Most athletes train to get better. A smaller group trains to find out what they actually are. These are not the same project. The 19th-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce made a distinction that cuts right into this difference: between beliefs that function as comfortable resting places — what he called 'the fixation of belief' — and genuine inquiry, which he said can only begin from a place of real doubt. His uncomfortable claim was that most people never actually inquire; they perform the motions of inquiry while quietly working to confirm what they've already settled on. The fitness version of this is everywhere: the runner who logs miles but never races, the lifter who adds weight only when the last set felt easy, the person who tracks everything but adjusts nothing. Real physical development, like real thinking, requires what Peirce called 'irritation of doubt' — the genuine discomfort of not knowing whether you're enough yet, held without flinching. The practical move is blunt: find the one dimension of your training where you've stopped being honestly uncertain about the outcome, and deliberately reintroduce that uncertainty this week.

What would someone observing your last two weeks of training say you are clearly avoiding finding out about yourself?

Drawing from American Pragmatism (Peircean) — Charles Sanders Peirce — 'The Fixation of Belief' (1877) and 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878)