Good post. In my athletic career, I always did pretty well in unusual/bad conditions. Not necessarily relative to my PBs, but relative to my competitors and our respective abilities.
To me, this was due not so much to purposefully varying situations and consciously preparing for the unexpected – as it was to being religious about doing what I had planned.
Examples
– pouring down rain but have LJ practice scheduled. Logical choice would be to skip it for safety sake. But instead, I would still jump, but maybe jump off the runway instead of the board.
– Step pattern troubles in the 300m – would space hurdles somewhat randomly and practice steering.
Don’t want to make this out as being against auto-regulating training (I think conditions, fitness, injuries, etc) can/should dictate what we do in a given day, week, phase – but for me, preparing for the unexpected has always been about setting out to do what I said I would do and stick to the plan, in spite of unexpected road blocks that get in the way.
Currently, in my professional life, we take a much more active approach to preparing for contingencies. These include:
1. Stress-testing – Evaluating the strength of an idea/model/activity under a variety of different scenarios
2. Practice – Religiously preparing, role-playing, devil’s advocate in getting ready for big meetings, pitches, presentations, etc
3. Setting up escalation protocols and contingency plans for a fairly broad suite of possible worst-case scenarios
4. Perhaps the biggest one = Simply making sure we address and take care of the most important elements of our work early, so that even if things go wrong – the bulk of what we need to do is already done.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail”