Aryan Manoj Blogs

Every year, around December, we get a calendar for the upcoming season and that’s when the true planning starts and it’s not as simple as jotting down a few important competition dates.

Over the last few years and especially after last season, I have realised that planning and scheduling is the most important thing that I need to do. Compete for too long and it can lead to burnout/injuries, compete too little or at random meets and you never get to perform the way you want to. Don’t even get me started on the number of mistakes we have made at training and how we prepare to peak for a competition. All these mistakes and a trial-and-error approach to what we should be doing has helped me understand how I need to plan out my year well in advance, and here’s how I do it:

First, I ask myself a set of questions – What is my goal for the season? What do I need to do to achieve this goal? What competitions do I need to run and which ones do I want to run? When should I start competing? When do I need to peak? How many meets can I handle? What is feasible? How do I schedule my training during this time? How do I approach and what do I focus on at each competition? What are the major deadlines I need to look at for my academics? When do I need to study/work to do well at university?

It seems like a lot of questions but once I have clear answers to all of these, deciding when and where I need to compete as well as how I can plan and prioritise all my other activities (side quests like university work) around them becomes much clearer.

I know I need around 3-4 months of competition with scheduled breaks in between to be able to peak for a championship. I then decide on a few races to use as training and a few races I need to run as qualifiers. That’s why I plan to begin competing in March as part of my training phase, before gradually building toward a peak in May, so I can eventually be at my best when it truly matters, in the last week of June.

Once this is done, I can then mentally prepare and know what I need to be feeling and focusing on during different phases of training and positively dealing with the inevitable ups & downs during the process, making sure that the competitions that I run can benefit me and not hinder my performances at the business end of the season. There are other factors like small niggles that can get in the way and when that happens, it can complicate things further, so we need to go back to the drawing board, re-strategize and take things one step at a time.

Developing a good schedule and learning how to structure my season in a way that works for me has taken 8 years, a ton of introspection and the support of countless coaches and mentors for me to figure out and I am still experimenting, learning and evolving as I go.

Stay tuned for the next blog, where I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on something I think is the most important thing for people to figure out in anything they do. This will be up next week, go follow me on Instagram @aryanmanoj33, where I’ve got some interesting stuff coming out very soon.