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.
