision, big or small, uses some of your finite mental resources. Decision fatigue clouds your judgment, hinders performance, and can even lead to dreaded bonking. Check out this study from 2018 that showed recreational cyclists had impaired performance, poorer decision making and felt tired quicker on the bike. They saw that mental fatigue led to poorer performance and greater difficulty dealing with difficult situations.
Pre-race planning and preparation: conquer the chaos
Pre-race planning and preparation allows you to take control of your race before race day is even here! It allows you to make decisions in the days leading to the race, saving your race day energy for the actual race. We all know that we want as good of sleep as we can get in the days leading up to an event. We want to make sure our nutrition is on point. We know that these can have a serious impact on race day performance. Pre-race planning and preparation can have as big, or bigger effect. It helps ensure we have the right kit and gear, but it also guarantees our energy on race day is going into racing, not into worrying if we have the right stuff with us.
Planning and preparing are the 1st two Ps in my 3P2R system. 3P2R gives you structure and guidance to plan, prepare, perform, recover and review. Have you ever showed up to a race without the right gear or nutrition? Have you ever frantically searched your house for pieces of your kit in the minutes before leaving for a race? Has anxiety plagued you as you sat on the start line, worried about what the day will bring you? If so, 3P2R is for you! You can read more about 3P2R here, or get your own workbook here.
In the planning and preparing you would consider:
Kit (what you will wear)
Gear (what you will use)
Nutrition (what you will eat/drink)
Logistics (what time to leave, where will you stay…)
Mindset (your goals and mental tools)
A large part of endurance racing is knowing how to use our energy to ensure we can get to the finish line. Don’t waste your precious energy on things that could be done in the days leading up to the race. Start planning, get prepared and have a great race the next time you line up at the start line.
