Week 001 Committing To Consistency

Learning to love silence.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

Having a good week doesn’t mean to let your foot off the gas. I had a good week of training this week but sometimes that’s the place where we can get complacent. I was able to run 30 miles and get 3 days of rucking in. I carried an 60 pound sandbag for a mile with 20 lbs in my ruck. It’s strange how carrying something tires you out in a different way than any other form of exercise. Even though my shoulders didn’t feel great afterwards, I learned that I need to get used to carrying things further.

There’s a few things that I need to begin to integrate into my training. One of those things is going to be to use all opportunities to strengthen my mind. For example, I’m used to running with music on and training with music on. Come event time, it’s not going to be an option. I need to begin training without any music on. About midway through this week, I began doing it and honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. The first 5 minutes of a run felt like that I needed to hear something but then I fell into the trance of the sounds around me.

Hearing the sound of my feet hitting the pavement, the weight shifting around in my pack and water sloshing around was annoying at first. Then I realized that it is something that is normal. What isn’t normal is to hear music 80% of your day. Humans evolved creating music but we didn’t evolve to hear music all the time in every waking hour like we do now. Sometimes the quiet and monotonous sounds is what we need. Sometimes we need to find time to find space in our own head.

Drowning out the space in our head with a bombardment of sounds probably isn’t good for us. Sometimes my best thoughts in writing have come from when I don’t listen to music when I run. My mind will wonder into my surroundings. Even if they are similar surroundings that I have seen day in and day out. One thing that I have learned is that no surrounding is ever the same but only similar. The world is constantly changing. Even what appears to be the mundane can be slightly different on a new day.

Finding The Little Things

I decided to start taking the stairs whenever the opportunity came about. When I took a step back, I realized that if I took the stairs just half of the time, I would climb between 60-100 flights of stairs a day. I live on the 10^th floor of my building and it only takes me about 2 minutes to climb them. Sometimes, I wait 2 minutes for the elevator so there’s no lost time here.

Another piece of the puzzle that I’m fully taking on is run commuting to work. While I started doing this sometimes this spring, I was only doing it part way. I would normally take the CTA to the Metra Station downtown, ride that to the stop that was closest to my office and run from there. It’s about a 2 mile run or 4 miles for the whole day. It’s not too bad and saves me the headache from sitting in traffic for 3 hours a day.

However, what if I started running to the Metra Station from home and back? That would add another 3.5 miles or 7 miles for the whole day. Timing wise, it only adds about 20 minutes of commuting to my day.

On Thursday this week, I decided to do it and my body felt great. I didn’t feel over exhausted from the run. The goal wasn’t to run a PR pace the entire way home. The goal was to run at around a zone two, light zone three pace the entire way.

Commit To Consistency

Consistency can be hard. Even if you’ve done something for months, it feels like it can be easy to fall back into old habits. That’s happened to me. I don’t have a normal day in and day out routine and schedule. I work from home on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Tuesday and Thursday, I run commute into my office. It’s not something that I do every day.

Even after committing to the same routine for a month and executing it, it feels like I could fall back into my old habits after slacking for one day. Similar to how one drink can cause an addict to derail, one day feels like it can throw everything off.

The key is not to beat yourself up to hard when you do have a bad day. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be days off where you’re not going to be able to keep your routine going to a perfect level. The trick is to make sure you do your best with it. Sometimes, it may seem like it’s not worth it to workout for 20 minutes when it’s the only time that you have for the entire day to work out. It may not be worth it on a physiological level. Honestly, it probably doesn’t move the needle that much. However, it does tell your mind that you are committed to the goal. It tells you that you will extract every little thing that you can to achieve your goal. That’s where the magic happens.

Commit to doing the little things right. If you do that right, then the big things will come on their own.

This week of training is going to be this:

Monday: Short 3 mile run

Tuesday: Run commute (11 miles total)- Lift weights on lunch break

Wednesday: Speed work – Core work on lunch break

Thursday: Run commute (11 miles total)- Lift weights on lunch break

Friday: Ruck workout – Ruck for about 1 hour, do sandbag workout

Saturday: Long run (2 hours)

Sunday: Long ruck (lighter weight, active recovery ruck)

This process of training has been about improving upon what my weaknesses are and learning along the way. I have an idea of where I want my training plan to go but the training plan isn’t permanently tied to me. If there are adjustments I need to make along the way, I will make them.

Here’s to week 2 of training. The goal this week is to remain consistent.

If you’re interested in following me train for one of the hardest endurance events on the planet. I will keep consistently posting here.