The end of your racing season is a great time to reflect and learn from your experiences through a review process. This will allow you to better plan your off-season and set inspiring goals for next year.
It can be all too easy to just roll into the same routine and habits without really thinking about whether they’re working for you or whether you’re getting the most out of the time you’re putting in.
End-of-year reviews are an integral part of the development process for elite athletes but athletes at all levels can benefit.
Reviewing the year as part of a Plan – Do – Review cycle will help you to identify what has worked and what didn’t so when you come back to planning you have a good basis for your decisions and any changes you might look to make.
In an ideal world you would start with the goals you had at the beginning of the year. Most people, even if they deny it, will have goals they would like to achieve so try to be honest about what it was you were aiming for.
Sometimes this can be perceived as being only performance-driven (such as race outcomes or training benchmarks), but it absolutely does not have to be.
Enjoying racing or using training to improve mental health are examples of goals that are not about performance but are really impactful.
“Most of us don’t take enough time to hit the pause button and reflect”
The main thing with any goal is that it has to be yours. If you have or can remember the goals you had for the season gone then the process is as simple as asking these questions:
- Did you achieve your goals?
- If not, what were the reasons?
- Were your goals realistic?
- What helped/hindered you?
- What did you enjoy/not enjoy?
If you didn’t have any goals or you can’t remember any this is still a great process to work through, but the questions could be:
- What did you enjoy/not enjoy about the season?
- What would you like to do more of/less of?
You can do this with a friend or training partner over a coffee, with your coach, with a loved one or just on your own.
Try to capture your thoughts but aim to keep your outcomes succinct, no more than 3-5 bullet points for each. Keeping it brief makes it much easier to go back and reference when you get to planning for next year.
We all feel sometimes that life is too busy and can get overwhelming. Most of us don’t take enough time to hit the pause button and reflect.
By not doing this we risk not learning from our experiences and either making the same mistakes again or just not getting as much out of the time and energy we put into our sport.
If you can get into the habit of reviewing and capturing your reflections regularly, you not only create that learning space to make change but also develop a sense of appreciation for what you have achieved.
Top illustration credit: Daniel Seex
