Your Endurance Lifestyle. Redesigned.

Note: This post was done partly in preparation for a teleseminar I will be doing in the coming weeks…stay tuned here for more information!

I get a lot of questions from people that have started with the 10Hours approach and want more information. How can I train better? How do I get faster? And, of course, how can I get faster faster? It’s hard to really pin myself down to get this information on to the printed page, but my trip to Madison to support athletes racing in IM Wisconsin has given me a few uninterrupted hours on the plane.

To help you get a better sense of how I came up with the 10Hours approach, it’s helpful to consider my fascination with time. While I may call myself a triathlon coach, only 50% of my time with any given athlete is actually spent on building workouts. The other 50% you ask? Time investment. Coaching age groupers, and I mean dedicated age group athletes, is more about managing what comes up than planning what will happen. This started with my own training, as I had to sync my workouts with my job, a start up company, a family, etc. Simply put, there wasn’t enough time in my day for my DAY, much less everything else I wanted to do.

My approach was two-fold: focus my workouts down to the ones that mattered the most, and condense the time I spent doing other tasks so that I would have more time for the things that mattered to me. I have written a great deal on this blog about how I have condensed my workouts, but I haven’t spent as much time as I had initially hoped on the other tools I use to make a daily difference.

Here is a list of the products, services, and technologies that help me out in my daily work / working out lifestyle.

Devices

• iMac G5 (www.apple.com/imac/) – My trusty home-based computer that has all the multimedia stuff I could ever need in a simple, easy to use interface. I love it.
• Dell Latitude (www.dell.com/latitude) – My road warrior laptop that takes a beating and still manages to keep me productive and connected on the road. Also inexpensive.
• Palm Treo (www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo680/) – Indispensible. I’d be lost without my email, instant web access, contacts, etc.
• Apple iShuffle (www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/) – One of the few things to keep me motivated on those long rides. Love the intuitive controls and the shuffle keeps things interesting.

Products

• Dragon Naturally Speaking (www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/) – Dictation software that is amazingly accurate. I use this to write a great deal of my stuff when I am on the road.
• Apple: Mail Act On (www.indev.ca/) – Simple addition to Apple mail that allows me to file/move messages instantly with a few keystrokes.
• Apple: Mail Template (http://maczot.com/discuss/?p=163) – Makes replying to those repeat emails so much easier.
• Scrivener (www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html) – Awesome writing software that makes creating a book incredibly easy. No more managing 100+ MS Word documents for me!

Services

• Meebo (meebo.com) – Web-based instant messaging software; cross-platform means it supports all of your own accounts and puts them all onto one single page. Also has cool widget functions where you can put instant messaging on any of your web pages.
• Mozy (www.mozy.com) – My auto-backup solution that makes me feel safer. Sure I have an external hard drive…but this make me feel even more confident.
• Skype (www.skype.com) – Internet telephony. Cheaper than my cell phone. Good quality and free for member-to-member calling.
• GoToMeeting / GoToWebinar (www.gotomeeting.com) – Inexpensive, easy-to-use online software for presentations and collaboration.
• SpamArrest (www.spamarrest.com) – Personal spam assassin that after two-plus years still catches 95% of all the bad messages sent to my 20+ email addresses.
• Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) – Killer tool that puts the info I want into my inbox when I want it. Consider it a virtual research assistant!
• Paypal / Google Checkout (www.paypal.com or https://checkout.google.com/) – Online payment services that have formed the backbone of my coaching business. Simply would not be here today without their influence.
• 30Boxes (www.30boxes.com) – Web-based calendar and to-do list tracker that is AJAX-enabled and easier to use than anything else out there. I keep all my events and to do items here as I can access them online or via my PDA’s web access.
• Jott (www.jott.com) – My newest killer app, Jott allows me to dictate and send email messages to anyone, including myself. No more typing in the car on my Treo or lost ideas…give me 5 seconds with Jott and everything will be waiting for me in my inbox when I return to the office.

Strategies

• Inbox Zero (www.43folders.com/izero/) – Learnt from the master himself, Merlin Mann, this simple yet revolutionary approach to dealing with email helped make me instantly productive when I started…and I have never looked back. Very few things are more satisfying than an empty inbox.

Exercise-Related

• CyclingPeaks (www.cyclingpeakssoftware.com) – The ultimate power analysis tool, this desktop software crunches the ones and zeros and spits out killer predetermined (or custom) charts. I use this exclusively with all of my powermeter athletes, but it also supports running devices as well.
• Ergomo Powermeter (www.ergomocoachingcenter.com) – The that rules them all. Easy to use, durable, and built on the Cycling Peaks platform…what more do you need? I simply won’t ride without my Ergomo on my bike…it’s no coincence that I got a powermeter and started qualifying for Kona.
• Polar HRM (www.polar.us) – I love my Polar S620i, even if I don’t use the infra-red interface to download all my data. It keeps a seemingly infinite number of splits, tracks average heart rate and has withstood countless beatings over the last 4 years. It’s the one device that’s with me for all of my workouts.

What do you use? Let me know in the comments section!

P

Tweet This Post 

This entry was posted and is filed under Event, Resource, Run, Self Care, Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.