Handling Race Nerves & Performance Anxiety

Welcome to another episode of the Get Fast podcast, brought to you by Trivelo Coaching. You are joined, as always, by your host, former Australian Ironman Jarred Donnelly. And I am Jordan Donnelly. In today's episode, we are talking about how to handle race nerves. It's something we've all probably experienced somewhere in some degree, in some race, some level of anxiety or nerves before a race. So straight off the bat, I want to ask you, dad, when's the time when you let race nerves get the better of you?

Well, I think there's a direct correlation between my preparedness for the event and it doesn't have to be a race and my nervousness. And I can have that in a training session if I feel that I'm not possibly going to complete the session the way I want to. I have a fair bit of pre event anxiety around that and even people like Coach have said to me that they're really worried about tomorrow's session. So nervousness and anxiety before a race or for a particular event is really detrimental to the outcome a lot of the times because really zaps your confidence. And there's been many times when I've been in that situation and the correlation between my preparedness and the anxiety is undeniable.

So is that what you're saying, that the more prepared you are, the less anxious you'll be?

Definitely. There's so many examples that I have in my career where I've been on the start line and I've had some nerves, but the nerves have been around my execution of the event. And I suppose I'm talking more in time trialing, where it's an individual thing where you're already in total control of the outcome. It doesn't matter what anybody else does in the race, you can only do what you can do on that race. If someone else starts off harder than you, you don't know that they're doing that because they're a minute apart or they could be five minutes up the road. So you're only focusing on your own performance. So I definitely have anxiety about my execution, but I'm confident in being able to execute it because I've prepared myself well. So having nerves and anxiety I think is a really good thing because it shows you care totally about what you're about to do and if you don't have them, that's really unusual. So it's really important that people understand that's normal to have have some sort of anxiety or pre race nerves when you're going to do something that you care about, you care about the outcome. So you create, you create some nervousness about that. And so different to going into an exam or to a job interview, you know you want to get that job. So you have got butterflies and you're thinking, oh, I really have to answer questions really well here. I have to execute my, my performance really well. And you know, there's, there's a. Sometimes I'm really overly nervous as compared to being almost too relaxed in other times and is almost like overconfident. I'm not sure I'm overconfident in my preparedness. That's definitely. But I still know that I'm confident in my performance. But then the nervousness might come from is it good enough to win the event? So that might be another level of anxiety is I know what I can do, but is that good enough to win?

That's a really good point because when you say the word nervous or anxious or I've got anxiety for the race that is going to be a different thing for every person. So everyone is going to have a different meaning of that. It's going to mean something different to them and they're going to have different meaning levels of almost that image you think about inside your head of what that means to you. And when you think you're anxious or you're nervous, you're thinking about a certain image and that's different to someone else's. And like you said, depending on whether you are training or racing. I know personally that I get nervous for a session because I know how hard it's going to be. I just know how much it's going to hurt. I'm not nervous about how I'm going to perform. And that's kind of a different nervous to the race where you're thinking about the end outcome and sometimes when you're letting your nerves get the better of you, you're just imagining the outcome going wrong and it's just not a really good thing to be visualizing before a race.

Yeah, the nerves definitely come in a variety of ways and you know, there's external influences and there's your own internal influences. Externally it can be, I've told people I'm going to do this event and my expectation from others around me creates anxiety because they expect me to win, they expect me to perform well. I might have people coming to watch all these external influences create, create an anxiety level. You might, you might have your own internal levels of anxiety such as, my goal today is to win. My goal today is to perform at this this pace if I'm running or this power number from riding. So the nerves can come from internal and from external and, you know, you have both. The people who are internally motivated, they seem to handle the nerves better because they're so focused on the outcome and the execution and therefore the outcome will become apparent. So they're motivated in their training because they've got this goal and almost target and they're valuing the moment to get the outcome. Whereas the people who are externally motivated, they get more nervous because they've got less control of what they're doing because they're putting themselves under pressure because of external influences. Whereas the internally motivated person, I think, has a better control over their nerves and they actually prepare better than the person who picks a race and tells everybody they're training for this race, but actually doesn't do the consistency and all the things that underlie getting a great preparation.

