One of the ways we can limit our training and limit our development as people is by focusing too much attention on numbers. Unfortunately, when we focus all of our attention on what we can measure, we become measurable and limited. The strongest expressions of our energy are intangible, unique, and beyond measure. To train ourselves effectively for nature, we must learn to see beyond numbers and understand how they can simultaneously serve us and limit us.
Conventional modern “strength” and conditioning training guidance to be heavily weighted towards numbers, schedules, percentages, sets, repetitions, time intervals, formulas, etc. Most modern “strength” training and conditioning programs are quite effective in training us to achieve some narrow quantifiable abilities. This works extremely well for track and field athletes and weightlifters but starts to become less applicable as we move beyond that. Ultimately, exploring nature as athletes is about developing ourselves as people in deeper ways so we must consider how to effectively support what really matters.
Keeping perspective on what’s truly important beyond the numbers helps us stay inspired, optimize training, and capture greater value from our athletic lives. We generally get what we focus on. Fixating on numbers sometimes helps us get faster for a little while but may actually slow down our broader development as people and can often burn us out. The ability to pick up some heavy weights won’t serve us in life as powerfully as the ability to pick ourselves up when we feel shattered, an ability that is trained in different ways. Imbalances and narrow focuses in training tend to become unhealthy and limiting. In addition, poor exercise form is a common path to injury that is often caused by a fixation on numbers and sacrificing non-quantifiable measures of performance.
One of the challenges of training effectively as outdoor athletes is that engaging in nature is for the most part non-quantifiable. When we go into nature as athletes, ultimately we find ourselves training to be the people we want to be in life. The further we explore, the further we move beyond what we can measure and into dimensions where psychological strengths and intangible skills become more critical. This poses certain challenges because focusing our energy and progressing effectively becomes a lot murkier without clear quantifiable goals and metrics to track ourselves. The inability to clearly perceive progress resulting from our actions may make it more difficult to maintain motivation and focus. Another way to look at this is that it becomes more difficult to maintain our illusion of control and we might slide into feelings of chaos, especially in our goal-oriented culture.
So how can we deal with this effectively? How can we keep focusing our energy into action and keep progressing towards inspiring athletic visions and challenges in an increasingly non-quantifiable environment? Here are some tips about this:
It helps to put some thought into what quantifiable metrics actually do relate well to our ability to follow our inspiration. For virtually all outdoor challenges, aerobic strength is important. We discussed how to track progress in our aerobic base in the previous post. It’s also helpful to think about times and distances that we will need to travel in an adventure and work progressively towards building this capability. It’s also helpful to think about what movements and what levels of muscle strength are necessary or beneficial to support our athletic visions. I’ll explore this in further blog posts because I think our strength training and fitness culture has largely lost touch with the questions “why?” and “to what end?” How much strength we actually need is not much of an issue for most relatively undeveloped athletes who can almost always benefit from some increases in muscle strength. However, once we have attained certain levels of strength we may be better off shifting more of our overall training attention elsewhere. At a certain point, additional muscle mass can start to hinder us. As we develop and focus on increasingly advanced challenges, it’s wise to think about this so that we don’t unconsciously keep putting effort into a strength progression for its own sake that is becoming increasingly divorced from what we are inspired to do.
It’s important to work on building our athletic visions. As they become more vivid and we get a better sense of what is required, it becomes easier to focus training energy effectively. Our training culture is a bit obsessed with objective quantifiable goals, but they are just one tool that can be used to focus energy into action. If we have a challenge that inspires us, we can start breaking it down into skills and strengths that we need to work on developing. Whether a skill is quantifiable or not, all learning and development tends to be progressive and we can plan incremental steps to take. For example, the athletic objective that I am currently training for is the Iditarod Trail Invitational 350, a winter ultra marathon in Alaska in which my friend Jake and I will be on cross country skis dragging sleds for over a week. We’ll need to do two 100 mile qualifying events beforehand and we’ll need to learn many new skills, so this might take five years of preparation. Other than requiring extremely well developed aerobic bases and sufficient functional strength and work capacity to drag the sleds effectively, this challenge will depend mostly on intangible mental strength and various winter camping and survival skills. We’re busy breaking the challenge down into underlying skills that we need to learn and we’ll put together a multi-year learning plan to ensure we’ll have practiced the various skills. We’ll also be planning various shorter excursions in rough winter conditions over the next few years to progressively train our minds for the challenge and make sure that we know what we are doing. Climbing a mountain on skis in 50 mph wind a few weeks ago felt like an introductory mental workout.
To help keep our focus on numbers from actually hurting us, we can remind ourselves that we are always practicing the skill of moving our bodies well. This is every bit as important as certain performance numbers we are achieving, and conscious attention to this helps us avoid injuries in the long term. It’s helpful to surround ourselves with coaches, friends, and other guides and periodically seek feedback on our exercise form to avoid injury. We also need to listen to our bodies. If we’re not feeling strong on a particular day it’s OK. This is part of the process. Sometimes we are sore and tired and need to rest. Some days we are just stronger than others and we shouldn’t force things or become anxious about bad days. Good habits over the long haul are what matter.
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