Secure and Insecure Strivers
01 | Two Athletes, Same Training Hours
Two athletes train the same number of hours per week, follow similar programmes, and race at similar fitness levels. One of them is straightforward to coach. The other is exhausting in a specific way that has nothing to do with their physical development.
The exhausting one needs constant reassurance. After every session there is a message: was that good enough? After every bad session a longer one: is the programme working? After every race that does not go to plan, a crisis that takes several days to resolve. The good races produce a temporary satisfaction that evaporates quickly, replaced by anxiety about the next test. The training is consistent on paper. The psychological cost of maintaining it is very high.
The other athlete completes sessions, reports honestly on how they went, and moves on. Bad sessions are noted without drama. Good sessions are noted without requiring an audience. When a race goes badly there is a debrief, some adjustments, and a return to training. Their confidence does not depend on the last result because their sense of themselves as an athlete is not primarily constituted by results.
The Growth Equation's framing of these two patterns as insecure and secure striving is the most useful shorthand I have found for something I observe constantly in coaching. Understanding the distinction matters because insecure striving is extremely common, genuinely damaging to long-term athletic development, and fixable once it is named accurately.
02 | The Insecure Striver
The insecure striver is not an athlete who lacks talent or commitment. They often have both in abundance. The insecurity is not about ability. It is about what performance means to their identity.
An insecure striver's self-worth is contingent on results. A good race confirms they are the athlete they believe themselves to be. A bad race threatens that belief. This is why the response to a bad race is so often disproportionate: the extra sessions added in panic, the equipment change, the sudden conviction that the programme needs rebuilding, the coach swap. None of these are primarily training decisions. They are attempts to restore an identity that the bad result temporarily disrupted.
There is a shift that happens in athletes who have been competing for a few years that is worth being specific about. The drive to train transforms from something that feels chosen into something that feels compulsory. What began as genuine engagement with the sport becomes more anxious and more restless. The training continues at the same volume or higher, but the energy underneath it has changed. The insecure striver is no longer training because they love what training produces. They are training to stave off the feeling that they are not enough without it.
Research on striving patterns found that insecure striving is associated with validation-seeking, unfavourable social comparison, submissiveness, and higher rates of depression and anxiety. None of those are character flaws. They are predictable consequences of a relationship with achievement in which the self is perpetually on trial.
The same pattern appears in training week to week. Insecure strivers resist rest days because rest feels like a statement about effort. They push through sessions that should be easy because easy feels insufficient. They add volume when the programme calls for recovery because the discomfort of doing less is psychologically harder to tolerate than the physical discomfort of doing more. The training they are actually completing is not the training they believe they are completing, because the decisions are being made by identity management rather than physiological logic.
The response to setbacks completes the picture. An injury is not just a physical problem. It is evidence of inadequacy. A bad race is not information about execution or conditions. It is a verdict. This reading of setbacks produces a specific vicious cycle: bad result triggers insecurity, insecurity triggers harder training, harder training without adequate recovery produces more bad results, which reinforces the insecurity. The harder the insecure striver works, the more fragile the whole structure becomes.
03 | The Secure Striver
The secure striver wants to win just as much. The difference is structural rather than motivational. Their sense of themselves does not depend on any particular result. There is a degree of space between the person and the pursuit, and that space is what allows genuine performance rather than performance driven by fear of what failure means.
This is not indifference. Secure strivers care deeply. They train with full commitment and race with full intent. The care is simply not entangled with their self-worth in a way that makes every difficult day a crisis. When a session is flat, it is a flat session. When a race goes wrong, it is a race that went wrong. Both are information rather than verdicts. The response is calibrated to what the information actually requires rather than to the psychological emergency the insecure striver would experience in the same situation.
Consider what the week after a bad race looks like for each type. The insecure striver spends the first two days in extended debrief, questioning the programme, questioning their commitment, possibly questioning whether they should continue in the sport. By the end of the week they have added sessions to compensate, changed something in the training structure, and arrived at the following week more fatigued than the race itself made them.
The secure striver has the same debrief conversation, identifies what went wrong, makes the relevant adjustment, and starts the following week's training on Monday. Not because the bad race did not matter. Because their engagement with training does not require the race to have gone well for the next session to be worth doing. The motivation is durable because it is not dependent on results confirming it.
Practically this means a secure striver can complete a prescribed easy session at genuinely easy effort without the compulsion to make it harder to feel like training happened. They can take a rest day without guilt that drives them to add a compensatory session. They can train through a difficult mid-block period when fitness feels like it is declining without abandoning the programme, because their engagement with training does not depend on it feeling like progress in real time. The flat weeks in the middle of a build are familiar rather than alarming. They have been through them before, they know what comes after, and that knowledge is sufficient.