So how have you handled that yourself when the stakes of the race are bigger, when you get to a bigger race and it means more, you know, you said before that you know, when there's a lot of pressure on the actual result of the race, that can lead to increased nerves for yourself. So what have you done in those situations where you've been in some big races and it's meant a lot?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I. I think the more times you put yourself into that position, come that really big race that you've earmarked as this is my race for the year and it could be a selection trial for a national team, it could be the national titles, it could be a state title. So you've created that this is a big race for me and if you haven't done a lot of racing along the journey, come race day, it's foreign feeling to you. So the anxiety levels, you're feeling something that's new. And I think for myself, and this is true for a lot of people that I coach, if you put them in a race situation a lot in, in seemingly less important races, but they still get the. The day before nerves, the preparation, all the things that go with performance, then at the end of the day it becomes just another race if you execute it and then the result will be what you wanted and it just happens to be in the most important race of the day of your year.

It doesn't have to be an external, like you said, an externally big event like a national title. You know, if you've set this ironman as your A race, then that is your particular A race. And all the B races that you do in the lead up are designed to counter that. And that's probably why you say all the time that we do so much testing as well. It's replicating. Whether it's a race or a time trial test, it's replicating the same thing.

There's so many valuable things to do when you continually test. And we test for a whole lot of reasons, but the main one is to practice the execution that you're going to do on race day. The other things are that we get to find out what level you're at for a particular month, and we train to that level going into the next month and try to improve. It's like a really hard training session. So there's three standout reasons why you would test so much. And. And by practicing that come race day, you are so ready for. It's kind of a normal feeling that you're about to experience. And that diminishes the anxiety. For me, I've done this, you know, 500 times in the last two years. You know, I know what my wattage is. All I've got to do is make sure I don't go too hard at the start. And we joked at the nationals, and I've told you this story. The nationals time trial course had a downhill section in the first five minutes, and the remainder of the next 20 minutes of the course was undulating, but gradually up to the turn and then gradually back down to the finish, but undulating. But the first section was really fast downhill. And I said to a couple of guys, especially one of the guys, Joe, I said, if I look at your data at the end of this event and find that your first five minutes is the highest power, I'm going to bash you in the back of the head. And he said, and I'm going to do the same to you. And both of us executed our best power in the last five minutes and our lowest powers in the first five minutes, even though we were going downhill and literally flying along the course. And that was the game changer. And Joe ended up winning his national title by seven seconds, I think. And had he not executed properly, he would have lost that. He came home like a steam train. The other guys were fading. It was a great example of, to me, of, you know, sure, you can be nervous and worried about it, but if you. If you don't execute, you're not going to get the outcome anyway, so all the nerves in the world are not going to help you. So it was a matter of focusing on different things. And that took the nerve. You stopped thinking about nerves because you had a purpose for the execution of the event. And time trial is a lot different because there's not a lot of external things happening in the time trial, whereas in a road race you have to react to other people's attacks or the way that the race is panning out. There's so many things you have to think about and I think that creates a little bit of anxiety. Who's going to do what today in this race? Whereas in a time trial, you can only control the things you can control. You can't control how anybody else is going to ride.

And that's why you say in triathlons it's so much more predictable of your performance because. Yes, it's. So those very variable factors are taken out.

Yeah. And I'm looking at running races, you know, marathons, 10k events, you're still influenced by other people's pace. Whereas in a triathlon, unless you got off with people in your age group around you and were influenced by their pace, as professionals are, but the age groupers really aren't. And most of the people we're coaching are people who are trying for a pb. So everything's in their control, the pace they start at. So the anxiety and nervousness is almost taken away. And that's the big difference. We talk about come race day. You know how well you've trained because you've got all the data telling you, you know your race plan because it's in front of you. The only nervousness that you've created is, can I actually execute that race plan? And that creates a little bit of anxiety, but you need to be confident because you've already raced so many times beforehand. And someone said to me on the weekend, you know, I used to be afraid totally of doing FTP tests of. Of going into races and forever testing myself. I got really nervous about it was because I didn't like what I thought the outcome would be. And now that I'm training with some structure and consistency, I embrace them because I know that I'm possibly going to improve from last time. So it's a different mindset and it's how you frame it really determines how nervous you become. If you let the nerves get carried away, it's because you actually. You're thinking about the wrong things. And that's what I'm trying to get across in what we're talking about today, is making sure you're thinking about things you can control. The things are out of Your control, you just need to disregard and just focus your whole entire thought process on the things that you are in charge of.

And you will feel a sense of ease when you start focusing on the race plan and you start focusing on what you need to do. If you're just asking yourself or how am I going to perform, if you're asking questions that are just not going to have good answers, how am I going to perform? Answers you, things you can't answer at the moment, what's going to happen today? Is it going to be hard? You know, if you're just continuously asking those questions, it's not going to be a very good feeling. Whereas if you're just running through the race plan, I need to go out first five minutes of this pace, I want to come home like a steam train. Like you were saying before.

