What Elite Athletes Teach Us About Spiritual Progress
Creating an Elite Athlete. For most of its history, the British cycling team wasn’t only non-competitive it was just plain bad. Between 1924 and 1988, British cyclists won exactly zero gold medals. The sport was dominated by countries like France and Germany. Yet, by 2012, British cycling had become the most successful cycling nation on earth, with a riders winning back to back Tour de France competitions and the team winning twelve medals in the 2012 Olympics, twice as many as any other nation. What changed? How did the former laughing stock become seemingly unstoppable? In his book Heros, Villians & Velodromes , Dave Brailsford, the director of British cycling reported that the phenomenal change can be boiled down to a single philosophy: “performance by the aggregation of marginal gains.” What does this mean? Instead of looking for one earth shattering solution (probably because there was not one), look at every aspect of performance and try to improve