Faith and Triathlon

Faith and Triathlon Success

Is there a connection?

By Matt Sheeks

How does one get to the pro level? What does it take, you say? I will endeavor to show at least what some of what my path has been like to get to the point I am at in multisport.  Most of us would guess it has a lot to do with genetics, rock solid discipline, and a mountain of self-confidence. Let me say emphatically, it is none of those things.

In fact, my journey has been one of taking the lowest places, acknowledging my weaknesses and shortcomings, and being satisfied with what God has given me, even when it (at least from outward appearances) stinks. Heck, I’m no Rockstar, and don’t go thinking you need to be one to make it to the top of endurance sports either.

Let me illustrate five truths about my athletic career in which understanding my weaknesses helped me to succeed. What we will end up with is my life-philosophy, of which triathlon is an integral part.

 1) I did not overestimate my talent level.

 It might surprise you, but I am not the most talented runner to ever walk the planet. I ran modest times in high school, that is, until I really bumped up my training volume. My junior year in track, I ran a 4:30 mile and 10:07 two-mile. Like I said, modest. Since that lackluster year, hard-work has been the name of the game. I bumped up my mileage to 55 miles a week, and also cross-trained on the bike 4-5 times a week. My track times improved dramatically, to 4:14 in the mile to 9:20 in the two-mile.
 Eddy Merckx, the greatest cyclist who ever lived, when asked for advice regarding younger riders that wanted to become professionals, he simply said, “ride lots.” That would be my main piece of advice to you. Train lots. ‘Cause talent only gets you so far.

2) Failure was the route to success

Winning the World Championships in duathlon is one of the few races I have actually won. I would guess about 95-99% of the time I don’t win. In the D1 Cross-Country National Championships, I placed near dead last in my first effort, and 113th place in my second go-round. And this was after it took my four years just to make the varsity team at my university, mind you. In the words of Homer Simpson, “No matter how hard you try, there’s always someone better than you.”

So why try, right?....

Exactly right, I say!

Now, you are probably thinking I have gone crazy. “Stop trying? This Sheeks guy does not make any sense.” Yes, while it is true that you won’t get any faster by sitting on the couch all day (that darn cause and effect law is still there, trust me), I am appealing to a different type of effort, or, differentiating between two types of efforts. It is not so much that you give up training, but that you give up trying to be better that counts. One can keep training without needing to feel better about themselves because they performed better. I will pick up this case in the discussion that follows. For now, just understand that the sooner you accept the fact that you are going to get horribly beaten most of the time the better off you will be.

3) I raced better when my expectations were low or non-existent

The first time I experienced this was my second year in college at University of Portland, running my last race of the season, which was to be a 5000m race in Seattle. My training had been going terribly, as I had been recovering from a 10,000m race a few weeks prior. Every training run was a slog, so going into this race my only hope was to break 15:00. I had already run 14:45 about 3 other times, so I figured a significant deprovement from those times was most likely.

It was a windy day on the track that day, so naturally I started out the race in last place (my favorite spot) to stay out of the wind. I went through the mile in 4:40, and the two-mile in 9:20. I was feeling great running 70-second pace, totally relaxed, so I threw down the hammer to finish in a time of 14:26, and won the race by a healthy margin too.

 Most people say you have to visualize greatness before you achieve greatness. In all of my breakthrough races, I have visualized failure.

The same was true of the Duathlon World Championships. I just assumed I would get beaten by some hammerhead named Hans that would average 30mph on the bike course. I figured I just didn’t have a shot and would end up placing 15th or so. In fact, I remember repeating to myself, “It’s just the World Championships” a couple times during the race just because it was a funny mantra. Low and behold, this relaxed attitude, combined with being in insanely good shape, lent itself better towards victory than having extremely high expectations, and then getting my panties in a knot.

If I took a poll of racers immediately following a race, I bet 90% of them are discouraged with their performance. Personal records come only once or twice a season, and winning races or a top three performance are even more rare, no matter what level you race. I think you would do well to ditch the expectations and just enjoy the experience of competing more than anything. It is just a race, after all.