Yep.

Immediately those nerves will ease up a little bit. But like you said at the start, some nerves are important because it shows you care and you want to get a good result.

Yeah. And you know in life that if you've got nothing to do for a particular day or week and you have no goal, your mind starts running all sorts of tricks on you. And, you know, that's a lot of how depression happens is because people have no focus or goal of every day. The busier people, of course, they can get depressed and have anxiety, but because they're focusing on tasks all the time, they don't have time to think about the nervousness that they're feeling because there's such structure that they have to get through each day. And you can relate that to your race. Yeah, I'm nervous. I'm really worried about this. This is going to be a big day. I have to perform well. I put all my season into this. Reframe the whole. The whole thought process. Okay. Can't wait for this race. This is my plan. This is how I'm going to attack it. And all of a sudden your focus is on something completely different to what you were focusing on before. And in fact, it's on the important thing, which is how am I going to execute it. So I keep going back to that word, execute. And the relationship between preparedness and the relationship between execution and nerves are equal. Getting ready for it and executing on the day. So the nerves will be. Will be less if you prepare well and they'll be less if you focus on the execution. And as we said at the start, it is important to have some butterflies and some anxiety because it shows you actually really value what you're doing. And you will be more successful in anything you do if, if you value it. And, and we've always said this to most of the people who come on board, we want you to enjoy it. So have fun executing to numbers that you know you can do. And it is such a great feeling getting towards the end when you are actually hitting all the numbers, going for a PB in your 10K, you know, you are just so satisfied with the outcome. And the nerves and the anxiety, they're a distant past.

What kind of examples have you seen of people letting race nerves get too much a hold of their race and derailing their preparation and their execution?

Yeah, many times as athletes have come to me after the race saying, I didn't realise that I was going to feel as good as I did. And I didn't go with the move because I was still not confident and at the end of the race I should have done that is the thing that comes back to me all the time. So don't be overconfident, but be confident in your ability from the training you've done. And there are examples of people who really let the nerves hinder their decision making in the middle of a race, oh, that's a good move going up the road, I should be doing that. And they hesitate. But a confident person, they'd see a move and go. And I'm talking bike races here, or I'm talking triathlon run at the end of the race and 5k to go. And you know, you're starting to. Starting to see people in your age group maybe come past you and, and rather than, you know, focusing on, you know, should I let that happen, you just instinctively make those decisions and, and take away the nervous thought process of, of should I, shouldn't I? The amount of times I've told people, go with your gut, if you think that's what you should do, don't hesitate, do it. But the going with your gut is based on so much information that you have about what you're able to do and the feelings you have of your body at that particular time and it's.

Thinking about where do you want to be putting your energy, your mental and physical energy, because you don't want to be wasting energy on those thought processes. You don't want to be wasting energy before the race and during the race on that kind of thinking, because it's just going to detract from your performance. And I mean, without getting into too much of the psychology side of it, and we're not psychologists, but, you know, the Common rhetoric in psychology is that anxiety is a very natural process of the body. The fight or flight response is necessary for our survival. You know, we need to have that response when, for when we're in danger and for it to be an alarm bell of when we need to change something. But you know that when that response is really extreme before a race, that's not a natural response, that's unnecessary. And so we don't need to give it that much attention or energy. So if you're feeling that unwarranted level, we need to kind of think about these strategies and change our mental thought processes to take that level back to what would be considered a normal level.

Yeah, the reframing your thought process is so key. And the fight or flight response is such an accurate way of how people can burn unlimited amounts of energy pre race because they're thinking about the wrong things. And that's one of the things I want people to understand here is reframe your thought process. And you know, you're doing, you know, if you're getting more and more nervous before something, you know, start asking yourself what does this mean to me today? Is, you know, is it, is it something like the end of the world that you know, no, it's just another event in a process of something that you enjoy doing. So you know, take the fight or flight, feel away from it and say, right, I'm here for fun and to execute and you know, don't be so single minded that you know, you're not enjoying the thing. If that's the state you're putting yourself in, then you need to rethink why you're doing it. I think that's a real key to nervous and anxiety. If it's creating too much of that, you've got to reframe your thinking.

