Do You Train Like A World Champ?

Not normally my sought out event, this year I’m surprisingly into the Commonwealth Games.

17 sports over 11 days and punditry from former stars of their sport gives welcome training insight.

I bang on about training with salespeople all the time. Only the very small few seem to care about their personal skill advancement. And it is no coincidence that these rare breeds are invariably also the very small few that smash quota.

Mark Foster was a six-time swimming World Champ. He liked to split his annual training slots in three chunks. In the pool, at the gym and on the track. Over the course of a year, for an eventual mere 21 seconds in a race (as a 50m specialist), he’d aim for 1,000 hours. 600 pool, 300 gym, 150 track. That’s a 4:2:1 mix. For roughly 40hrs a week.

How many sellers manage even 40 hours across an entire year?

Couldn’t we all squeeze in 45mins a week?

And I do like the ratio.

It’s a framework with legs. I once made a word cloud style slide for a sales conference with fifty separate sales skills listed. You can easily select a trio and work on those in such a way.

Then there was the marathon. The Ugandans and Kenyans made such a mess of the waterstations. There were falls, stumbles and general rhythm disruptions to such an extent that audibly unimpressed world record holder Paula Radcliffe described how she help Mo Farah prepare for his marathon efforts recently.

She set up just such a table with water bottles on it trackside. Mo practised running up to them and taking his liquid. East African athletes were watching on and couldn’t understand why this was being done. Having been beaten by an Aussie this morning who’s waterstation action was totally untroubled, I bet they do now.

It doesn’t matter how small part of your process is, there is scope to practise it and improve.

And what about the amazing Brownlee Brothers. (The brilliant addition to the rosta that is the Triathlon Mixed Relay shows how backward the IOC are. Their mangy excuses for not having the event in Rio utterly shames them.) Alistair and Jonny train to win from the front. Now there’s a mentality lost on many a salesteam…