Gardening. Not really my thing; at least not in the conventional sense. My parents loved gardening and spent what as a child felt like in an ordinate amount of time dragging me from garden centre to garden centre. When not at (or on the way to) a garden centre, my parents spent large chunks of their weekends working on the gardens; planting, weeding, nurturing and maintaining what they clearly loved. As a kid, even the non-gardening me could appreciate the beautiful end result of their labours. The gardens were really very pretty.

It recently occurred to me that personal bests or records are very much like the flowers (or vegetables) found in gardens. Much like a well maintained garden will produce beautiful flowers (or vegetables), with appropriate training, recovery, nutrition and maintenance, the human body is capable of producing some amazing, often beautiful results.

Unfortunately, a 60 second clip on the Internet of someone’s PB can’t show the hours, days, weeks, months and (potentially years) of training that produced the beautiful PB; the ‘Secret Garden’ if you will. Based on some recent observations, it seems to me that many people are focusing their attention on hitting PBs as opposed to developing the ‘garden’ that will (eventually) produce the PBs. Instead of spending time training, developing and recovering, they seem to be on some sort of continual PB quest. They want their PB and they want it NOW! In part I suspect this may be down to a lack of real understanding of just how much work a top level athlete puts into THEIR PB flowers (ie the ‘Secret Garden’), in part it may be down to impatience and a desire for instant gratification.

Although beautiful flowers may be available relatively quickly by visiting a florist, the beautiful flowers living in a well tended garden will in all likelihood live much longer. Similarly, although it may be possible to hit a PB every now and then without following a training plan, the athlete that employs sound training, recovery and maintenance strategies is, in my opinion, far more likely to nurture a ‘garden’ which will produce PBs on a far more consistent (and repeatable) basis.

Looks like I actually rather like ‘gardening’!