Fraser Darcy

Welcome to the 8th edition of the newsletter. Only two more to go including this one and then we are in the double digits! Yay, double digits! *Hi-5’s everywhere* Not that it really means anything upon REFLECTION. Which is where this newsletter is actually going… reflection time…

Agenda

• Self reflection
• Coaching Reflection (https://forms.gle/wAZ4Pged3XtD4j828)
• Actioning reflection

Self reflection:

This newsletter is broken up into two types of reflection, self reflection and coaching reflection. Self reflection is something I want you as you read this (I’m in your head muahahah) to think about in terms of ways that you have acted or not acted in your running that you are happy about, proud of, learnt something from etc etc. Might not be something major or maybe it is. Do you record this in a list? Do you record this anywhere? Do you monitor your own reflections on FinalSurge?

Speaking from personal experience I reflect all the time (some people call it overthinking) and do it both formally and informally. Formally wise, I reflect daily on my running by ticking off a box on my excel spreadsheet I use to track my training. I change my planned run to a green box if I do it. I reflect weekly on my training in a blog and then read these reflections back to myself if I find myself in a similar position. I also reflect “quarterly” when I look back at a training block before a key race and analyse my average mileage, my amount of key sessions and overall if I’ve improved in any non-definable areas like ‘strength on downhills’. I also reflect annually on my overall running and life goals and how much I have achieved. Helps to remind myself of how much I have done in a year even though I may not feel like it. I think we all think like this though so if you’ve read any of the above so far and gone, oh yeah that all sounds like me, well I hope you are doing some formal reflection of it all!

The reason I like to reflect and want more people to do it more often is that I find reflection like a form of memory processing. Everyone knows the feeling of working on a Word Document all day and then closing it before saving it properly? That’s like going through a whole training block without reflecting on what you have achieved. If you made some mistakes in a run and forgot to ‘reflect/save’ those memories you’ll just go through the same process next time until you do.

Coaching reflection:

Now in this newsletter I defined self-reflection as more or less the things to reflect on that YOU control. There’s debate about whether my next sub-topic, coaching reflection, is part of that web or not but the purpose of this newsletter I’d like to seperate the two. Coaching reflection is the reflection I want you to make on how my coaching has impacted you and whether or not there are ways we can improve. As I’ve said, I reflect on things myself a lot but I can’t reflect on the effectiveness of my coaching without input from clients. Hence, along with reading this newsletter I have dropped in a link to a Check-in form thatvshould take 2-3 minutes to fill out to gather some data.

It’s all anonymous and I’ll report back on how it goes. To paint the picture though, imagine you’re a professional athlete at a professional sports team. You’ve woken up today and been asked/reminded to reflect on yourself as a person/athlete etc by your coach. You do that (privately or if you’d like to share that with me as well then that’s cool) and then you come into your professional sports team HQ and they’re conducting a season review or a review of their pre-season or whatever. That’s essentially what I’m asking of you here (yes, you’re part of the professional sporting team of FraserDarcyCoaching if you want to believe that). If you’re relatively new to FraserDarcyCoaching it’s ok if you want to hold off to gather more data before using this link as well.

Actioning Reflection

So you do all this reflection and then what? Do you actually action it? I’m no self-help guru but I do know, that without setting some SMART goals or something similar to actually action from your reflection you may make the same mistakes again. So again, much as like the whole point of this newsletter is just to REMIND you about reflection in your life as a runner, it’s also to REMIND you that sometimes we need to be prompted into taking action on things we have reflected on and know we need to change. As much as we all wish for people to just tell us what we need to action/do all the time it doesn’t work like that (we’re all thinking about ourselves too much maybe). Instead of telling you every little bit of what you need to do, I’m just telling you to do two things, one: reflect, two: act on that. With that you can probably solve all your problems anyway.

AOB:

That’s all I have today for this very non-specific running newsletter. I’ll report back on the results of the survey in the next newsletter and then possibly include some information on; summer training, dealing with the Christmas holidays, starting fresh in 2027 etc. etc. Until then, enjoy your running, do the survey, do the things I tell you, but don’t wait for me or anyone to tell you everything you need to do and don’t get confused by the irony of that all.