Furey Athletics

Mountain of Success

For those who do not know much about me, in addition to being a javelin thrower and coach, for almost the last 20 years, I have also worked as a design engineer at a major aerospace and defense contractor. I have come to realize that the strategic approach that is taken to design multi-billion dollar marvels of engineering (think NASA Spacecraft) from the ground up is quite similar to the approach top Olympic coaches and athletes take to achieve their athletic dreams.

Engineers call this approach the Systems Engineering “V.”

For those interested in digging into some details of the Systems Engineering V please read the next section. Others can skip right to the next section!

Systems Engineering “V”

The process starts by walking backwards from the customers needs (think NASA wants to get to Mars) to define a set of detailed requirements to achieve that goal. 

Once the requirements are defined down to an appropriate level of detail, system design and development begins. During this phase, hardware and software are designed that will meet the identified requirements and experimentation with prototypes occurs.

After the design has been matured and the development phase is coming to an end, testing begins. Progressively larger portions of the overall system are tested to provide feedback into the system requirements and overall design that act as a course correcting mechanism. An example would be testing the spaceship wing profile in a wind tunnel to ensure it provided the appropriate amount of lift (I understand there is no lift in space!) for the anticipated mass of the craft. If the test indicates a change is required, that flows back into the requirements and ultimately the design is modified. 

Once the components, subsystems and overall system has been testing and verified to meet the previously defined requirements, the product is ready for the field. The fielded system will then, based on systematic testing results, be capable of meeting the customers need and is ready for its first mission (lets head to Mars!).

After the mission, thorough assessments are done to assess performance of the system and materialize in the form of upgrades or next generation products.

“Mountain of Success”

The process of starting with the end goal in mind and following a strategic/ iterative approach to achieve a goal is not limited to those designing spaceships. Top coaches and athletes use a similar approach when chasing their athletic dreams.

For fun, and because I love flow charts, I made some small modifications to the Systems Engineering V and created what I call the “Mountain of Success.”

This diagram, shown below, demonstrates how to take an athlete’s goals and turn them into reality. The base of the mountain is athlete assessment and training plan development. Training plan management takes place as you climb the mountain and get closer to your goals. The peak is the championship competition, where you execute your new found skills where it matters most. The back side of the mountain is where you reassess your performance against your goals, refine your new goals based on your current state and course correct to start the cycle over again.

Some key things to mention right away is that the “Mountain of Success” is an iterative approach with continuous feedback loops that help to refine the training plan, the overall strategy and ultimately athlete’s goals. You can think that in an athlete’s career there will be many “mountains” to climb and each one will hopefully be taller than then one previously scaled.

Over the next few weeks,  I will go into my philosophy regarding the three sides of this mountain. I will discuss my thought process on how you can combine athlete’s goals, historical data/ norms and a thorough assessment of an athletes mental, physical and emotional capabilities to generate a training plan baseline. I will then explore the strategy of using training component testing (KPI’s), mock meets and early season competitions to effectively manage the training plan and achieve the desired training results. Lastly, I will talk about the third and final leg of the journey where athlete and coach reassess and course correct to optimize the next trip into the unknown.

Thank you for reading! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below and I will do my best to answer them all in upcoming posts.