Are you inspired to pursue a big adventure in nature but struggling to make time for training? This is a good sign. It’s an important training milestone.
The challenge of devoting time to train is actually in many ways a gift. It provides us with a great opportunity to work on some of the skills that may help us most to live a life of purpose. I’m referring to the skills of self empowerment, time optimization, self-care and personal development, and the skill of navigating multiple challenges while continuing to pursue our inspirations. Without developing these skills to a high degree, it is difficult to realize a life of purpose.
“I don’t have enough time to train.” Have you ever found yourself saying something like this?
Let’s reframe this statement because it will never serve us. Even if our week is filled with high priority things and we decide not to make time for training, the “I don’t have enough time” perspective holds us back. This voice inside is a reminder of our opportunity to step up and take control of our lives. We start by taking control of our power of choice. A more constructive way to express this is “I choose to prioritize ______ over training” with the blank being absolutely everything else that we are doing in life that is not training. Some things to fill the blank may make a lot of sense and may feel right (day-to-day survival, constructive relationships, etc.). However, if we start finding that things like news media, social media, passive entertainment, online shopping, earning money beyond what we actually need, draining work obligations, and alcohol are taking priority over training for our most fulfilling lives it might be time to re-strategize.
Since we have the power of choice over our time, it’s helpful to learn time optimization. This is a multi-layer skill that doesn’t really appear to be taught broadly in our school systems and cultural institutions. Many of us appear to spend entire lives without a real sense of purpose and our civilization seems headed towards an environmental cliff… perhaps an underlying factor could be a population-wide deficit in time optimization. Luckily this is trainable, but it’s a bit different from time efficiency. Time efficiency helps us eliminate wasted time as we become more “productive” in accomplishing tasks or working towards goals, but it’s just one element of optimizing ourselves. Even for the most impressively time-efficient life-jugglers among us, if seems that if substantial time is not devoted to healthy self-care and personal development time, we may spend our whole lives juggling away in an out-of-control life.
In addition to efficiency, time optimization also requires us to examine our lives and efforts from a broader perspective. To time-optimize we also examine the purpose and suitability of our activities and goals, what we want our lives to stand for, and who we want to be. When we time optimize we let go of things that don’t serve us or under-serve us as we realign our lives with what matters to us. When we examine exercise through the limited perspective of time efficiency it’s quite common to end up training in poor ways. We generally add additional stress hormones in our already anxious lives by mostly doing frantic high intensity workouts. Despite the apparent calming we perceive from post-workout endorphins, many of these workouts are actually contributing to our overall stress. We might try to “multi-task” by watching TV while we churn away at an exercise machine, but in doing so we may actually be robbing ourselves of the deepest benefits of spending some time in our bodies and in nature.
From a time optimization perspective, nature-based athletic training can actually offer us with an incredible return on our time investment. No matter how busy our weekly schedule is, it is undeniably important for all of us to develop and train our bodies to some extent in order to maintain quality of life in both the short term and long term. If we care to live our most inspiring and meaningful lives we’ll also need to devote some time to personal development, expanding our comfort zone, and facing fears. To experience some joy, beauty, and gratitude, perhaps our most efficient and effective teacher is time spent in nature. Nature-based athletic training and exploration essentially addresses all of these things simultaneously. From this perspective, instead of looking for ways to squeeze some training into our hectic stressful lives it may make more sense to ruthlessly slash other things out of our lives to make even more time for training.
Let us put training time in perspective. How much time should we devote to training? This actually is highly individual depending on many personal factors including our athletic inspirations, our training experience levels, our genetic capacity for training, the overall enjoyment and inspiration we get out of training, and circumstances in our broader lives. Outdoor athletes train everywhere from a few hours per week to 30+ hours for professional and elite athletes. We won't discuss more detailed prescriptions in this post but I merely want to offer some high level perspective. A November 2013 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning examined the training habits of 1,345 ultra-marathoners and found that their average annual training volume was about 40 miles per week. If we assume a modest 9:00 average mile, that’s an average weekly running volume of six hours. This training time won’t be spread evenly over the year, so some times of year it will be higher and some it will be lower. Ultra runners will also have to devote some time to strengthening exercises, flexibility, recovery on foam rollers, etc. so it seems that reasonable to conclude that a very large portion of the ultra community is putting in perhaps 8-10 hours per week total. I think this is probably pretty close to what most of the people at the 24 hour solo mountain bike races I used to compete in were doing for training. The winners would naturally do quite a bit more, but the real mental benefits are available to us all so it's not really necessary.
From one perspective 8-10 hours per week may sound like a lot. However, when we consider that there are actually 168 hours in a week, even ultra training can be quite a doable part of life if we shift our perspective. For most athletic endeavors that are less physically demanding than ultra distances, we can get started with substantially less training time. To put this in further perspective, several surveys in the past couple years suggest that we spend an average of almost 2.5 hours per day on social media. I can’t imagine all of that time is contributing to our most inspiring lives, and that’s just one example of many ways we spend time that could be allocated in more effective ways. I believe that most of us can find all the training time we need if we focus on our inspirations, if we are really honest with ourselves about our time utilization, and we let go of some things.
So... you want to go outside and explore your limits? Are you struggling to make time for training? It may be time to embrace this conflict for what it is: the first struggle in the path to building our most inspiring lives and learning to let go of energy-sucking activity that doesn’t serve us.
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