The end of the year approaches. Now is the time to think about doing awesome things next year. Something big and scary. Exactly what that might be depends on you. Your first triathlon. Your first marathon. You know that to be successful in achieving your goal you need to train. Your first question might be how to train – what to do and when to do it. Just as important, yet too often overlooked, is how to find the time. To be successful, you need to get organized.
The first step is to get a TrainingPeaks Premium account. (If you hire me as your coach, the account is free.) This provides a training diary where you and your coach plan your season, record your training, and communicate.
Using TrainingPeaks is a good first step in getting your training organized. I’m pretty sure that you will feel excited when you see the workouts spread out week after week, month after month. What may not be obvious is that you cannot simply add this new schedule on top of your current schedule. The key to success in finding time to train is getting your life organized.
Unless you live alone, this will involve your family. You can’t just drop your new training schedule on top of your family’s routine. You are going to need a little help and a lot of cooperation. This requires a lot of communication and some give-and-take.
A good place to start is meal planning, where you should find a lot of low hanging fruit, pun intended. The athletic lifestyle is a healthy lifestyle. You will not find success if you start planning what to eat fifteen minutes before mealtime. You need to plan.
I recommend planning a week in advance. Use the Note feature in TrainingPeaks to create a simple daily meal plan. Purchase as much as possible in one outing and do as much prep as possible on the weekend. Keep the recipes simple. Vary the ingredients from day to day to ensure you eat a range of foods. Build every meal around a protein. Emphasize fruits and vegetables over traditional starches like bread, rice, or potatoes. Look for color at every meal – green, yellow, orange, red, purple. Most important – eat everything.
If you work full time, chances are your family time and social time will take a hit. Aim for seven to eight hours of sleep every night. The more you exercise, the more you need sleep, as that is when the adaptations to training take place. The best time to work out is the morning, which means getting up early. To get eight hours of sleep and wake up at 5 a.m. puts bedtime at 9 p.m. That’s lights out, go to sleep time. You will have to cut back on binge-watching Netflix and going out on the town with the gang every Saturday night.
Get in the habit of doing a weekly review and planning session, and be sure to share it with your spouse. I find this works best for me on Sunday. Look back on the previous week and reflect; what went well, what did not go as well as you hoped. Hopefully you have been adding comments to every workout, so this review can be at a broader level. How did the weather impact your training? Did scheduling conflicts or unforeseen circumstances interfere with your training? Next, look ahead to the coming week. Is your meal plan complete? Any special events, like a parent-teacher conference or a doctor appointment? The idea is that at some point in the future you want to be able to look back and be reminded of what was happening. To the extent that anything you note here interfered with your training, writing about it will help you see what you can do to improve.
When you undertake such a program it will feel awkward. That’s okay. Your goal should be to ease into a routine. Give yourself time to settle in. Use your weekly summary to reflect on your progress and look for ways to improve. The Japanese have an expression, kaizen, which means continuous improvement in small steps. This is what your training should aim for, and it applies equally to getting organized.