The MicroCast

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 01/27/2023

Today’s call is all about developing your mental performance toolset! We hope that by providing these techniques you’ll be able to build out your mental performance toolsets so you can better deal with adversity in training and racing. For more on visualization, see the link to our blog post on visualization 101 in our call notes.

Like anything, these techniques are best practiced overtime. Think about implementing one new technique into preparation for a workout or long-run, and one new technique into the workout or long-run itself at a time. Develop a sense for what you feel works well for you and what doesn’t through practice and experimentation, with the goal of showing up for your next big event with a few new tools that you know work well in practice.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

VISUALIZATION: https://www.microcosm-coaching.com/microblog/how-visualization-can-lead-to-training-and-racing-breakthroughs/

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 01/20/2023

The “Never Enough” mentality and approach to work, life, relationships, and financial status is an ever present part of today’s culture. It shows up everywhere, and for athletes this same mentality crosses over to training and goal setting- and has far reaching impacts on our mental health and overall contentment in an athletic life.

On today's call, we define what this mentality is and discuss several ways in which we see it manifest in ourselves and in the athletes we coach. We’re doing this in an attempt to help athlete’s become more aware of this mentality, so you all can better avoid the pitfalls in living in this mindset, and in the process develop a stronger relationship with yourselves while feeling more contentment in an athletic life.

As the call develops, we try to offer practical methods and solutions for working through the never enough mentality in training and in goal setting. We also lean on Licensed Clinical Social Worker and mental health expert Sarah Strong to offer us mindfulness tips and active solutions to help us grow our awareness and perspectives around this subject. The goal here is to help our athletes get to a place where they make better decisions in training and goal setting. Ultimately, so many of these takeaways can be applied right back into life too, so make sure you stick around to listen to this part of the call, because ultimately the most important relationship you have is the one with yourself. No achievement will ever feel like it’s enough if your self-worth isn’t intact.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 01/13/2023

As many athletes on our team continue to get their race schedules ready for 2023, we wanted to start this year's calls off with the question, How does an athlete know when it’s time to step up to the next distance and what would an ideal timeline to get there look like? We love this topic because it encompasses so many of our coaching principles, like developing and knowing your why, developing self-awareness, and the compounding consistency principle.

From here, we talk briefly about xtraining before going into another in depth discussion around balance. We ask, does balance exist? Is it a worthy thing for athletes to strive for? How can we plan for training blocks that don’t go to plan? In answering questions like this, our team seems to always come back to our favorite James Clear quote, “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your habits.”

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 12/16/2022:

This week's call is split into two sections, the first encompasses a really interesting, and ongoing discussion with athlete, coach and chaplain Chris Morgan about purpose. During this part of the call, we attempt to shed a little light on whether or not there is a purpose problem in trail running, if you need purpose to sustain the process and if the process itself is enough of a purpose to keep athletes running and working toward their goals for years. In the second half of our call we talk about our thoughts on having multiple A races in a season, choosing races and doing adventures that don’t fit our skill sets, and how to approach leveling up to more difficult adventures.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 12/09/2022:  

On this week's call, we go into a deep dive on the menstrual cycle and birth control and their impacts on training. We discuss how athletes who menstruate can work with their bodies and take a practical approach to training. From here, the conversation shifts to talking about the impacts of low level activity on training and how athletes should view things like dog walks and human-powered commuting in the context of their training.    

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 12/02/2022:

On this week's call, you will hear from coaches Sarah Strong and Kylee Van Horn on their takeaways from the 2022 season. What went well, what they’d like to improve on in 2023 and what process oriented goals will help guide them. From here, we’ll transition into a conversation about planning for 2023 and offer some tips for winter running!

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 11/18/2022:

On this week's call, you’ll hear expressions of gratitude and reflections on 2022 from our team of coaches and athletes. Gratitude is one of the values we hold most near and dear at Microcosm, and the time around Thanksgiving always offers us an annual reminder of the importance of expressing gratitude and incorporating those expressions into daily life. The thing that we all find really exciting about these expressions of gratitude is that they do not only come from the heart, they are completely unique to each individual's experience, and we really love celebrating that at Microcosm.

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 11/11/2022

On this week's call, we took a deep look into our coaches 2022 seasons, discussing their high and low points. We focused in on some of the specific takeaways each coach had from the season, talking about perspective shifts, parenting, new habits and routines and what each coach wanted to focus on in 2023. Myself, Kristen and Drew all had unique and different process oriented goals for 2023 which I know you all will enjoy.

From here, our conversation moved into how we approach off-season and fall/early winter with our athletes at Microcosm. We talked about how to hold the training loosely to remove internal and external pressures to perform a certain way, and the importance of paying attention to how things feel, both physically and mentally. We noted how important it is to maintain habit and routine during periods of base building or during downtime in training and specifically highlighted the opportunity for athletes to use these moments to work on nagging injuries and niggles so they could move into winter speed work feeling strong!

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 11/04/2022  We had a great call this week, diving deeper into the topic of mental setbacks and dealing with prolonged injury and illness. We started the conversation off by recapping Coach Zoë Rom’s experience at the Puerto Vallarta 100k by UTMB and how she dealt with setbacks following Western States that ultimately paved the road to a great race there. From here, the conversation goes deeper as we hear from Coach Drew Connor and Kylee Van Horn about their experiences dealing with setbacks and the approaches they use and the advice they give their athletes. Coach and clinical social worker Sarah Strong offers some wonderful advice on acceptance and Coach Kristen Schindler helps transition the conversation to embracing community as a tool for working through setbacks. This is one of my favorite parts of the call.  I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]

Microcosm Coaching Team Call 10/21/2022

This week’s call consists of three parts. In the first part, we dive into the mental side of training setbacks. Coach Sarah Strong, our resident clinical social worker, gives us some great tips for how to overcome these challenges while normalizing setbacks as inherently part of the process. In the second part of our call we talk about whether or not athletes should change their running form and what the timeline for making those changes would be. In this section of the call we dive into everyone’s favorite topic, down hill running as well. We close the call with our resident dietician, Coach Kylee’s take on Athletic greens, so make sure you stick around for that!

I hope you enjoy this episode and as usual, if you have any feedback, a question for a future call or are looking for support in your running journey, please visit us on the web at microcosm-coaching.com or contact us at [email protected]