The Racing Weight system, which encompasses the six steps we’ve discussed in the preceding chapters, is not a diet program that you start on a particular day and stop several weeks later. Nor is it even a diet program that you start on one particular day and continue indefinitely. It is a set of tools that you use when you need them—namely, when you’re trying to attain your racing weight for an upcoming race or series of races.
At other times you may not need these tools, or you may need a different set of tools. During breaks between performance-focused training cycles, it’s not a bad idea to eat however you please for a couple of weeks. This will get any pent-up desire for low-quality foods and overindulgence “out of your system” so that you can get back on the Racing Weight system with renewed motivation when it’s time to start training for your next race or races.
After your off-season break ends and before your next training cycle begins, you may choose to complete a four- to eight-week program for accelerated weight loss that I call a quick start. The purpose of a quick start is to shed excess body fat at a faster rate than you can within the training cycle, when performance is your top priority, through methods that are best kept outside the training cycle. The point of the quick start is not necessarily to take you all the way to your ideal weight and body composition but rather to get a quick start toward them. Any remaining excess body fat can come off more gradually on the Racing Weight system within the training cycle.
Quick starts are also appropriate for beginning endurance athletes who are significantly above their racing weight. An eight-week quick start will take these men and women down to a more comfortable weight at which to start training for their first race while also establishing a solid foundation of general fitness to build on. Beginners who are more than 20 pounds overweight may choose to extend their initial quick start beyond eight weeks. Theoretically, doing so would yield more weight loss in the athlete’s first year or so in the sport than an eight-week quick start followed by a longer performance-focused training cycle.
However, in most cases I think it’s best for beginners to hold their initial quick start to eight weeks and then get ready to race. After all, the goal of completing a race is more motivating than the goal of losing weight. Competitive goals encourage a higher level of dietary and exercise compliance than weight-loss goals, and therefore in the long term they produce better results.
It sometimes takes years for athletes who start their sporting journey overweight to attain their ideal racing weight. Few men and women who remain focused on weight loss as their primary goal have the patience to adhere to their program long enough to reach their destination. But those whose primary goal becomes improvement in their sport tend to stay consistent with their program because they are being rewarded—with better performance and its “side effect” of fat loss—every step of the way. I’ll say more on this topic in the final section of this chapter.
Endurance athletes are accustomed to dividing the year into training phases. The central phase is the performance-focused training cycle, which starts when the athlete begins to seriously ramp up for a race or series of races and ends when this race or series is completed. The offseason is a period of relative rest between performance-focused training cycles. The preseason is a period of general preparation for the start of the next training cycle. In most endurance sports this is a period of heightened focus on strength development. Among cyclists and mountain bikers it is often also a period of aggressive weight dropping. For example, Jeremiah Bishop, winner of multiple national championships in mountain biking, maintains a daily energy deficit of 200 to 400 calories to drop weight before the start of a new racing season. He tries to keep his off-season weight gain to no more than 5–7 pounds because it takes a lot of work to get back to his racing weight, and that time would be better spent on quality training.
Because training and diet are synergistic, an endurance athlete’s diet should have phases that match these three training phases. Within the training cycle the diet needs to support optimal training performance and facilitate the loss of excess body fat. In the off-season the athlete’s dietary standards can be relaxed a bit, at least for the first two weeks. And during the preseason, or quick start period, the athlete eats to promote fat loss first and to support his or her training second.
Some endurance athletes will find that they cycle through these three phases once a year. An example is a cyclist who races from late spring through fall, takes a break for the holidays, and then starts preseason training after the New Year. Other athletes complete two cycles of all three phases. An example of this type is a runner who does a marathon in the spring and another in the fall with off-season breaks after each. Still others pack a trio of three-phase cycles into the year. An example of this type is a multidiscipline cyclist who does mostly road races in the summer, mountain bike events in the fall, and cyclocross competitions in the winter.
Table 10.1 summarizes the training and diet phases of athletes who complete one, two, or three full cycles in one year.
Regardless of how many racing weight cycles you complete within a year, you will practice the Racing Weight system the same way within each performance-focused training cycle. Each step is largely independent of the others, but when you’re practicing all six together, they create a cohesive whole.
