Discipline Is Just Another Muscle
photo credit: Ian Sane
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
There are different times throughout your year when you need to be able to prioritize your training in a way that is commensurate with the results you want to achieve. There will come a time in your training cycle when you will need to get really strong and focus in order to make sure the results that you want on race day are readily available to you.
80% of the things that we deal with in our training are a direct result of how disciplined we can be. Perhaps it’s a matter of fitness or nutrition. Maybe it’s a flexibility issue or it has something to do with equipment. Whatever your individual challenge might be, chances are it’s best addressed through the application of discipline.
I think that discipline is no different than any other muscle in your body. The more that you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. The more frequently you use it, the more competent you become at using it.
In my personal endurance journey, my biggest focus has been on my nutrition. I have been exercising my disciplinary muscle, if you will, around the concept of nutrition. This means controlling both what I eat and what I don’t eat. It means eating more of when I need to and less of when I want to. For me this requires an insane amount of discipline.
Developing a strong, consistent nutritional management strategy through a positively rewarding process is not easy. I have focused on two levels: daily consistency and acute focus.
On a daily basis I do my best to make simple food choices that can make a difference over time. My subtle goal has been to create a basic routine that I can follow — with a few options — on almost any given day. This is part of trying to make a habit of better eating.
On a more acute level, I have been using an approach called intermittent fasting, where I incorporate 8, 12, or sometimes 24 hours of fasting. While I am not 100% sold on the physical benefits of this, I can attest to the fact that it’s an incredible exercise in discipline.
But there is a flip side. Thinking of discipline as a muscle reminds us that too much of one thing is no longer a good thing. Developing really, really strong hamstrings is not necessarily good for my quadriceps. The hamstrings can become dominant, short circuiting optimal muscle firing patterns and prevent me from operating from 100% on a system level.
So work on that discipline. Use it wisely. Use it long before you look for money to solve your problems. But don’t overdo it. Even that takes discipline.
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