How prepared for your event are you? Totally? Really? Yes or No?

It does seem obvious that you ought to be prepared for your event. Training your body physically; being fit enough; having the stamina; learning the skills and techniques.. The list is long and complex. Having committed time, effort, energy, finances and more to attaining race fitness how much have you considered the practical and logistical aspects of preparation into your schedule? Put simply how organised are you to race or compete? Some professional athletes and teams have staff specifically employed to make logistics arrangements to get them to the competition or start line. Most amateur and aspiring elite athletes make these arrangements themselves or rely on a parent or partner to help.

To begin, you will want to start with the basics. Buy a wall planner, learn how to use your digital calendar, try a mind-mapping program, use an online training platform or use a diary to look ahead and note important dates. If you feel organised enough without any of these, that’s fine. You don’t have to introduce additional processes to your schedule if you feel you have everything under control. The process of pre-event and event day planning starts by working back from the competition start time.

Ready, Set, Go! What time, on what day, in what month and at what location exactly is your event? Be literal about this. Take an open water swim start such as this year’s Go Swim event at Loch Tay. There is is no point in saying your race starts in Loch Tay on Saturday 20th August. Loch Tay is huge. Getting the start location wrong or not knowing the start location can kick start a disastrous chain of events; for example, booking your accommodation at the wrong end of the Loch without realising how far away it is. You need to know exactly where on Loch Tay you enter the water, at exactly what time your wave or heat starts and from this exact information you will begin to realise that the picture you build up of the event start informs everything about your event plan and your pre-event plan.

You’ll see one simple example of this that I started today for the Go Swim event mentioned above that I have entered. There are lots of different ways of creating a pre-event or event plan and this is only a tiny start on want could become a much bigger document.

There are many advantages to creating a plan for your event and pre-event activities. It frees up your mind to focus on the task itself (distraction control), it segments or distributes your time into a structure and it highlights areas for attention that you might have missed out. Give it a go…