All of the steps allow and indeed require a degree of individualism in their execution. For example, daily carbohydrate requirements differ by body weight and training volume. There is also a natural evolution in some of the steps, such that they are not practiced in exactly the same way after a year or two as they are initially. For example, when you start to practice step 1, you will keep a daily food journal and calculate daily Diet Quality Scores as you seek to improve your diet quality. But once you’ve raised your diet quality to a level that works for you, daily food journaling and diet-quality scoring can be set aside as long as your diet remains consistent.
Here’s a brief summary of how the six steps of the Racing Weight system are practiced together within the performance-focused training cycle:
1 IMPROVE YOUR DIET QUALITY. Start by keeping a daily food journal and calculating a daily DQS. Continue this as you make changes to your habitual eating patterns to increase your DQS. When your typical DQS is high enough to move you toward your racing weight, you may stop keeping a food journal and calculating your daily DQS, again provided your diet is consistent thereafter. Repeat this process whenever you make any significant change to your eating habits.
2 MANAGE YOUR APPETITE. Experience the difference between belly hunger and head hunger with a two-day appetite calibration. Thereafter use the mindful eating methods to satisfy your belly hunger only, and avoid additional, mindless eating from head hunger. All of these methods are optional. Find out which ones work best for you, and then stick with them.
3 BALANCE YOUR ENERGY SOURCES. Begin your first Racing Weight cycle by using Table 6.1 to calculate your daily carbohydrate requirement. Next use the food journal you’re already keeping for diet-quality scoring purposes to calculate how much carbohydrate you’re actually consuming. Adjust your diet as necessary to meet your requirement. Recalculate your carbohydrate needs as your training load and body weight change.
4 MONITOR YOUR PROGRESS. Measure your body weight at least once a week and as often as once a day throughout each training cycle. Measure your body fat percentage at least once every four weeks and as often as once a week. Complete a sport-specific performance test once every four weeks.
5 TIME YOUR NUTRIENTS. Start eating breakfast every day if you don’t already. Determine how many times a day you need to eat to avoid unacceptable levels of hunger at any point in the day and to support your training optimally. Once you’ve settled on a frequency that works for you—whether it’s just three meals or three meals plus one to three snacks—stick with it until changes in your training load require you to add or eliminate snacking occasions. Establish habits of consuming fluid and carbs and perhaps also a little protein during your more challenging workouts and of taking in recovery nutrition within 45 minutes of completing each workout.
6 TRAIN FOR RACING WEIGHT. Train by the 80/20 rule: Do approximately 80 percent of your training at lower intensities and 20 percent at and above the lactate threshold. Perform two to three full-body strength workouts per week.
A majority of elite endurance athletes I’ve surveyed on the topic of offseason diet tell me they eat less carefully during the off-season than they do within the training cycle. The rationale for such dietary slacking off is not physiological but rather psychological. Athletes find it easier to eat with great discipline within the training cycle when they give themselves an opportunity to reward that discipline between training cycles.
Weight gain tends to be unavoidable for many athletes in the offseason because of a reduction in training. When reduced training is combined with a slacker diet, the likelihood of weight gain is further increased. A small amount of off-season weight gain is not a bad thing. In fact it’s a good thing inasmuch as it results from giving yourself a needed physical and mental break from the training and dietary rigors of the training cycle.
All too many endurance athletes gain too much fat in the off-season, however. Cyclist Jan Ullrich was infamous for letting himself go during the winter. His racing weight was 158 pounds, but he would routinely show up for his team’s first training camp of the year at 180 pounds. He would perform poorly throughout the early season as he scrambled to work his body back into shape in time for July’s Tour de France. Many cycling experts believe Ullrich would have won more than the one Tour he claimed at age 24 if he had taken better care of himself during the off-season.
Thanks to favorable genes, a few endurance athletes can slack off as much as they want in the off-season without putting on a whole bunch of fat (although not necessarily without losing a ton of fitness), but most endurance athletes, like most humans in general, have a built-in potential for rapid weight gain. The transition from peak-season training to off-season slacking presents the perfect circumstances for this potential to be unleashed.
The most effective way to prevent off-season weight gain from getting out of hand is to set a specific weight-gain limit. I suggest you try to limit your off-season weight gain to no more than 8 percent of your optimal performance weight. So if your optimal performance weight is 162 pounds, you should avoid gaining more than 13 pounds during the off-season. It so happens that my marathon racing weight is 154 pounds, and my off-season weight naturally peaks at 165 pounds (a difference of just over 7 percent) when I’m doing everything an endurance athlete should do in terms of training and nutrition at this time of year. But this 8 percent rule is not based only on my personal experience. It has been confirmed as a good rule of thumb by a number of other athletes, coaches, and sports nutritionists with whom I have discussed the topic of off-season weight gain.
Understand, however, that this rule is not an allowance to gain 8 percent of your end-of-season weight during the off-season regardless of what your end-of-season weight is. It is only an allowance to gain 8 percent relative to your optimal racing weight. If your weight is above optimum at the end of your competitive season, you should still limit your off-season weight gain to 8 percent relative to your (known or estimated) optimum. Thus, if you are already above your optimal racing weight at the end of the competitive season, you should try to avoid gaining any more weight during the off-season.
The amount of weight you gain during the off-season depends on how much or little you train, how much your diet changes, and the length of your break. The last factor is likely to be determined by your future racing plans, which are completely up to you. Regardless of how long your off-season lasts, the initial period of zero training and eating whatever you want should last no longer than two weeks. After that you will need to reintroduce enough of the Racing Weight system to stay within 8 percent of your racing weight until you begin the next phase of the Racing Weight cycle: the quick start.
The appropriate length of a quick start depends on how far above your racing weight you are when it begins. If you’re less than 10 pounds above your racing weight, a four-week quick start will suffice. If you’re between 10 and 20 pounds above your racing weight, a six-week quick start is best. If you’re more than 20 pounds above your racing weight, try an eight-week quick start.
Whatever its length, your quick start is intended to yield faster weight loss than is possible within the training cycle, when building fitness is your top priority. Your nutrition and training practices in the quick start period are necessarily different from those in the performance cycle. There are five key dietary and training components of a quick start.
MODERATE CALORIE DEFICIT. To lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than your body burns each day. In a quick start, your daily calorie deficit needs to be large enough to promote fairly rapid loss of excess body fat, yet not so large that you lack sufficient energy to perform well in your workouts. The calorie deficit “sweet spot” is 300 to 500 calories per day.
STRENGTH TRAINING. During a quick start you should make a greater commitment to strength training than you do within the training cycle. Research has shown that when a calorie deficit is combined with strength training, nearly all of the resulting weight loss is actual fat loss. When a calorie deficit is not combined with strength training, weight loss is equal but body fat loss is less, because muscle mass is lost too. Building strength before you begin your performance-focused training will also give you a solid structural foundation to absorb that training.
INCREASED PROTEIN INTAKE. While carbohydrate is king within the training cycle, I recommend that athletes switch to a highprotein diet—getting as much as 30 percent of their daily calories from protein—during the several weeks of a quick start. Protein is the most filling nutrient, and research has shown that “dieters” experience significantly less hunger when they combine a calorie deficit with increased protein intake. A high-protein diet will also help you get more out of your strength training.
FASTING WORKOUTS. A fasting workout is a long, moderate-intensity workout undertaken in a fasting state—that is, without a meal beforehand and without carbohydrate consumption on the bike. When you deprive your muscles of carbohydrate in a long workout, they burn a lot more fat. Such workouts also boost general fat-burning capacity. I suggest that you perform one fasting workout per week during a quick start.
POWER INTERVALS. Your training volume is necessarily lower during a quick start than it is during the performance-focused training cycle. You can’t maintain maximum training volume year-round, or you’ll burn out. Obviously, the higher your training volume is, the more calories you burn. So when your training volume is lower, as it is in a quick start, you need to burn calories in alternative ways.
Power interval sessions are one such alternative. These workouts consist of large numbers of very short intervals performed at maximum intensity (e.g., 20 × 20 seconds all out). Research has demonstrated that power intervals promote a high rate of fat burning in the hours that follow the session through a phenomenon known as EPOC (excess postexercise oxygen consumption).
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER. To complete a successful quick start, you must first determine exactly how many calories your body burns each day, because this provides the basis for setting your calorie deficit. You must then create meal plans that hit your daily calorie target and your 30 percent protein target simultaneously. You’ll also need to design a sensible training plan that combines strength workouts, fasting workouts, and power intervals, plus the right amount of aerobic filler.
You can do all of this on your own, but I did it for you in the Racing Weight Quick Start Guide. This book presents complete four-, six-, and eight-week quick start plans that show you exactly how to eat and train to shed excess body fat rapidly and get a quick start on your next racing season.
Typically, endurance athletes manage their weight in order to perform better. They do not participate in endurance sports to lose weight. While endurance activities such as running are excellent ways to lose weight, those men and women who take up such activities primarily to lose weight seldom stick with them. An American College of Sports Medicine study (Havenar and Lochbaum 2007) of individuals participating in a group training program for first-time marathoners found that those whose primary motivation was weight loss were significantly more likely to drop out than were those whose primary motivation was to achieve event-related goals.
Overwhelmingly, the men and women who stick with an endurance activity long enough to become full-fledged endurance athletes cite simple enjoyment of the activity as their primary motivator for pursuing it. In a companion study to the Montana State University study on endurance athletes’ weight-related beliefs, attitudes, and practices mentioned in the Introduction, respondents were asked to select their top three reasons for exercising from a list of ten options. Enjoyment ranked number one. Weight loss ranked dead last (Stults-Kolehmainen et al. 2009).
The poster child for these principles is Natascha Badmann, a six-time winner of the Hawaii Ironman. In her early 20s, Badmann, who is Swiss, was an overweight and depressed single mother who loathed the very idea of exercise. A coworker at her office (Badmann was employed as a secretary at a computer company) noticed Badmann nibbling on tiny lunches at noon and then gorging on chocolate later in the day. He kindly explained to her that if she wanted to lose weight, she needed to eat more lunch and less chocolate and that she needed to exercise.
Although she had no interest in working out, Badmann was determined to lose weight, and she thought her coworker, Tony Hausler (now her husband), was kind of cute, so she accepted his offer to take her running and cycling. In the beginning she could not even run a mile, and she suffered through every step. A triathlete, Hausler understood the psychology of exercise and thus steered Badmann’s attention away from weight loss and toward developing competence and enjoying a feeling of accomplishment on the bike and on her two feet.
Hausler talked Badmann into participating in a short duathlon only six months after she started training with him. Upon crossing the finish line, she was hooked. And it did not hurt that, thanks to her one-in-a-million endurance genes, she took 3rd place.
Duathlon, and later triathlon, gave Badmann a sense of identity and purpose and made her feel good about herself. Endurance sports also made her lose weight, but after a few months she had lost all the weight she needed to lose, and maintaining her losses was the last motivation to keep going. Five years after completing her first half-mile run, Badmann became the duathlon world champion, and a year after that she took 2nd place behind the legendary Paula Newby-Fraser in the Hawaii Ironman.
Affectionately nicknamed the “Swiss Miss,” Badmann is a favorite of triathlon fans because she wears a smile throughout every race, win or lose. What started as a reluctant means to weight loss has become for her a source of the greatest happiness.
So that’s the fairy-tale version of the phenomenon. But there are millions of less extreme cases that are no less meaningful in the lives of everyday folks. Consider the case of Wesley Howarth, an IT professional from Liverpool, England. Wes had been a competitive Olympic weight lifter in his youth, but he downshifted from competitive to recreational training at age 17 and then let himself go altogether in his early 30s. At age 35 he was hospitalized for three months with a condition that was eventually diagnosed as chronic myofascial pain. His weight ballooned to 342 pounds.
One day after his release from the hospital, Wes stepped on a scale, and it registered an error message because his weight exceeded its measurement capacity.
“I decided to change my life right then,” he says.
Wes had always hated aerobic exercise but knew he had to bite the bullet and do it to lose weight. He was so out of shape that he began with 10-minute walks. But while he couldn’t exercise long, he could exercise often and consistently, and by doing so, he was able to make rapid progress, advancing from longer walks to walk-jog workouts to real running. And as he made progress, something magical happened: He started to enjoy running.
Inevitably, Wes began participating in races. His first event was a 5K. He has since moved up to half-marathons and marathons. Wes’s headlong leap into endurance sports has resulted in a most welcome and unexpected side effect: He no longer has to take medication for his once burdensome pain condition. He’s also lost 124 pounds and hopes to lose 20 more. However, “weight loss has become secondary,” he says. It’s pure enjoyment that keeps Wes running (and swimming, biking, and strength training). “As much as I used to hate running, that’s how much I love it now,” Wes confirms.
Beginning endurance athletes often need to change their mind-set before they can fully enjoy the many benefits (including weight loss) of staying involved in their sport over the long term. Too often, they are motivated primarily by a goal to lose weight. Ironically, they will lose more weight if they replace this goal with performance goals and with a focus on simply “getting hooked” on their new sport. Enjoyment and the desire to perform better are the only motivations that can keep endurance athletes involved in their sport, and loss of motivation is the greatest barrier that prevents beginning endurance athletes from getting lean and light and enjoying the other benefits their sport offers. So if you are new to endurance sports, I want to give you some additional guidance to help you build and maintain motivation to participate in your sport.
Endurance training is an acquired taste. Learning to love an endurance sport involves learning to love physical straining, extreme fatigue, and sore muscles. Granted, pain and suffering may not be what endurance athletes love most about training and racing, but these two results are inseparable from the greatest joys of training and racing, such as the joy of getting faster. So it’s not surprising that most passionate adult endurance athletes first fell in love with exercise as children, when the physical straining of exercise was introduced as play.
In this regard my story is utterly typical. I took up running at age 11 after watching my dad run the Boston Marathon. He never told me to run or even encouraged me to run. He just ran and enjoyed it, so I thought I might enjoy it too. I did not seek weight loss, fitness, approval, glory, or any other reward from running—just enjoyment. And enjoy it I did.
I wish every child could be so fortunate as to experience an early, positive introduction to exercise. Yet while the story of my early affinity for exercise may be the norm, and while it may be easiest to develop a passion for endurance sports as a youth, previously exercise-averse adults catch the endurance bug every day.
SUCCESSFUL BEGINNERS SHOULD FOCUS ON PERFORMANCE AND ENJOYMENT OVER WEIGHT LOSS.
I meet such folks all the time in the course of my work. For example, on a flight to Bermuda to cover the Escape to Bermuda Triathlon, I met Bryan Lee, a 46-year-old furniture store owner from Seattle, Washington. In conversing with Bryan over the Atlantic Ocean, I learned that he had taken up triathlon the previous spring, having been a nonexerciser his whole life. It started when a cousin, who happened to be a Navy SEAL, invited Bryan to his wedding, and Bryan decided to try to get in shape so that he did not make his cousin “look bad” at the big event. (Bryan was roughly 40 pounds above his college weight.) So he joined a triathlon training class, confident that all the swimming, cycling, and running involved would quickly trim him down and tone him up, but having no intention of actually completing a triathlon (“because those people are crazy,” he recalled thinking).
Unexpectedly, Bryan discovered that he actually liked the class, and he signed up to participate in a local sprint triathlon after all. Self-admittedly obsessive-compulsive, he developed an instant endorphin addiction, began looking for races to do every weekend, and was soon traveling all over the world (Chile, South Africa, Monaco, and so forth) for fixes. Escape to Bermuda was to be his 35th triathlon in 18 months. He had lost 35 pounds along the way, but losing weight had long since ceased to be his main motivator for swimming, cycling, and running. “I just love the whole lifestyle,” he said.
Bryan Lee’s story contains some important cues about how best to develop a love for endurance sports, which should be every beginning endurance athlete’s first objective. Weight loss can be a goal as well—indeed, if you need to lose weight, it should be a goal—but understand that you are unlikely to still be exercising one year from now if you don’t learn to enjoy your training.
There are four key steps in the process of learning to enjoy exercise.
In our society exercise is promoted as a means to achieve desired results rather than as an end in itself. Exercise product manufacturers and service providers compete by promising better results through more efficient means. Advertisers assume that you cannot possibly enjoy exercise; therefore fitness solutions are marketed on claims of minimizing the amount of time the consumer is required to suffer through them to achieve the results he or she wants. This phenomenon is epitomized in the best-selling fitness book 8 Minutes in the Morning, which promises a body like that of author Jorge Cruise, with a commitment to exercise not exceeding the eight minutes of the title, and in the infomercials for the Bowflex exercise machine, which promise bodies like those of the fitness models they show using the machine “in just minutes a day.”
Such marketing encourages consumers to choose modes of exercise utterly without regard for any possible affinity for the activities themselves. It teaches us to view working out strictly as a chore to get through as quickly as possible and hence to choose the particular form of exercise that will yield the desired results in the least amount of time. But there is no form of exercise that yields the results we really want in just minutes a day. It takes hours a week, every week, to sculpt and maintain a fitness model’s body, and it is nearly impossible to sustain that level of commitment unless exercise is enjoyable.
Despite such efforts to make us believe that some forms of exercise are more effective than others, the truth is that all forms of exercise are more or less equally effective—if you keep doing them. But you’re unlikely to keep doing any form of exercise that you view as a chore to be gotten over with as quickly as possible. Only if you truly enjoy the actual experience of performing a given form of exercise can it become a permanent part of your lifestyle.
So if there’s a particular endurance sports activity that you’ve tried in the past and kind of liked, make it your primary form of exercise going forward. If you haven’t yet found a favorite, try them all and choose the one that feels most “right” as you do it.
I encourage every beginning endurance athlete to set his or her sights on finishing a race. Establishing such a “big” initial goal seems counterintuitive to many, but it’s actually a much surer way to cultivate enjoyment of exercise than setting a small goal, such as losing 10 pounds. The reason is that big goals are more consonant with human psychology.
First, any goal tends to be most motivating when it is quite challenging. Small, easy-to-achieve goals don’t always excite or, frankly, frighten us enough to inspire consistent hard work toward their fulfillment. Setting a goal to finish a first race—whether it’s a sprint triathlon, a century ride, a half-marathon, or something else—will make exercise a “bigger deal” in your daily life and encourage you to invest more in it, thereby accelerating the process of coming to enjoy it.
Second, research in psychology has shown that human beings are natural game players. Almost any sort of hard work becomes more enjoyable when it is structured as a game, with a clear objective and clear means of “counting points” or measuring progress toward that goal. When I was a child, my mother cleverly made a game of the chore of putting away my toys before bedtime—a chore that my two brothers and I loathed. She would put a fun song on the record player and challenge us to put all of our toys away before it ended. We raced around giggling and screaming instead of moping and pouting as we had always done when tidying up in the past. More to the point, studies in exercise psychology have demonstrated that men, women, and children have more fun playing sports than they do exerting themselves at the same intensity in mere fitness activities (Bakshi, Bhambhani, and Madill 1991). By establishing a goal to finish a race, you transform an activity, such as bicycling, that could be a mere fitness activity into a sport.
Third, research has also shown that self-efficacy, or a feeling of activity-specific competence, is the single best predictor of enjoyment in a given activity, and pursuing and achieving the goal of completing a race are a great way to develop a sense of self-efficacy in your chosen endurance sport (Lewis et al. 2002). The first distance-running race I ever completed was a roughly 1-mile run against my fellow fifth-graders on our school’s annual field day. It hurt like hell, but I won, and the winning made me want to race again, despite the suffering that racing entailed. Studies in sports and exercise psychology indicate that my experience was quite typical. The naturally fittest kids (and adults, for that matter) tend to most enjoy fitness activities, while the naturally most coordinated kids and adults most enjoy motor skill sports, such as basketball. In short, we most enjoy doing what we do well.
Does this mean you have to be capable of winning races to enjoy an endurance sport? Fortunately, it does not. Research suggests that exercise enjoyment increases as fitness does. Thus, as long as you enjoy your chosen sport well enough to continue doing it until you get that first race under your belt, you will gain so much fitness and self-efficacy along the way that you will enjoy it much more by the time you have achieved that initial goal. Also, crossing your first finish line has a magical effect on self-efficacy. It’s transformative in many cases, such as that of furniture salesman–turned–triathlete Bryan Lee. Something about stopping the clock at the end of an official event puts a hook in you, such that no sooner have you showered off your race sweat than you are already plotting your next race goal.
A change of lifestyle is a big deal because it is also a change of identity. Your self-definition is transformed in the process of making significant modifications to your daily routines and rituals. Because major lifestyle changes are often disruptive, they are not completed without a certain rallying of your entire personality around the change. This is why a honeymoon period of intense absorption in a new lifestyle often occurs. We see the phenomenon played out in every sphere of life. Perhaps you know someone who found religion as an adult and couldn’t stop talking about God for a while. You can probably think of at least one person who found a career and threw himself into it headlong, suddenly dressing the way people in that profession dress, talking the way they talk, and so forth.
The same pattern is normal in endurance sports. Running, triathlon, or whatever it is becomes the biggest thing in the beginner’s life for a time as she develops a new sense of identity as an athlete that is essential to learning to enjoy sport and establish it as a permanent lifestyle component. Bryan Lee is once again an extreme case in point, completing 35 triathlons in his first 18 months as a triathlete. He’ll want to slow down sooner or later, of course, as he will need to be balanced in the long run. But in the novice endurance athlete, a short-term imbalance in the direction of obsession with the new hobby is normal and healthy.
I am not quite instructing you to become obsessed with your newly chosen endurance sport, because such a thing cannot be forced. Either it happens on its own, or it doesn’t happen at all. I will only advise you that should obsession begin, do not try to stop this process through misguided self-doubt, conscience, or sense of propriety. If you find yourself feeling compelled to read all the books and magazines on your sport, pass time on related Web sites, purchase new gear every week, seek out new friends in your sport, and so forth, let it happen. Go ahead. Go overboard!
If you are not currently a regular exerciser, then there are barriers between you and exercise. They are the very reasons you have not exercised consistently to this point. As such, these barriers, which may be logistical, psychological, social, and perhaps even physical in nature, must be dismantled if you are to succeed in becoming a bona fide endurance athlete who enjoys exercise.
The primary logistical barrier to exercise is time. Lack of time is the most commonly cited excuse for not exercising. But surveys suggest that those who exercise regularly are just as busy with their jobs, families, and other responsibilities as those who don’t work out. So the time excuse is just that: an excuse. We’re all pressed for time, yet we all have time for our highest priorities. If exercise is important to you, you will find the time to do it. Consider the case of David Morken, an age-group triathlete whom I had the pleasure of profiling for Ironman.com a few years ago. Morken is a husband, an involved father of six children, and the CEO of a high-tech company, and yet still he finds enough time to train for triathlons. If David Morken can do it, anybody can!
Creative ways that endurance athletes find to fit training into their schedules include working out early in the morning and late in the evening, commuting to and from work on foot or by bicycle, working out on their lunch break, packing most of their training into weekends, working out indoors at home (for example, cycling on an indoor trainer), and combining workouts with other responsibilities (for example, running laps around a soccer field while your child’s team practices on it). You might be amazed to see how creative you become after you drop the time excuse!
Perhaps the greatest psychological barriers to exercise, after lack of exercise enjoyment itself, are lack of self-esteem and the attending demons of self-doubt, pessimism, and fear of failure. Lifelong nonexercisers are often ashamed of their bodies and convinced they cannot accomplish anything positive with them. There are many effective methods of battling these internal barriers. Recognizing that they exist is the first. Once you recognize that your expectation of failure in exercise is a self-fulfilling symptom of low self-esteem, instead of a rational deduction based on solid evidence, it will suddenly seem worthwhile to make every effort to destroy this illusion. Other methods to employ in this effort include seeking your family’s support and encouragement, exercising with a friend or a group of like-minded individuals, speaking encouragement to yourself (possibly in the form of inspirational notes left in key locations, such as on your car steering wheel), and even seeking professional counseling if you feel you could benefit from it. Remember, you really are worth every effort made to learn to enjoy exercise and become an endurance athlete (who just happens to be lean and look great)!
