How to become an outlier

Joe Friel just read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Very good book which I highly recommend along with Blink, both of which I recently read. Tipping Point will be up next, once I can actually get my hands on it from the library that is.

Anyway, Joe wrote a post about the book and it's relevance to the general athlete population and does a really good job of summing it up. It shouldn't be and isn't really ground breaking stuff, especially if you've read Gladwell's book, but this last little bit I think sums it up perfectly.

I believe that the key to success in sport is not simply hard workouts but, more importantly, training consistency — practicing your sport day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Uninterrupted. Athletes who focus on excessively hard workouts on the premise that this will quickly produce exceptional performance eventually find themselves overtrained, burned out, injured or sick. There is nothing that produces race results like years of consistent training. This is not to say there is no place for hard workouts. There is. It’s just a matter of how hard and how often.

Enjoy all and keep on riding.