 4) I took God’s estimation of me at face value.

 If God’s word didn’t say it, I probably wouldn’t believe it either, but here it is.

 “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)
 “There is none righteous, not even one.” (Romans 3:10)
 “There is none who does good, there is not even one.” (Romans 3:12)
 “But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)
 “But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies (declares righteous) the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness.” (Romans 4:5)

Our culture is 180 degrees away from the truth on this one. If you are a female, you probably grew up hearing you are a princess, or a snowflake, or that you are “special”. If you are a guy, well, our culture isn’t so positive on the men these days, but I am sure you have at least heard something about being all you can be, or that if you put your mind to it, you could accomplish anything. The possibility of making a difference in this world, making this world a better place, has always been on the table for you.

But then the truth hits you like a freight train one day and you realize: I am not a good person, I am not making a positive difference in the world. In fact, I am a contributor to the problems in this world. Even less comforting is this - “for the wages of sin is death…” (Romans 6:23). Ouch! It’s hard to stomach that in objective terms (God’s valuation of things), all I’ve earned in this life is breaking God’s law to the point I am deserving to be cut off from His love eternally. I thought I deserved a cookie because I helped out at a soup kitchen one-time. Guess not.


But, if we continue in our pursuit in understanding our contribution to the world’s problems, eventually we will come to understand what God has done for us in Christ, and the peace of God washes over us when we realize, “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which he lavished upon us.” (Eph 1:7) Although I didn’t help to solve the brokenesss in this world, God did what I couldn’t do. His Son died to pay the penalty for my sin, and He rose from the dead so that I too might have a chance at a new life, a life free from my selfish desires and pursuits, and a life where I can serve Him and others out of love.


What has this all got to do with triathlon? I have noticed that pride and triathlon don’t tend to go together too well. If you haven’t figured it out already, prideful people tend to train less, thinking that their talent level and mental toughness will make up for their shortcomings in training. And in a sport where frequency and duration of training are the main determining factors, an arrogant training style won’t help.


Prideful people get themselves into big trouble early on in tri races, not being able to stomach their pride when hundreds of people are in front of them in a race, they shift into overdrive too early, building up way to much lactic acid (or hydrogen ions, depending on your beliefs on that one) build up early into the race. The other big racing problem that occurs is trouble dealing with discomfort; a prideful person tends to think they are so fast that they will feel good during the race even at race intensity. But triathlon is a painful business with much suffering.


Prideful people can’t handle failure well or learn from mistakes. They can’t get rid of their frustration with themselves to the point where they can even assess the mistake objectively. Finally, somewhat conversely, they can be so obsessed with themselves that they miss out on opportunities to enjoy sports by helping others succeed.


I have been guilty of all these issues caused by pride, but occasionally I have laid down my self-sufficiency and Pride, and moved onto #5, and the results where truly remarkable, a transcendent experience.


5) I trusted God’s provision

Trusting God in Christ is the first step in stomaching your pride. Trust and Pride are nearly opposites, since when I say trust, I mean trust in God, and pride is really just trust in self and the valuation that you are good or did good, or even that you are better than someone else. It may be valuable to point out at this juncture that the terms faith and trust are really synonymous. Faith really has nothing to do with believing something without any reasons, as is commonly held throughout the world. In fact, faith (or trust) is actually increased with an increase in evidence that a person or thing is in fact, trustworthy.


By the way, while we are at it, another culturally cleansed word for pride, which is passed off for a virtue, is called: self-esteem. It is at the core of many types of evil.


Trust is a huge but mainly neglected topic in triathlon. Recently, some television shows such as “24” have picked up the notion of trust, but mainly only in regards to interpersonal dealings. One has to trust the decision making skills of the other. In the show it is usually someone having to trust Jack Bauer’s decision making, and he is always right, so it works out.


Trust is also a mega component of our everyday life that we fail to recognize. Every day we wake up, trusting that our alarms will go off on time, trusting our cars will start, and trusting that everyone else in traffic will drive safely.


