Building Your Athlete Phone Book

How can you become an unbreakable athlete?

Every session you complete is one thin, almost insignificant page added to an Athletes Phone Book. The key is to consistently add page upon page until you have an Athlete Phone Book, that is so thick, it’s unbreakable.

Understanding the concept that, no one session makes an athlete, is very important. Especially in trail and ultra running.

It can happen daily, weekly or once a month, but it happens. Athletes get caught up in the end results of just one session. Too often, negative thoughts are generated as a result of not achieving a certain expectation set for a certain training run. Whether that is a set distance, lap splits, average pace, elevation gain or the overall feeling experienced during the hit out.


It’s important not to let these training parameters play a higher importance then training consistency.
It’s great to have expectations and goals within certain training sessions, but it should not have any detrimental effect on the bigger picture, long term goal.The most important thing is, you got it done and added another thin page to the book. Building it stronger every day.

Completing UTA100 in 2019, this is an Outcome Goal, this is the Athlete Phone Book as a finished product.
In order to achieve an Outcome Goal, the most important factor is to consistently add page upon page, until the date of UTA. And each day brings a new opportunity to add a new page.

Each completed page is thin, just like the steps toward the Outcome Goal are small. Large leaps and drastic changes can lead to burn out, a drop in motivation or risk injury. So it’s more important to focus on the small actions that can be regularly completed on the journey towards achieving the desired Outcome Goal.
Each small step or thin page is a Process Goal. These are the defined daily goals that can be executed and progress an athlete towards achieving an Outcome Goal.

The specific components of each Process Goal are individual to each athlete and can only be determined based on the athlete’s goals, history, current state of health and training phase.

With this in mind, what can you do TODAY that will make you a better athlete tomorrow?

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