How Endurance Sports Create Life Capacity

“EVERYTHING IS TRAINING”

When something goes wrong in my day and forces me to have to take on more to overcome it I’m grateful. Why?

Because I train in endurance sports and get to incorporate this new obstacle into the way I mentally prepare and execute for hard training sessions and grueling competitions.

I was reminded of this capacity this week in both directions and want to take the opportunity to dissect a bit of the day to day ways I apply these endurance lessons into my life.

Colorado Dreaming

Gazing at the top of Mt. Sanitas Saturday morning

This past weekend I flew out to Colorado to run trails, live coach athletes, and continue building Tribal Training with head coach and founder

Ryan Dreyer

. It was a quick hit but a powerful one. I’ll write another post about this experience, but for now let’s just take the logistics of travel and the workouts we did.

I flew into Denver after dropping my kids off at school Friday morning. Upon arriving in Boulder, I immediately turned around and went for a 4 mile run with

Blaine Bursey

before heading out to an intellectual discussion at a local church.

Late night Friday moved right into an early morning sunrise trail run. This was a 2 1/2 hour, 11 mile, 2300ft of climb, effort that took us to two mountain tops. Big time effort on little sleep and fuel. We then immediately went to a coffee shop and hosted the first even ‘Run / Write / Build’ workshop with 2 of the athletes Ryan and I coach in a 2-1 capacity. Early night to bed but wow, still so tired!

Sunday morning was the same, early morning sunrise trail run. This time only 75 minutes, 6 miles, 1300ft of climb. We even threw down some hill sprints in the middle of this one. The compounding affect of the altitude, little rest, and irregular diet all started to hit me Sunday afternoon and I was ready to get home and rest up.

But my flight got delayed and I made it home at 1am in the morning. A wild weekend of endurance training no doubt, but the real test was about to begin.

Life is Always an Endurance Race

When I get home I don’t have the luxury to sleep in and take a day to recover. I have to get right back into my responsibilities.

Watching the sunrise at 6:24am, little man woke up 2 minutes later

My wife was leaving early Monday morning on her own 4 day business trip, effectively we tagged eachother in our sleep as solo parents.

Here’s 3 ways my endurance training showed up to help me win the next few days at home while dog tired from a trip centered around endurance training

1. Express Gratitude

   Endurance Sports are HARD. They force you into grueling physical efforts and take a lot of time in your already busy day.

   But they take you to beautiful places, make you uncommon in uncommon company, challenge you to rise to a higher standard, and help you forge lifelong relationships. They force you to be grateful.

   Walking into my house at 1 am knowing I’d need to be up in 5 hours to get my 2 kids off to school didn’t have me dreading the potential adversity.

   Instead I was overwhelmingly grateful to have a loving family that supported me to go off and explore the mountains on the weekend for the work I do.

   It made it easy for me to see that I needed to show up for them, instead of complain about ‘what was going wrong for me.

2. Manage Expectations

   With gratitude in your heart it’s easy to find the right aim.

   Monday and Tuesday were going to be rough on 3 days of little sleep and heavy on training. I already prepared the week before to have low creative output and energy. I moved some of my coaching calls to later in the week. I worked harder last week to load up content.

   My expectations were to place all my energy in parenting and house organization. That stuff takes a lot of energy, especially as a solo parent.

   My kids deserve a parent who’s focused solely on helping them manage their tough days, and because I had the right aim, I wasn’t worried about what I couldn’t produce in work.

3. Pace The Effort

   This led to my execution on Monday and Tuesday.

   Rather than try to grab an extra hour of sleep, I set my watch alarm to 6AM so I could still get up before my kids on Monday morning. I require that early morning silence to help prepare me for the potential chaos of the day.

   If one of my kids wakes me up, and I’m not well rested, we start the day behind. We’re rushing. I’m short with the kids because I’m too tired to be patient. We fight. It’s going to be a mess.

   Understanding pacing I know this morning shift takes a lot of energy and I leveraged all mine to hit this portion of the day smoothly. Once completed, I came home and hit light calls, did house chores, and got in some light exercise on both days.

   After school, my kids are tired but I still need high energy so I don’t want to over tax myself and have a bad night that leads to a bad morning the next day.

Your Turn To Apply

I often forget that I’m a fish swimming in water. It’s natural for me now to see the ways my training and life connect to help me grow as an individual. But for most, they still need to take their first steps in embodying this process.

Here’s my best advice on how to start mining your own athletic experiences for the deep life lessons and opportunities for character growth.

1.Be intentional in training

• Don’t just train for the sake of it.

• Have a purpose and plan.

• Set goals and hold yourself accountable.

• Move in ways that you enjoy and make you want to push hard and challenge your skills.

2.Reflect on the direct experience

• Think intently about how you were challenged and pushed through.

• Ask questions of others who train in similar ways to help you better understand your efforts.

• Create a consistent and conscious system of refinement.

• Become honest in looking at the results dispassionately.

3.Imagine how you’d teach others

• Brainstorm tips to pass on to beginners.

• Imagine ways you could improve another person’s experience with some advice.

• Recognize that gaps in your own experiences.

• Become ruthless is applying the truth of the effort to improve in body, mind, and spirit.

4.Aim the synthesis towards your life outside athletics

• Identify where the gap between your expectation, the result, and what you had control over.

• Recognize similarities in how you think about challenge and your ability to break through adversity in training to other domains you want to improve in.

• Take the true self knowledge generated through training at face value, and become confident in seeing the limits without harsh judgement.

• Reveal what truly matters as your priorities and endeavor to aim directly there in body, mind, and spirit.

If you keep consistent in this pattern, you’ll know so much truth about yourself that taking lessons from your training becomes automatic. The connections are bright in your mind, and the ways to apply become clear, even if they always remain difficult to implement consistently.

What you have is a process of self discovery with the road towards self mastery.

This is the proper way to use sports, to become better individuals in body, mind, and spirit.

The power is in your hands.

If you need a guide, message me using the button below and I’d be honored to help you calibrate your aim in fitness towards the deep truth about yourself. So that you can live day to day in a way that helps you bring the best of yourself to what matters most inside your heart.

Happy Training Team!