Life Lesson # 4 – Perspective

Life is fast. Life gets crazy. And sometimes you’ve just got to decide to put it all back right again. I’ve just finished a 2 week stretch, 16 days actually, of work averaging probably 12 hours a day. Half of that was doing the night shift. And by the end of this stretch, I felt strung out, and my family felt strung out. We need to intentionally do that resetting, and we are. My wife and I leave for a week long Caribbean retreat to celebrate our 16th anniversary Friday. I’m juiced.

Amazingly, through this stretch I have been able to keep up my triathlon training which culminated in a 60 mile ride in 25mph wind yesterday afternoon after I recovered from my last night of work by sleeping the morning away. But I didn’t try to match to schedule to my training, I adjusted my training to my schedule. Knowing that this stretch was coming, I timed my training so that one of my cut-back weeks was scheduled during this time. So last week, after I was done sleeping and my kids were still at school, I did BRICKS. I alternated swimming, biking, and running, each for an hour at at time combining two hours back to back each day while rotating through the three disciplines. And it worked marvelously. But I didn’t try to fit a round peg into the triangular hole. Sometimes training and life take the proper perspective.

At the YMCA where I do my swim, treadmill, and some of my BRICK work, I recently came across a copy of Relevant magazine. The subtitle reads “God. Life. Progressive Culture.” I have heard of it prior but have never checked it out so I swiped it for my own reading pleasure (and will return it if anyone is offended by my swiping). I am in no way endorsing the publication by putting a quote from the editor here. In fact, I don’t even know if I like the magazine. It seems a bit like the same old, same old in just different packaging in some ways, but I am still holding out judgment as I haven’t had the time to look through it in detail yet. But the quote is good and relevant to this idea of keeping things in the proper perspective so I will share it. From page 6 of the May/June 09 issue, Editor Cameron Strang:

“My life’s priorities had flipped without me intending them to, and I needed to intentionally bring balance into my life and how I spent my time. I had gotten so busy with what I felt I was doing ‘for’ God, I started to lose my relationship with [God]. In the midst of the stress, I was becoming a shell of the man I wanted to be. A void in my heart had formed, and I’d filled the void with more busyness-harming my friendships and marriage in the process. Worse yet, I didn’t even see it was happening.”

There is a lot more to say about this quote such as can we really do anything ‘for’ God? Does God even need us to do anything ‘for’ God? Blah, blah, blah. But I put this in here because of the view it gives me of getting out of perspective. It is so easy to get so busy doing stuff for bosses, or friends, or God, or whomever or whatever that we often forget to take care of ourselves and our closest relationships. We have to quit forcing square things into non-square holes if we ever expect to be in a good place of peace and balance. I have likened this in the past to riding life like a wave, flexing and flowing to what comes instead of forcing.

Triathlon helps teach me this idea of perspective. It is such a huge task, that it can overtake your life, and then it destroys your life and your ability to do triathlon. It’s critical to approach it with perspective.

Training Routine

I’ve had a few people ask what my training schedule is like so I will lay the outline out here. Right now I am training for a 70.3 so my weekly training hours are between 10-15 hours depending on how hard of a week it is. I generally cycle through a 4 week rotation of increasing intensity and distance followed by a relative rest week. During each intensity week I try to increase distances and times by about 10%. During a cut back week I decrease to about 75% of what I was doing in intensity and distance. Later on this year when I am pushing for my Ironman race I will be averaging about 15 – 18 or even 20 hours per week. Most of it is done early AM except swims which I generally do over lunch and my long ride which is generally on a day off or afternoon off.

Sunday: Usually rest. Sometimes a strength/ab workout.

Monday: 60 min cycle intervals sometimes in the form of a spin class. 30 minute run. TaeKwonDo for 60 min in the evening for core and flexibility and provides some interval type training also.

Tuesday: Long run AM. Swim lunch. I sometimes switch Monday and Tuesday.

Wed: 60 min cycle intervals. 30 min run. TaeKwonDo 60 min.

Thurs: 60 min cycle intervals. 30 min run. Swim at lunch. Strength/ab workout.

Friday: Long ride. TaeKwonDo 60 min.

Saturday: Intense BRICK. For example a 2 hour ride followed by an hour run at faster than race pace. Strenght/ab workout.

For my strength workouts I use P90X. It is far superior to any machine or free weight workout. I use their ab routine also.

I’ll try and get a separate page posted in tabular form so that it can be looked at in a cleaner fashion.

My New HED 3’s

Rode my new wheels today for the first time. And they are sweeeeeet! Since they are carbon fiber, they make the ride softer. I could tell a difference when I got a carbon fiber bike and think I could tell a difference today too with the new wheels. Awesome. Here is a picture of my setup that I took after my ride today.

