Rediscovering Training - Part 2

Goals: sometimes they present themselves to you as missions and you can’t help but accept them. The first one of the series this year was this one. 

Photo by Ben Moon, courtesy of Patagonia

Being able to do the human flag would not only be cool, but it would also mean awesome core strength to benefit rock-climbing, windsurfing, kayaking... and most sports where your whole body is needed really! Great ways to train for it are doing planks, head and hand stands, pushups and pull-ups. The problem is it’s difficult to use only the vision of this outcome as motivation… I’ll come back to that shortly. 

The next goal that came along was a trekking trip to the Indian Himalayas, and wow! I felt ready to say “yes, count me in” on the spot.

Through the early exchange of messages with the trip guide, he recommended load training to prepare for the trip – start doing some hill walks with 5kg on the back, slowly increasing towards about 15kg. Man I was excited at the idea of walking through those glorious landscapes, gazing at the white mountain tops and enjoying the peacefulness yet dynamic nature of the fauna, flora and land surrounding… This became a very good motivator and I went walking 3 to 4 km four times in the first week, in the early morning. I’m lucky to have a nice hill not far from my place, part of which is actually a great bush walk, with a beautiful view from the top. The walks also became a rendez-vous with the sunrise and the fresh morning air: a delightful way to start the day. 

Some of the view from Candos hill, just before sunrise

That week felt very good and I was already sensing increased strength in my legs. Based on that, I naively doubled the load on Monday of the next week. It was noticeably harder but I didn’t suffer from it during the walk, only a few hours after my right knee started to be sore. What an idiot I thought! Way too hungry for “performance”, pfffff!! So I didn’t do the walk for a few days, replacing it with upper body strength workouts. Meanwhile I was still deciding whether to go on the trip or not! The budget for it wasn’t that small, and the more she was thinking about it, the more Maja, my wife, became weary of dangers, health hazards, etc… 

In the same time period, the programme for the windsurf racing season came out and is full of exciting events. I had had a great session in the waves a few weeks back and the wind was looking good for the following Saturday (this is still week 2 of “trek training”). I ended up really bugging Maja with my indecisiveness, and eventually we came to the conclusion that we can always go to Reunion Island by boat for beautiful trekking, that the time (a better time) will come for the Himalayas. We also decided we could still spend a bit of money on things we needed here instead. Hiking shoes for us both, tent, that kind of stuff…

As you can see, the goal of tripping’ through the Indian mountains went out the window, but I’m still doing the load training, properly this time, for the joy of sunrise, views, fresh air and great wake-up call (here's a programme to get inspiration from). It will also help for those Mauritian outdoors explorations and other sports. New goals are now to do a few windsurf races and rock-climb as much as possible – a happy and motivating combination. In fact, almost just after deciding, I had another nice windsurf session in the waves and went rock-climbing at spot I didn’t know yet. Both were tasty soul-foods and left me invigorated. 

By now I have a healthy mix of goals: doing the human flag, doing well in windsurf races and climb harder routes, and ensuring a good mix of training types, good form, nutrition and sleep. Another interesting coincidence is that the book I’m currently reading, Strength to Awaken, recommends three types of goals: outcome, performance and process. I have thus matched the above goals to these. Knowing they are not the same type of goals and that each is needed is a good way to remember them all! By the way the book offers many more insights that you won’t learn in the mainstream fitness literature so I recommend you check it out. 

In the end, it's all about finding what you want. The natural step from there is to design a training regime that will help achieving these goals. It is coming together pretty nicely right now, still including a variety of activities ("variety is the spice of life"!) but I guess there will be a part 3 for that!