It's a funny little game you have to play with yourself, don't you? You really have to go through this self talk process and talk yourself through it and say, well, hang on a second, there's no real danger. I don't have to feel this level of anxiety, but it's almost like wanting to challenge yourself as well. And we speak about, you know, all the great examples of elite sportsman and we've spoken about Michael Jordan a bit recently because of his documentary where he would be nervous before those big games, but he would, he would be demanding the ball because he's saying, I'm nervous but I want to challenge myself and I want to see if I can do this. And it's almost that little bit of take away. It's that balance again of playing the game of take away that unnecessary anxiety, but also relish in the anxiety and say, well, this means a lot to me and I want to push myself and I want to see if I can challenge myself to get this result.

Yeah. And there's so many examples of him demanding the ball in the last six seconds of games. And you told me some amazing statistic that he was given the ball and the buzzer shot and the percentage of him, you know, making the shot, he still made misses and they lost, but it was more times that he made the shot to win the event. And the confidence he had in executing that because he didn't think about the weight of the win or loss, he thought about the execution of the throw to get the basket which would give him the result. And so he was reframing that and people go, oh, I don't know how he keeps doing that. You know, give him the ball. He's got a lot of pressure. We didn't look at it like that. He knew that he could execute a basket shot from any point in the basketball court there was, you know, no matter how many people were on him, he could still execute that because he was thinking about the shot rather than the result. And I think that's another thing that people think too much and focus too much on. You know, you think of the AFL grand final or the NRL Grand Final, you know, you've spent a whole season. And they're unique sports because they have a final after paying. Whereas a lot of other sports around the world, the champion team is a team who finishes on top without a grand final. In a lot of sports, soccer, soccer being the main one, being the main thing. So come Grand Final day, it is a real clutch game and you want to perform at your best on that day. And there's. I've listened to some, some coaches, how they went about getting their guys to. To think about it as just another day, but it's not. It's definitely not another day. And to try and convince them that it's just another day is, I think, going down the wrong track. I think they have to embrace the day for what it is and not be afraid of it. Bring it on. And that's the thought process they have to have. And we're talking the same in an Ironman triathlon or a big event that you're preparing for, whether it's a marathon, is, this is a big day, but embrace it, Bring on the day. Because I'm ready and I Can't wait for it.

Yeah, definitely. And the important part of Michael Jordan stats was he did miss a lot of game winning shots, but no one remembers that. They just remember the winning ones. And we've spoken about this with the perfect example is Peter Sagan in cycling. You know, people don't know that he has come second a record amount of times. It's, it's, it's insane how many races. I think it's 110 races or something. He's come second place and, or third as well. And no one will remember that. They just remember the time, the amount of times he's won because he keeps putting himself in that situation. So for you personally, you won't remember the times that you made a mistake or stuffed up, because you'll learn from them. And you, you will remember if you keep turning up to challenge yourself when you do succeed.

Yeah, and, and he's not shying away. He's putting himself into, you know, the hardest events possible, you know, and he's won that many world titles and key marquee events one day, Classics, green jersey, Tour de France. He keeps coming back and winning more and more, but he's putting himself in that position. You know, a lot of the guys will, will avoid races where the best people are at because they've got external influences putting pressure on them. You know, he's a classic, exact, classic example of a true racer who wants to be against the best and bring. Bring on everybody. I'm here to, I'm here to. And I'm sure he gets nervous because he wants, he wants the outcome that he's, he's there for. And I think the seconds and thirds that he gets drive him more to say, well, I'm not happy with that. I want to, I want to win the next time. And so he's getting rid of all that nerves because his determination to perform better is just. Nerves are like clouds. You know, you want to see blue sky and, you know, it only takes a few seconds and thirds to change your thinking, to say, get out of my way, I'm here to win. And the nerves are all disappearing when you start thinking like that. And that's, that's the way to harness the energy, the nervous energy that you're creating. And that's a really good point, is to harness that nervous energy in the right direction to. I don't want to be second again or I want to beat my pb. I've, I've been struggling to do this for six months. Today's my day. You know, I'm harnessing all of my nervous energy into focusing on how to.

Execute the power of switching your focus.

Yeah, yeah. The framing of your thought process. Right from the start of this podcast, we've talked about that, and I think that's the single most important thing. Everybody has anxiety and nervousness, but you've got to reframe it to your advantage. And, you know, it only takes a few unhappy, unsuccessful events that you've been in. And it doesn't have to be the biggest one you've ever been in. But not performing it gets rid of that for me for the next event is. I've stuffed that up today. I'm looking at the calendar. When's the next one?

What's the fire in the belly?