I was in a bit of a time pinch so I didn’t yet get the magnet for my computer glued to the spoke yet so didn’t have an exact speed reading. I did 22 miles in 1 hour and 4 minutes though which is above 20mph average. The wind today is about 15mph gusting. I did a 1 hr 45 min run yesterday and a 90 minute BRICK on Monday plus an hour of TaeKwonDo so I was feeling a bit tired today before the ride. All that considered I feel good about my ride and felt like it was a bit easier to maintain that pace with the new HED’s. I get the magnet put on tonight so I can get some more objective data. I followed today’s ride with a 3 mile run at 6.5mph pace and then a mile swim. In just a few minutes I will go to another hour of TaeKwonDo with my boys.

Tomorrow will be a rest day. I am on call so work will be from 7 AM to 10 PM not giving much time for training. During my call weeks I get 2-3 afternoons free so Friday I will do a 50 mile ride and another swim. Saturday I am going to go for a 2.5 hour ride followed by a 1.5 hour run for a 4.0 hour total. Sunday will be a 90 minute BRICK. Monday a 2 hour run. Rest Tuesday. With the higher intensity this week before next weeks cut back week while I am on night call I am holding on my formal strength workouts. I will get them back up and running next week.

And, yes, John, Friday afternoon I am going down to the massage therapist a mile away and get a massage. I do feel that I need it.

Life Lesson #3 – Rest

I find that I am a very driven person as I would guess that most people who consider themselves “triathletes” are. To do this and manage a full time career which requires an average of 50-60 hours of work per week plus a family with two boys who love sports and a wife who deserves my best, takes a certain amount of discipline and drive. And I thrive on that challenge and on continually trying to do it better. One of the dangers of being that type of individual is going too hard and too fast for too long and then finding yourself crumpled in a heap and lost. I have learned this the hard way in a major way at least once, and I don’t want to end up there again. As it pertains to triathlon and endurance sports and really any athletic endeavor, this is known as overtraining, and as a sports med doc colleague of mine said to me, “That is a deep dark hole that is a long time climbing out .” Agreed. Luckily I had enough sense to know where I was headed as it was happening to me and took preemptive measures before I got too far down into that hole. I wrote about this experience on my only blog at the time, and if you care to read the details of it you can check it out here.

The important point here is the value of rest. I pulled myself out of the darkness by resting. Intentional rest. Purposeful rest. And I had to fight feeling that I was being lazy. It was almost as horrible to fight that within myself as it was to go through the pain of training. But intellectually and medically I understood that the only way out was to give myself a break. So I am commenting on this today as  life lesson because today is my purposeful rest day. At the most, I will do one of my upper body strength routines which only takes about 30 minutes and is low aerobic stress. The remainder of the day will be rest. I will probably even take a bit of a nap. In the last week I have swam 3 miles, biked 100 miles, run 20 miles, done 3 strength routines, done 3 hours of Taekwondo for a total of about 15 hours of training. So today I will rest.

It took some time for me to get it through my thick head that training is not what makes you stronger. Resting is what makes you stronger. Training and stress breaks your body, your mind, your spirit. Then when you rest and give it time to heal, it heals back stronger. We tend to think that we need to do more and more and more to get stronger. But without intentional regular rest, it is of no use. Now of course if all you do is rest, you will end up a fat blob with heart disease, diabetes, metaboic syndrome, hypertension, depression, and co-dependency on the system to solve your problems for you. You will die young and end up at some point struggling for survival. That sounds like hell on earth to me. I want no part of it.

So Life Lesson #3 is how important it is to drive yourself and then rest. Not just in athletics but in other areas too. We used to be a part of a church where the basic expectation was that you were there every time the doors were open, that you had some area of “ministry” within the church, and that you bought into what they told you to believe. What this resulted in was going to 2 services on Sunday, a worship band practice on Wednesday, usually some other sort of meeting another night of the week, some wedding or baby shower on Sunday evening, some 5,000 year marriage reception on Sunday afternoon, and some other extra church-wide activity at least a couple of times a month not to mention at home time spent studying for lessons that we had to teach or music that we had to play or “homework” that had to be completed for whatever study we were a part of. It was ridiculous. We were running ourselves into the ground. It was destroying our family. So we decided we were going to rest. We now go to one, at the most two, gatherings per week at a very small, close-knit church made up of people who were just as beat up as we. We are resting.

So push yourself hard. Really hard. Expect the best. But don’t forget to rest. It’s the most important part. God seemed to know what he was saying when he suggested that rest on the 7th day was fairly important.