Earned, Not Given- Chapter 3: Solving Problems
Identifying a problem to solve is crucial for achieving your goals.
Previous chapter:
About a week after recovering from the Heavy and getting back home to Chicago, I was thinking about when I’m going to give the next event a try. I was convinced that if I didn’t get blisters on the bottoms of my feet, I would have been able to do the HTL. This gave me a direct problem to solve. How do I not get blisters on the bottoms of my feet?
This taught me a lesson about how to overcome challenges in life. When you have a challenge that may seem difficult or even impossible, identity what the problem is that’s in the way. My problem was my feet. My body was able to go but I had to do something to solve the problem of getting horrific blisters on my feet again.
How do I solve this problem? At first, I thought that I had to toughen up my feet. I started to do rucks barefoot on the sidewalks around my apartment complex.
I tested out numerous types of ways to cover up the skin on your foot to make sure that there is a layer between your foot and the friction that hits it. I did a couple test runs with moleskin on the bottoms of my feet but it kept inevitably falling off. If it couldn’t last during an hour run, there’s no way that it was going to last during any GoRuck event.
Eventually I found something called Leukotape. It’s a tape with a zinc oxide adhesive that gets stickier with friction. Maybe this was the magic thing that I was looking for to cover my feet.
I found a few YouTube videos of people demonstrating how they taped up their feet before doing intense hikes and runs. I tried the same method on my feet and it was like magic. The tape didn’t roll off or move during the entire run. Whether or not this would protect me from blisters after being on my feet for 24+ hours was unknown but I did know one thing- this stuff wasn’t going to fall off.
Training
Now it was time to figure out what I was going to do for training.
The job I was working at the time was in Operations for a Medical Device company. My role was mainly on my feet checking in the kits that would return from hospitals after being used. I was constantly lifting 20-40 pound totes throughout the work day.
Training outside of work was not easy with my job. I was consistently working from 7am-5pm most days and had about a 45 minute commute one way. This meant, I was away from home from about 6:15am to almost 5:45pm every day. I had to figure out something to make sure I didn’t miss out on one of my dreams.
How would I figure out how to make training work without burning myself out? I started to rethink what it means to burnout. I think that burnout comes from when a part of your life is taking away from another part of your life that you find is important.
If you miss out on achieving your dreams because you work too many hours at a job, you’ll eventually become resentful of that job. When you’re making sacrifices that do not feel are voluntary, eventually those sacrifices come back in the form of resentment.
I knew that if I gave up and allowed myself to get out of shape (or just maintain) while working this job, I would become resentful and I would not allow that to happen.
I put every option on the table that was possible to make this training work, no matter how crazy it sounded.
Wake up at 4:30am to train.
Train immediately after work.
Train on my lunch break (I get an hour lunch).
Do two a days or even three a days if I have too.
Wear my rucksack & weight to work while working.
Wait, what? Wear my rucksack to work while working? This idea seemed crazy to me. What would my coworkers think of me? What would my bosses think of me? Do I want to be stigmatized as the weird guy at work that wears a rucksack all day? If my job performance suffers, people are going to start blaming it on me wearing a rucksack all day.
It was worth a shot though. If I wore my rucksack to work, that would give me at least 4x more time of wearing my rucksack than outside of work if I wore it just half the day. I estimated that I walked about 6-7 miles a day in my job.
If I was going to accomplish this task of doing the HTL, I had to make it a part of my lifestyle. This isn’t a hobby. It can’t be a hobby because a hobby is something you do when you feel like it. It has to become something more than that.
The challenge of doing an endurance event isn’t the event itself, it’s the training for it. The event is a test of what you did during your training. If you do not prepare, you’re unlikely to perform well. The harder the event becomes, the long the commitment you have to have in your training.
The event we were targeting was the GoRuck HTL in Chicago. It was another 9/11 event. About 3-4 months before the event, I started to wear my rucksack with a 20 pound plate in it to work every day. I would keep both my 20 and 30 pound plates in my car from this day forward so I would always have the option in how much weight I wanted to carry. I figured to start light on a daily basis then move up weight in a couple weeks after 20 pounds felt okay. That’s exactly what I did.
I definitely sweated at the office a little more. My range of motion picking up totes was definitely a little restricted but I don’t think that my job performance suffered in any way so no one at the office said anything. Initially, everyone asked me, “what’s up with the backpack?”
I told them that I was training for an endurance event and wanted to get used to wearing it for a while. After that, no one really said anything about it. Although my boss would every now and then would sing the Dorah the Explorer song Backpack, Backpack making fun of me a little bit but it didn’t bother me. It’s the price to pay for attempting to do something great.
After training became a part of my lifestyle, this became my workout schedule throughout the week: Monday
Upper Body lifting & run a few miles
Tuesday
Lower Body lifting and a few miles of running
Wednesday
Yoga class. More of a rest day
Thursday
Upper Body lifting with a running a few miles
Friday
Lower Body lifting with running a few miles
Saturday
Long ruck or long run day. The purpose of today was to be on my feet for a while
Sunday
Day off or go to an evening yoga class.
I’ve never minded my schedule being completely filled up with things. I like to keep busy and training was a great way to keep my mind off of other stressors in life.
Would this be enough training? I wasn’t entirely sure. There are a lot of training programs out there but it’s hard because you have to build a program that works for you. The best program is the one that you can do to 100%, not the one that you can do 50% of. If you’re consistent, you have to trust in the process that every day you are getting a little better each day.
See the next part of this story in the link below. You can also find the ebook of this story here.