Because I want to actually rectify what I just did wrong. Why was I think why I say, why was I so nervous there? I was so nervous because I hadn't prepared properly. I was so nervous because I wasn't confident in my ability. I was so nervous because I was worried about other people performance. I was so nervous because they were all the wrong framework of thought process. And you know, you're doing it to yourself, but you just can't change it. The more you do those events, the better you become at it.

Yeah, I've absolutely done that exact experience to the T where I've been way too nervous before a race and just puts too much energy, wasted energy into wondering how I'm going to perform and I didn't perform well. And then after, I'm just going far out. Like, it was so frustrating to look back and know how much energy you spent into that. And you go, oh, I just want to race the next race. And you go to the next race and you cannot be bothered spending a second on being nervous. You just want to go run as fast as you can.

Well, you don't want to waste another opportunity. And like I look at a performance like you've talked about, that's just a waste of. It's almost a waste of time, but it's not. You've actually learned something really valuable. You've learned that that degree of thought process created a really poor outcome. I always use the football analogy of the grand final and it's happened a few times. Guys have taken a mark in front of goal, 40 meters out. If they kick the goal, the team wins. If they miss, the team loses. So they have to kick a goal. I can't kick a point. They go back and all they're focusing on is I have to kick this goal, I have to kick this goal.

Or don't miss, don't miss, don't miss.

And footballer A is that person. Footballer B. I go back, I have 10 steps back. I focus on my run up, nice and smooth, run straight, look above the goal umpire's head, kick through the ball with dropping the balls close to my foot. He's thinking of completely different things. Follow through, keep my head over the ball and then look up after I've executed and watch the ball sail through the goals. Whereas the other guy is going, I hope that it sails through the goals. He's thinking about the wrong things and therefore he's more likely to miss that goal than the person who goes through the routine.

Absolutely. So in summary, it would come down to two main things. It's one, your preparation, which includes your entire training preparation leading up to race day and then the plan that you need to execute. And then two, your, your actual mental strategy on race day.

Yeah, you've summarized it perfectly. And, and if you have anxiety, don't worry, it's normal. Plan it, prepare and execute. They're the things you concentrate on and the anxiety will be in your favor.

So I know you actually wanted to touch on, to finish off with, you know, keeping your motivation in training. So because our motto is plan, prepare, perform, you know, and that planning and preparing is so important so you can get to race day and perform as.

Well as you want.

But often we lose sight of the end goal in our training and we can often lose motivation. That's such a big part of this whole process to alleviate that anxiety on race day.

Living in the moment is something that I'm really big on. If you're thinking about today's session as I've just got to get through this session and all you're thinking about is it's taken too long to get to where I want to go. That's the wrong framing of thought process as well. And if you can, if you can think about this session, I've got say I've got 16 weeks until my big event. I've only got 16 Tuesdays and today's Tuesday and two of those Tuesdays are taper and one Tuesday is an easy day and another Tuesday is an easy day four weeks later. As an actual fact, I've only got nine Tuesdays left out of this 16 week program. And I know those Tuesday sessions are so important for me to improve come race day. So I've got to execute today, the motivation to think like that. So Tuesday, this day, I've got To hit these numbers. Then next Tuesday it's the same session, but I know that I have to hit numbers slightly higher. And the next Tuesday is the third go I have at this session and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to try and have three week build. So living in the moment of the day and then the outcome at the end of the 16 weeks will be there and you'll be standing there on the line confident as anything because you've just executed day by day. So don't think too far ahead. Execute each session as it is. And that takes away the anxiety, that takes away the stress because you're not just thinking all the time and just getting the patience that you have to have to do it that way is incredible. The motivation and the patience to train like that. And as I've said many times, if it was easy to execute that, everybody would do it. It's not easy to do that because every session is quite difficult and the patient's required to wait three weeks to get the outcome for that particular block. That is time consuming in thought process and in actual effort. So you have to be in the moment all the time. What is the purpose of this session? And sure I get nervous about how far out the high intensity Tuesday session's coming. Am I ready for this? And so I'll do things like, you know, I'm going to start at this number, plan out, I'm executing plan out. What I'm going to do even before it warm up a little bit more, a little bit better than I have possibly before the day before, do some stretching, you know, possibly make sure I've got the right fuel in me pre, pre that event. I'm not talking about, I'm talking about your general diet for the day, I'm not talking about your training fuel. But yeah, making sure everything's in line and you're giving yourself enough time for it. So living in the moment definitely enables you to have less nervous anxiety levels come that session, come that week, come that month, come that end of that race. Preparation and the patience is what I wanted to make sure everybody understands that you don't want to be at your highest race level at week four of a 16 week program. So you've got to think about it like that. And as we talked about earlier, framing all of your thought process to understand the purpose of where you're at at week four compared to week eight, compared to week 12, compared to week 16. If you think about it properly, then you're not going to get frustrated or anxious about that. You're not where you want to be. Where you want to be is on race day at the top of your game. It's very hard to hold being on top of your game from Week 4 to Week 16. A period of form can only be four to six weeks at the most. So you'll come into form come that last block and then it's a real job to hold it and get some really good training done so that come race day you're fresh enough with no fatigue to execute. And knowing all that information relates back to taking away the anxiety and the nervousness around race day.

