On how a positive mind set helps an athlete train properly.
“Here is one of my biggest points. (When an athlete has a positive attitude) the training
philosophy changes.
“There were so many athletes out there that were more talented than me. All across the world. I cannot believe the guys that I would beat. I can’t believe it.... in a one-time race they would blow me away. But when it came to the championship meet they were totally flustered. They couldn’t do it in the big one. Why is that? I think, there’s a lot of athletes ... that have to train at (a very fast) pace in order to be able to do it in the race. Now I agree with some of that. But I have seen many athletes tire themselves out for race day by doing too much, trying to gain confidence. This is a tricky point. Because I believe in training very hard, but the idea is to get to race day with great fitness, great confidence – and fresh legs. And being able to use your mind. If you train so hard that you can’t get to the main race, fresh, it doesn’t matter how many miles you’ve put in. I don’t even want to hear your times in the workouts. You have to balance the training so that it allows you to be fresh, mentally and physically, on race day. So this mind set, and realizing that the mind set is your greatest weapon in your arsenal, changes your philosophy toward training just a little bit. Instead of having to gain the confidence from every blasted workout, why do you have to do that? Why do you have to gain confidence every workout?”
“Every time it counted, I knew I was going to be ready. I saved my mental effort, my intense
effort, for those opportunities and I didn’t squander it with doing it every race. I tried hard every
race, but the mind set, just really pouring it into a race, you only have a certain number of times
in a season that you can do that without just wearing yourself out mentally. For myself it was about four or five races that I really, really would put my mental focus on, in order to be fresh.”
More from Brian Diemer:
Preparing for the 1984
Olympic Trials
The 1984
Olympic steeplechase
How Brian Diemer
trains his athletes’ minds
