Your Endurance Lifestyle. Redesigned.

photo credit: MR38

With all my writing, I realized that it could be really helpful to take a step back and talk big picture. This post is about what I consider to be the basic building blocks of the endurance lifestyle — five core components. It’s a long one, but a good one, and a great deal of my future writing will assume that you “get” these commandments. So break out those flash cards!

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One of the most important benefits of being a triathlete, or being an athlete in any endurance sport, is the lifestyle that accompanies your activity. Your decision to pursue your sport means that you have had to organize almost everything you do in such a way that you can actively participate to your fullest. Triathlon encourages you to exercise frequently, to eat properly, to manage your sleep, to balance recovery, to choose the right equipment. There’s so many different facets to this sport — and so many different areas within this sport where you can focus on improvement and find opportunities for growth and development — that your lifestyle is fundamentally, and similarly, impacted.

The Cycle of Change
In other words, it’s hard for you to see an incremental change in your level of skill or level of participation in the sport without making incremental changes in other areas of your life. Everything is, in a way, part of a closed circle. If your training hours are to go up, then some other area or some other commitment in your life must commensurately decrease in commitment. Because holistic development is a cyclical thing, there are times when you will commit resources perhaps to your sport, and then times when you shift those resources away and put them back into something else, be it work or family or perhaps another hobby or some social time.

Why Design A Fit Life?
Sure it’s sexier to start with a race and a challenging training plan, plotting century rides and marathon greatness weeks and months ahead of schedule. In a way it’s more of a visualization exercise than what I’d consider planning, as so much of the work to be done is oddly abstract and detached from the life you lead now. Instead of getting lost in the details, you can target a set of bigger points that can, when connected, lead you to be successful at all facets of your sport. Beware the minutae!

Five Fit Life Commandments
Sometimes details are too much to manage; instead having core areas to focus on from time to time allow us to keep the big picture in focus even if everyone isn’t looking directly at the camera. You get the idea. So if you find yourself lost in the details, consider the following commandments to get you on track.

#1 — Plan From The Ground Up
Picking a race and then training for it across many month is a massive exercise. To be your best, everything about you needs to be in “sync” with your athletic goals. Forget calculating annual hours or pie charts dividing each week by discipline…these all pale in comparison to who you are today.

Your life, your job, your means, your goals, everything down to the work you need to do to achieve your goals…they all constitute critical elements of your plan. Ignore these elements an you risk creating a fantastic plan for a season that will only ever exist in a vacuum.

Instead, begin your seasonal journey by taking a 360-degree look at who you are. Are you a mother? A CEO? Do you work full-time? Do you enjoy volunteering or spending Sundays at Church? Are you a vegetarian? An early riser? A late-worker? Are you saving for a new house or perhaps a vacation?

All of these components, seemingly unrelated, are an integral part of who you are. Lay out your season and your athletic goals to include these elements, both on a macro and daily level, and you’ll be well on your way to being successful as you can possibly be. A plan that builds upon your network and involves your family and friends will outperform almost any other plan.

#2 — Focus on Fun & Challenging Activities
Building an entire season around a race is a lot like planning for Christmas…in January. Sort of exciting but not really. And it makes for a really long Spring, Summer, and Fall. While long-term planning is an important part of any endurance sport, it shouldn’t be the defining element. Look too far in the distant future and you’ll miss out on the short-term– perhaps even daily– opportunities to make improvements and positive changes. If it isn’t fun, you aren’t going to keep doing it.

Fight the planning blues by filling your calendar with regularly scheduled fun and cool activities. Outside of your sport, there are plenty of events that will keep you focused (athletically), test your abilities (physically) and force you to execute (mentally)…all without the perceived cost of the long-term event. Do your best to plan these roughly six to eight weeks apart, and if you can involved others (think relay or destination vacation), then all the better.

#3 — Create A Basic Training Week
Annual hours and training phases are nothing more than demands on your time; just as meetings at work, errands at home or any other commitment might be. For some people training is a top priority, for others it falls into third, fourth or even fifth place.

Regardless of where training fits on your own personal agenda, it’s important to recognize that you already have an agenda…your life. You need to work late on certain days and travel on others. Your local pool is only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You can only bike indoors on Sunday because of other social commitments. Each of these elements are demands on your time, and essentially set the tone for how your training will actually work.

Instead of starting with your race, consider making a Basic Week. This week is what you can do consistently across a year regardless of seasonal and external commitments. This will quickly become your go-to week for all of your training, as it fits within everything else you already do. More importantly, if you need to increase your training hours as your race approaches, you have some personal/social/professional capital stored up since your training has not been a constant drain on other areas of your life.

#4 — Integrated Nutrition & Recovery Plans
Forget fancy equipment, altitude tents or race day supplements. The two most important parts of your endurance training can’t be bought: longevity and consistency. The longer you participate in a sport, stacking years upon years of training and combining all of that with the experience of a veteran can make you a formidable competitor. But all of the above doesn’t happen by accident; you need to be able to master the disciplines of nutrition and recovery.

Exercise teaches us that everything we eat and drink is fuel for our bodies. Choosing the right fuel, whether it’s for living or training, is a constant battle: we are surrounded by poor food choices bundled in ridiculously attractive packaging. Learning how your body functions, and how you can best fuel it for daily and race-day performance is a critical component of reaching your full potential. Food can be friend and foe; making it a priority will ensure that whatever you do, you’ll do it well.

We don’t get stronger from exercising; we get stronger after we have recovered from exercise. Think about it…the second you put down those dumbbells after curling your biceps to exhaustion, you aren’t stronger. You arms feel like jello! But after a day or two off, the next time you hit the weights, you are ready to move up. While swimming, biking and running might not seem like it, they are essentially different versions of that same weight room experience. Not allowing your body to recover means you are really reducing the effectiveness of all the hard work you are doing. Your best possible program will balance work with recovery.

#5 — Well-Organized External Commitments
Adding an endurance sport to your list of “to do” items is no simple task. Suddenly everything you do is placed under a microscope as you try to find extra time to exercise and spend previously productive hours recovering from big workouts. Anything you can do to simplify and constructively delegate (or outsource) the unimportant tasks means you’ll be able to focus on the things that matter and your training.

Shopping for your food online is a great example of this. A trip to the supermarket probably costs 20 minutes each way, plus unloading groceries, then there’s all that shopping and browsing. It could take you as much as 1.5 to 2 hours a week. By shopping online, you can re-use previous lists quickly browse specials and manage your budget. The food shows up when you schedule it and voila you have saved 1.5 (or more) hours in your week. Might not seem like much on the surface, but across a year that’s more than three full days of time!

Everyone has their own tolerance and ability to reshuffle their lives. Know that incredible time gains are possible, but you have to invest yourself in making them possible. Any change likely will involve others, be it your boss or your spouse, and as such will not happen automagically. Do things right and you could have more time to train, be a more effective worker and spend more quality time with the people who matter.

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It’s not easy to keep things down to just five areas, but anything more and they’d just be another list to manage. Do your best to follow these core concepts as you go through the daily/weekly/monthly exercise of running your training life, and you’ll be well on your way to having the Fit Life you deserve!

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