And I love that frame of if it was easy, anyone could do it. And that's why it is so rewarding when you complete challenges like this. When you set a goal, set a race and you complete it, or you set a goal for a half ironman or Ironman or a PB and you do it, if it was easy, it wouldn't feel nearly as satisfying and a lot more people would do it.

The, that's the key to it. The satisfaction of the consistency, the effort, the discipline, having value on it, setting a target and all of those things, having patience, they're not easy, but it's extremely satisfying. But it's very unsatisfying when none of those things, you're inconsistent, you don't have a target that's, that's easy, but you're not going to get the result you want when it's easy. That's the problem. You don't actually have value for, for what your, your efforts are trying to achieve.

And this is what you do to motivate yourself.

For sure. That's, that's the framework I always put in. And, and you've seen me decide, there's my target. Okay, I'm starting from here. And in the interim period, how do I stay motivated when I'm trying to almost keep my fitness from dropping? Well, that's my motivation. I don't want to see periods where I might not be improving during this five or six week period, but I'm not going to let my fitness drop so that I have to start from a further away point when I decide as each program and each, each year you have a new program that you've made some targets and goals that are different to other years or they may be the same. You just want to better them. So you want to keep arriving at the new program at a higher level of fitness than you were previous. Because as you know, if you go away from the End of. Let's use the football analogy or soccer analogy or basketball or cricket. You go away from the end of the season at a high level because you've had a whole season of skills and fitness and then it's time to rest, let the body recover and then you come back next year. The really good athletes who become better footballers or better cricketers are the ones who spend all summer or all winter doing the things they were weak at and coming back to the new training season with a higher level of fitness than they left the previous one. So they're building from a higher level all the time. Whereas the people who get to that level and then have a rest and do nothing take no control over their fitness. It takes them almost half the season to get back to where they were at the end of the last season. And they might improve a little bit towards the end of the season. So they got this up, down, up, down. It's almost like over, under training block. Whereas we want to see a straight line and in that straight line we might see a step, not a reduction. We see improvement. We see a step which we call a plateau, then we see an improvement and we see another step. So we want to see a set of stairs where there is very little times when you are decreasing.

You don't want to see you going up the first step, then back down the first step.

That's right. There's nothing worse than doing some hill climbs. In the middle of one of the big hill climbs, you lose 50 meters of altitude that you've worked so hard to. You get two seconds of rest going downhill and you got to catch that back up again. So we really want to make sure that that's the system we're trying to achieve. There will only be a few reasons why you can't achieve a step improvement. It's injury or sickness and you've seen your own performance management chart when you've been sick or injured. It just goes from a fitness of 90 down to 45. It is so frustrating.

So to summarize, how to handle race nerves, to answer the question, how do you handle race nerves? It's just so much not about the race itself, it's just so much everything to do to prepare in between your whole thought process around the process. And it's just taking the attention away from whether you're going to get the outcome or not. And just executing.

Yep, plan, prepare, perform. We'll have a little bit of anxiety in it, but it's good anxiety and you can direct it the way you want. To rather than it totally controlling you. And that's probably the main thing I want the listeners to hear.

Perfect. We'll finish there. Thanks very much for listening to another episode of the Get Fast podcast. If you want to download our Expert Secrets cheat Sheet, that's a cheat sheet of the very best tips and advice all the experts that have come on our podcast have said to help you train smarter and race faster. Go to getfastpodcast.com that's getfastpodcast. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, if you enjoy the episodes, please leave us a five star review on itunes. It really helps other triathletes and cyclists find us and please let us know why you enjoyed it and if you have any questions as well. We're getting a lot of listeners now. We're getting some good feedback and some good comments from people, but we'd love to hear your questions of stuff you hear on the podcast and what you want to clarify or get get us to dive deeper into some concepts. If you have any topics that you want us to to discuss, then definitely let us know as well. But that's it for this episode. We'll see you next time.