Some people also have extreme distrust in certain areas of life. Some are warranted, like distrust of the government to spend our money wisely, while others are unwarranted, like when people come up with conspiracy theories and see things that aren’t really there. My brother is very untrusting when it comes to other’s cleanliness, and he is always breaking out the Purel to make sure he kills every single germ within a mile.

One girl I dated was always fearful that I would find something wrong with her and break up with her. Ultimately, the lack of trust placed a huge burden on the relationship, and guess what? She broke up with me! Lack of security can really destroy relationships and productivity, and everything seems to get bogged down.

Everyone has an implied level of trust that they operate on. Now, there is a fine line between high levels of trust and outright stupidity. But, we can also see how extremely low levels of trust bog us down and hinder us from doing what is really important. Imagine if my brother had to cleanse his hands every 5 minutes. He would never get anything done!


Similarly, trust becomes essential in multisport, which involves a high level of complexity as it is. I remember getting ready for my first half-ironman in Boise. There was so much gear I had to pack! Eventually, I just gave up and went to sleep, trusting I would have everything I needed for the race when I got up and left the house. Not to mention that trusting your training plan and coach is at least as difficult, with three sports always competing for attention, which can often build doubt in your mind as to how you spend your time.


What is an appropriate level of trust, then? There can never be an iron-clad answer, but perhaps the following will help.

1) You have entered distrust when there is nothing you can do, yet you still fret and worry about the situation. It is now time to just sit back and enjoy the ride. You take action on what is in your control, and trust God for what you can’t control. In the words of Van Wilder, “Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”

2) An appropriate level of trust keeps things as simple as possible without a decrease in performance.


3) When you have God in your life, it’s easier to trust the process. Otherwise, there is no real object of trust. The Aussies can say, “just enjoy it,” and trust in some vague force that governs the world. The Americans and Brits can say, “believe in yourself,” and of course without God the ultimate responsibility of your destiny rests solely and squarely on YOU, and self belief is the only option. But that will create a basket case out of anyone; who knows if self-belief is warranted? What proof is there that you should believe in yourself? What is your basis of comparison? It seems that self-belief is at best an attempt to get you to stop doubting yourself, and at worst misguided advice because it instructs us to trust in something that we might have good reason not to trust. When people are instructed to have self-belief, no good reason is ever given for why someone should do this. It is just accepted as true. I think this will this mentality will hold back an athlete from developing, as well as decrease their enjoyment of the sport. I for one am not taking the bait!

 How would I advise someone to succeed in Multisport

1) Recognize God’s provision


2) Stop wanting to be better


3) Stop trying to be better


4) Trust God’s provision


By now you’ve noticed that my philosophy is really opposite from the traditional goal-setting, self-belief method that many training manuals espouse. I was playing with this idea in the summer of 2010, when I had my ideas confirmed by Ryan Hall at a distance running camp called the Altitude Project. Ryan is the best American born marathoner of all-time, yet he too suffered under the defeat of the traditional goal-setting, expectations driven method of planning for success, and was never really satisfied with his results. Ryan shared with the group how this method left him despising running, and how it cut down on the joy God wanted him to experience through running. Recently, Ryan moved locations, adopted a self-coached method; he now looks to simply enjoy and find opportunities to give thankfulness to God through his training and competition. The result? How about a 2:04 marathon at Boston! Not too mention many changed lives through what God is doing through Ryan and his wife.

Believe me, you will lose nothing by adopting this approach, and gain everything. Experience will be needed to tell you what it looks like to be on the right track, but revelation, hopefully through my dissemination of the truth, will help make you aware that there even is a right track to be on.


Message me if this article was helpful or if you have additional questions.

Your bro,

Matt


Table 1.

God loves you so much, and the first thing he wants from us is not success but to simply recognize His success and enjoy everything He has done and thank Him for it. Then, and only then, can we move on to productive work. When we don’t do that, nothing seems to flow too well, and there seems to be discord with self and with others. I hope this chart helps point out the difference between the two.


We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. – 1 Corinthians 2:12