Intro to focus project: Mental Health in the endurance sport world

  


  As an endurance athlete on a daily basis I struggle with motivation and fighting my mind to get myself to go train or workout. While this isn't just endurance athletes that experience this no matter how much you love your sport it's very difficult to go and dedicate 3 hours to 7 some days to train and prepare yourself for events or races in my case. The mental toughness this requires to be able to be active in your sport for that long at a time is absurd. Losing focus could result in utter disappointment and time wasted because of loss of a result. A common mindset for many competitors in this world of endurance athletes is to leave it all out there and go as hard as possible even if you put yourself in greater danger. Working to get past training blocks and this mindset is mainly why I have chosen this topic so I might learn from my mistakes and help others not make the same ones I did, as well as learning more about the mental health aspect. 


Comments

  1. Noah BrewerMarch 10, 2022 at 8:28 AM

    This blog doesn't have much structure. For one thing, its just a single block of text with fewer than 200 words (which is less than HALF the minimum required length of a blog). You have a good impulse to open with your own experiences, and you start to build toward a bit of PURPOSE (with the idea of mental toughness or grit), but you've not really developed this point. By the time you get to your point, you've ended your blog.

    You are also missing the key aspect of engaging with a text--every blog should ENTER INTO CONVERSATION with at least one text. This should be a text that offers an interesting, informative, thought provoking or controversial perspective on the topic about which you are writing.

    You are also playing fast and loose with grammar conventions, and your syntax (word order) also confuses the reader. The post reads like you wrote it like you thought it, and didn't take much time to consider whether the first way you thought of it was the best way for conveying it. For example, your opening sentence:

    As an endurance athlete on a daily basis I struggle with motivation and fighting my mind to get myself to go train or workout.

    Are you an "endurance athlete on a daily basis" or do you "struggle on a daily basis"? I suspect the second is more true. Also, are "motivation" and "fighting your mind" two DIFFERENT things, or is the second part a rephrasing/clarification of the first. I suspect the latter is correct. A possible revision to this sentence might be:

    "As an endurance athlete, I struggle with motivation on a daily basis. I am constantly fighting my mind to get myself to go train or work out."

    The second sentence:

    While this isn't just endurance athletes that experience this no matter how much you love your sport it's very difficult to go and dedicate 3 hours to 7 some days to train and prepare yourself for events or races in my case.

    Is a run on. It is trying to accomplish far more things than most sentences are capable of accomplishing. And it is doing weird things with pronouns (the "this" as the second word is weird when you use "this" again after "experience"). I suspect if you slow down and take a close look at this you can see some ways to improve clarity, but one strategy that I find useful is to take a sentence like this and break it up into its basic parts/ideas

    While this isn't just endurance athletes
    that experience this
    no matter how much you love your sport
    it's very difficult to go and dedicate 3 hours to 7 some days
    to train and prepare yourself
    for events or
    races in my case.

    Now you can try to express each as a simple sentence.
    Motivation is not just a problem for endurance athletes.
    Other people also struggle with motivation.
    Even if you love your sport, motivation is a struggle.
    It is difficult to dedicate hours of time to training.
    Training is necessary to prepare for events.
    My events are races.

    Not only does this make the ideas CLEAR and CONCRETE, it also makes it easier to see how you are bouncing all over the place with the ideas that you are trying to convey. When you start to try to put these ideas BACK together as a paragraph, you can CAREFULLY combine some sentences/ideas, get rid of others, and add the CONNECTIVE ideas that are needed to move from one ideas to the next.

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