The quiet athlete who trains without requiring anyone to notice is almost always a secure striver. Their training looks unremarkable from the outside because nothing about it is performed. It is executed because it is correct. The correctness is sufficient.
04 | The Want To and Have To Shift
The most useful diagnostic question for identifying which type of striving is operating is also the simplest: does this training feel like something I want to do, or something I have to do?
Every athlete experiences both at different points. Motivation fluctuates. Some sessions feel chosen and some feel obligatory, and neither state is a reliable indicator of whether the training is going well. The diagnostic question is about the dominant pattern over weeks and months rather than any single session.
An athlete who predominantly trains from want to is drawing on intrinsic motivation: engaged with the process, interested in what the training is building, capable of finding genuine satisfaction in sessions that produce nothing shareable. An athlete who predominantly trains from have to is drawing on avoidance: training to prevent the feeling of inadequacy that not training produces. That fuel source has specific properties. It is reliable in the short term and corrosive over time. It tends to produce overtraining, because the anxiety driving it does not recognise the physiological signals that adequate training has been done. It tends to produce burnout, because avoidance is exhausting in a way that genuine engagement is not. And it tends to collapse unpredictably, because the athlete is one sufficiently bad race away from the motivation evaporating entirely.
The sport rewards want to in the long run. The have to athlete may be faster in the seasons when the anxiety is driving hard and the training is accordingly aggressive. They are rarely faster across a decade, because the accumulated cost of the anxiety eventually exceeds the training benefit it produces.
05 | What Coaching Can and Cannot Do
Part of my role as a coach is to create the conditions in which secure striving becomes possible. This means being honest about what training requires without making an athlete feel judged for not delivering it. It means responding to difficult session reports with curiosity rather than disappointment. It means making the coaching relationship safe enough that an athlete can report a bad week accurately rather than managing how the bad week appears.
Psychological safety in the coaching relationship is not a soft concern alongside the technical work. It is the condition that makes the technical work effective. An athlete who filters their session reports to present the version most likely to be well received is giving their coach inaccurate data. The coach calibrates training on that data. The adjustments are wrong. Performance reflects this, which reinforces the athlete's anxiety about reporting accurately, which produces more filtered reports. The whole system runs on fiction.
What coaching cannot do is resolve the underlying identity question on someone else's behalf. Sport is genuinely good for many things. It builds physical capacity, develops mental resilience, provides community, and creates the specific satisfaction of working toward a difficult and measurable goal. What it cannot do is fill a psychological need that is not actually about sport. An athlete who is using training and racing to establish that they are a person of worth will keep finding that need unmet regardless of results. The Ironman finish line does not solve it. The age-group podium does not solve it. The PR does not solve it, because each result simply resets the clock and the anxiety returns with the next training block.
The shift from insecure to secure striving requires something that is available to every athlete but not achievable through training harder: a degree of separation between the self and the pursuit. Not indifference. Not reduced caring. The ability to care fully about the sport without the sport becoming the measure of the self. Care deeply, but not so much that the space between you and the pursuit disappears entirely. That space is where performance actually lives.
06 | Why the Sport Celebrates the Wrong Type
The triathlon world frequently celebrates insecure striving without naming it as such. The athlete who trains through injury, who sacrifices everything for performance, who is consumed by the pursuit in a way that crowds out work, family, and other things that constitute a life, is often held up as exemplary dedication. The coach who announces that losing makes them want to die is praised for competitive fire. That kind of caring sounds like passion. It is usually fear with good aerobic fitness attached to it.
The secure striver is less dramatic and harder to romanticise. They show up, do the work, handle the difficult parts without crisis, and keep improving across years. Their motivation is durable because it does not depend on the last result. Their training is consistent because it is not being distorted by psychological compensations. Their racing is calm because they have not spent the preceding months in a state of constant self-assessment. They are in it for the long game that the sport actually rewards, which plays out over decades rather than seasons.
The insecure striver who disappears after two or three good years did not lack dedication. They had more of it than was sustainable. The wanting to prove something that drove them into the sport eventually consumed the thing it was supposed to power. That is not a cautionary tale about caring too much. It is a precise description of what happens when caring becomes entangled with identity rather than anchored in genuine engagement with the process.
The question worth asking honestly, not as a judgement but as useful information, is which type of striving is predominantly operating in your own training. Are you training because you want to see what this process builds, or because the alternative to training is a feeling you are trying to avoid? The answer does not change the sessions. It changes whether the sessions are sustainable.
If you want a coaching relationship built on the conditions that secure striving requires, where honest reporting is welcomed and training decisions are made on physiological rather than psychological grounds, Sense Endurance Coaching is built around exactly that.
If you want a structured programme that removes the compulsion to constantly add and adjust, the Sense Endurance training plans are built with that simplicity in place from the start.