How to Make Time for Training & Goals - Coach Tip Tuesday

How are you doing so far in terms of making progress toward your goals this year?  If you’re like a lot of people, the optimism caused by The Fresh Start Effect of a new year is well worn-off by now and you may be struggling with motivation and/or finding the time to accomplish what you initially set out to do when you forecasted into this year and season.  There’s no shame in this; it’s something that happens to a lot of people, and to the vast majority of people who set New Year’s Resolutions.
That being said, endurance athletes tend to be more driven and tenacious than the average person, which is how they end up being endurance athletes in the first place.  As an endurance athlete, you are in the 0.05% of all humans who train for endurance sports events such as running races, cycling races, and triathlons.  But even endurance athletes are human, and thus may find that they are lacking motivation and/or are struggling to progress toward their goals, even goals that are significant and meaningful to them.  This is especially true because the average age-group athlete is a busy person who is time-starved because they have so many competing demands for their time every day.

Accepting that Time is Finite Can Be Liberating

“I need to find the time to train.”

This sentence (or some similar version of it) is something I’ve heard often from athletes over the years.  However, it’s a false and misleading statement (though most people saying it are not really conscious of that).  Time cannot be “found.”  It must be traded.

Endurance sports goals do not achieve themselves.  Athletes need to dedicate a lot of emotional, temporal, financial, and energy resources in order to achieve any goals that they set in running, cycling, triathlon, or open water swimming.  That being said, the most nebulous and precious of the resources that endurance athletes dedicate to their goals is time.

Seneca, a Roman Stoic philosopher, pointed out in his essay De Brevitate Vitae (English translation: On the Shortness of Life) that humans are incredibly stingy with and fiercely protective of our money and other material things, while simultaneously being comically wasteful with our time.  Seneca hypothesizes that this is so because we do not properly value time, and he further hypothesizes (quite accurately, in my opinion) that we do not properly value it because time appears to be intangible. 

While Seneca wrote this essay nearly 2,000 years ago, his observations still hold true today because human nature has not changed very much since then (if at all).  Humans still covet money (which they can acquire more of) and do not spend or protect their time (which they cannot get more of) nearly as intentionally.  The wisest and happiest people I’ve encountered in my life so far are people who understand that time is finite and who value it accordingly as the most valuable of all resources that we have access to in our lifetimes.

Life is a zero-based budget.  Every single one of you reading this is already using all 24 hours that are available each day.  Unlike financial budgets, we cannot go into debt with time.  There isn’t any way we can borrow an extra hour and all of sudden have 25 hours in a day to get done what we want to get done.  No matter how much we may not like it, we are forced to stay within the confines of our allotted hours every single day of our lives.  When something takes longer than we expect it to, the excess time used beyond what we expected needs to come from some other activity in our day.  For instance, if a work project causes you to stay late at work, you may miss dinner with your family, a sporting event for your kids, or sleep that you would have had that night.

A lot of us rebel against the truth that time is limited and finite.  (My hypothesis why we do this is that we (either consciously or unconsciously) do not want to accept the reality that we are mortal and that we are going to die.)  Many, many people subscribe to the fantasy that they will be able to do more than is actually possible for them to do if they just put the right system in place in their lives.  We (often desperately) want to believe that we can do it all.  However, in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman makes the point that it can be exceptionally liberating to accept the truth that time is limited and that there will, in fact, only ever be a limited number of things we can get done…in a day, a week, a month, or over the course of our entire life.

Rather than futilely trying to do it all, we can (and should!) learn to prioritize our time and to allocate it to the things that matter most to us.  By doing this, we can heal our fractured and often tortuous relationship with time management.  While a lot of us instinctively rebel against the idea of restriction, accepting hard truths alongside setting appropriate and good boundaries and limits on ourselves can actually provide relief and feel liberating.  Paradoxically, too much autonomy or too much flexibility in our days can be disastrous.  Personally, I have found that I get more done when I’m busier because time feels much more tangible to me when my calendar is full.  There are hard boundaries on when I need to be done doing something and moving onto doing something else.  As a result, when I’m busy and have a lot of things going on, I don’t procrastinate on tasks or other things in my life, I make decisions without overthinking them, and I prioritize well when my options are limited.  I have observed the same thing for many of the athletes I coach who have full calendars.

By contrast, if I don’t have anything on my schedule for too long of a period of time (such as an entire day or several days), I am not as good at getting things done or at prioritizing what is important.  You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon yourself.  If you have a busy day with a lot of work tasks, commitments, and appointments and your only opportunity for a workout is first thing in the morning, you probably get it done because you know you will not have another chance to if you miss that window of time.  However, if you don’t have any commitments on a given day, you feel the openness of that opportunity and therefore feel like you can get your workout done at any time because your options for what you can do with your time on a day like this are seemingly infinite.  As a result, you might procrastinate doing it or even not get it done at all if you procrastinate enough.

