Week 004- GORUCK Selection Training- The Ups and Downs Of Training
Improving 10% a week over a month is harder than improving 30% over a week.
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I had a post last month about committing to consistency. Consistency is hard. It’s not glamourous. It doesn’t have the same dopamine kick after doing double the workout that you planned that day.
Consistency is consistent.
There’s no magic formula to consistency. The foundation of consistency is knowing how to prioritize. Often in life, we might set a goal to do something but we don’t want to do it unless if it takes away from something else.
Here’s the problem. No one has spare time hanging around. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day as everyone else.
You have to take a hard look at what you spend your time on to maintain consistency.
I slept in this morning and missed out on some time to write. Did I decide that I wasn’t going to write altogether today? Of course I didn’t. I had some time on my lunch break at work today to write so I decided to utilize that time block instead. If I hadn’t prepared myself yesterday and didn’t meal prep my lunch yesterday, I may not have had the time to write.
In Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile, he writes about how some things gain strength through disorder. We might all think that we are strong when times are tough but the truth is, most of us are not. If one thing changes in our day, it can create a domino effect that ruins our entire day.
Often this is an all-or-nothing mindset. An all-or-nothing mindset is the antithesis of being antifragile. It’s the thing that will cause us to crumble when things do not go our way.
An all-or-nothing mindset is when we don’t have a full hour to workout so we don’t do it at all, even though we had 20 minutes.
An all-or-nothing mindset is when we decide to forget eating healthy today because we ate a cookie earlier.
An all-or-nothing mindset is when we decide not to write a post because one little piece of it doesn’t seem right to us, so we decide to put the piece on hold.
Not only is an all-or-nothing mindset the antithesis of being antifragile, it’s an enemy of consistency.
When we are trying to be consistency at something, tell ourselves that we have to do everything or otherwise it was for nothing. The truth is, the only way to be consistent is to embrace the disorder of the things around you. Things are not always going to go right but it’s your job to make sure that things go as right as they can.
I’m training for GoRuck Selection, one of the hardest endurance events in the world. Doing this event is the definition of things not going right. The first thing the Cadre’s (who run the event) do to you is try to give you a shakedown. They’ll make you dump everything out of your bag and put it back in as quickly as possible. There’s no time to find that perfect place you can put that one little thing, you have to get it in the bag as soon as possible.
Never let perfection get in the way of goal. Perfection comes when you take a lot of imperfect steps towards it and you stumble upon it by accident.