Practical Tips for Making Time for Training

So what does prioritizing our time mean in a practical sense?  When you want to have more of something in your life (such as training hours, workouts, or the supporting elements that enhance endurance sports training), you should also try to decide ahead of time what you’re going to be doing less of to make space/time for the thing you want to have more of.  Saying that you want to do more training without also saying what you want to do less of is a recipe for failure.  Saying yes to one thing always means saying no to at least one of something else.  In life, there are no solutions.  There are only tradeoffs.  If you want to have more time for training, you will need to spend less time on something (or somethings) else.  Period.  Full stop.  No exceptions.  Ever.

If you don’t decide ahead of time what will be sacrificed, it will get decided for you.  And what gets sacrificed may very well be something that you are ultimately unhappy about sacrificing.  For instance, if you add training to your day, you may find that you’re spending less time with your family as a result.  This is probably not the trade you would have self-selected in advance.  Thus, it’s better for you - both acutely and in the long run - to make this choice about what you are willing to do less of ahead of time.  By doing so, you are exercising control and autonomy over your life, versus letting your life happen to you.  You can - and should! - decide what gets your first fruits when it comes to your time.

When it comes to endurance sports, it’s very important to remember what a goal actually is.  A goal is a thing that you have deemed to be a higher priority than other things in your life.  It’s not enough to just say that you want to do something and/or that something is important to you.  You need to demonstrably show that it is important to you through your daily actions and decisions.  You need to do less of something that isn’t as important to you in order to make way for what you have said is more important to you.

So in order to make time for training and/or to train more than you recently have been, you need to decide what else in your life you will be doing less of.  An important part of this process is understanding exactly what you are currently spending your time on.  To do this, you can use a tool or an app such as Clockify to track down to the minute how you are actually spending your time.  I recommend doing this for at least 3-7 days, but tracking everything you do over the course of a day for even a single day can be extremely enlightening and reap heaps of self-awareness.  In order to successfully do this and glean useful insights, you will need to track everything you do throughout your day, including (but not limited to):

• Work
• Family tasks (to include caring for children, spouses, parents, pets, etc.)
• Household tasks (such as cooking meals, cleaning, etc.)
• Personal care tasks (such as showering, doing your hair, applying makeup, etc.)
• Recreation activities and/or hobbies
• Social time (to include time spent with friends or neighbors)
• Time spent watching TV or on devices (to include texting, scrolling social media, reading the news, etc.)

Many, many people think that they know how they are spending the hours in their days, but they are not actually as self-aware about this as they imagine that they are.  Warning: I’ve encouraged many athletes to do this tracking exercise over the years, and many of them quit very early on because they are unhappy with what they are seeing when they truthfully track how they are spending the hours in their day.  I’ve actually had athletes tell me that they are disgusted with how they are spending their time.  And when confronted with that disgust, many of them shy away from it.  While I absolutely understand this instinctual reaction, it’s important to actually face what you’re doing, as facing it is the only way you can develop self-awareness and therefore potentially make changes to unattractive or undesired habits and behaviors.  This is yet another example of why it’s important to face and confront the Discomfort Dragon.

Self-awareness requires you to turn your gaze inward and pay attention to yourself.  It requires you to observe and understand your behaviors, habits, and choices - the strong and attractive ones as well as the unattractive ones that you might not like to see.  By tracking how you are spending your time, you will develop an awareness of what you are actually doing on a day-to-day basis.  Once you understand that, you can decide which things you value most and therefore which things you will prioritize spending your time on each day.  If training is important to you, you need to say out loud what is less important than it and be okay with eliminating something in favor of being able to spend time on training.

Choosing what we spend our time on is important, but what we choose not to spend our time on is also equally as important.  After all, there will always be a significantly higher number of things we cannot do and are not doing compared with what we can actually do and are doing.  That being said, all too often, sleep is the first thing that people will sacrifice (both consciously and unconsciously) to fit more things into their day.  They will get up earlier or stay up later (or both!) to accommodate the thing(s) that they want to do.  However, sleep is one of the worst things to do less of - for all humans, not just athletes.  There is nothing - and I mean nothing - that takes the place of what sleep does for the human body.  The best long-term solutions for health, successful time management, and goal achievement prioritize sleep, rather than sacrificing it.

The Bottom Line

Any time we decide to do anything new or additional in our lives, we need to do less of something else we are already doing.  Time is finite, and each day of our lives is a zero-based budget time-wise.  In order to make time for the training that is necessary to support the goals that you have set, you need to decide what you are going to do less of in your life.  Ideally, this choice is intentional and made ahead of time.  By doing this - executing some thoughtful pre-planning - you can ensure that training is fitting into your life (versus trying to fit your life into your training) and that you feel replenished and built up by your training, not broken down and defeated.  This is the best way to make time for your goals and your training.