Ten Training Tips for Lifelong Athletes

Date: 27th March 2015

I’m 48. I just had the best 12 months of my athletic career. Crazed months of travel, flying, climbing, kids, speaking, guiding, writing, repeat with more events and less time than I wanted. Demands are ever-growing, time constant, things give, but I still improved as an athlete. I was late a lot this year, dropped work assignments, barely met others, but in the end another year has gone by and I’m proud of a few things I did as an athlete, and need to do way better at others. I wrote the below to remind myself that for the next year I’ll be an athlete. I fail regularly at each point below, that’s why I’m writing them down. To kick myself in the ass, remind myself of what is truly important athletically for the next 12 months. I hope you find some of this useful. Your comments drive what I write here, please comment if you’ve got something to say.

1. Commit to being an athlete. This means moving at whatever level you can, regularly.

I did something physical more than 340 days in the last 12 months. Sometimes it was an hour in a POS hotel gym, sometimes an all-day sufferfest, sometimes a walk up a hill with my kid on my back, but I did something. Every bit of movement adds up, and over a lifetime builds into specific skills. People get all worked up about precise number of sets or “peaking” or nutrition, but most people really need to simply shut up about all these details and go do something physical every day. That is the basis of fitness, of being an athlete: Moving. Stop worrying about perfection and just move, the rest is ever-refining details and shaping that movement toward a goal if desired. Without the basic mental commitment and desire and joy of movement no athlete will be an athlete for very long. This doesn’t mean running on a treadmill in spandex, although once in a while that’s great. It doesn’t mean taking a “fitness class,” although that’s great in moderation too. It means finding out what you like to feel with your body’s motion, and going and doing it because you like it, because it stokes your body and brain, and because it’s fun and because it’s who you are. I often encounter athletes who say, “I haven’t done anything for two months.” Well why the hell not? If your arm is hurt then run, hike, bike, crawl, do squats, whatever, but be an athlete! I have a friend who is a quadraplegic; he works out on a handbike every day because he likes it. I have no excuses if he can do that. Nobody really does, but if there isn’t that desire and joy in movement then no movement will happen…

2. Write down what you do every day

I know how may days I “trained” because I kept a training log. I enter my little “skied for an hour” every day with great joy. It’s a reminder that what I do physically matters. I see the holes where I let flights or work or whatever eat into my time… I am so damn proud of my lazy ass when I wake up extra early to ski for a hour before I get on my flight to some city. I check that little “did that” box and am stoked. Plus watching the sun come up while the city sleeps is rad. I could have responded to 20 more emails or whatever, but that hour was worth NOT doing those emails. It always is.

3. Pay attention to your body

If it hurts stop doing it. Do something else, or do what you’re doing differently. Now, just being uncomfortable is not hurting. Screaming with effort to finish a set or a climb or puking at the end of an interval is not hurting, that’s weakness evaporating from your body and head, and that’s great. Hurting is when tendons hurt, when your knees hurt, etc. Keep doing whatever it is that prompts that pain and you will be seriously injured, and have to be a different athlete. Which may be cool, but not if you have goals that revolve around your body working in a certain way. Change. Listen to your body or pay the price. I have paid it many times when I tried to push through pain. Being an idiot has cost me national or more results in several sports. Hear that Will Gadd? Don’t be a fucking idiot this time when your shoulder hurts while hanging on it, stop hanging on it!!!!

4. Food is food. Eat good stuff mostly. Ignore the hype.

Eat less processed food and more basic food. Every top athlete I know eats food to fuel his or her results, and isn’t too discriminating about what goes down the hatch. Really. Eat. Many, many people I know eat paleo or vegan or WTF the latest hyped craze is, but don’t really do shit athletically. Food is easy to control (at first, nobody ever stays on super restrictive diets for long), so it’s easy to seize on as “the way.” It’s not the way, it’s fuel for the way forward. Eat good food mostly, some junk regularly, exercise hard regularly, we’re done here. Seriously, it really is this simple. Every diet guru in the world will tell you it isn’t, but they are clearly wrong or there wouldn’t be thousands of them and millions of suckers buying their hype. Eat. Move. Repeat.

5. Surround yourself with people who like to do physical stuff. And support the same.

My friends sometimes call me up for beers, but mostly they want to go do something. And then drink beer. Friends don’t last long if they want to sit around and drink beer only. After activity that’s great. Before, no, it destroys motivation. We are all reflections of our friends, for good or bad. Choose friends who are positive and psyched and want to move. This is why Crossfit has done so well; it’s a community of people psyched to do something physical. That changes everything. You can argue about whether Crossfit is relevant or not, but it for damn sure builds communities of people who are psyched to move. All of my sponsors are psyched people. I end relationships with people who aren’t psyched on life and doing physical stuff. Shallow? Maybe, but if you think so then you’re probably not really getting the point of this rant and need to sit on the couch some more. I won’t be there.

6. Set way more short-term performance goals than long-term ones

Little victories matter more than the big ones in the end… I often hear, “I want to win comp X or climb 5.XX.” OK, but what are the small steps to get there? A big success is just a lot of little successes put together. Define those little steps and do not weaken at the little ones. Celebrate the little ones. Often my end goal changes before I get there, but each step is a success. And when I win a comp or climb something rad it’s because of all the little steps, not the big one at the end. I need to set more small goals, ladders to the sky not just grabbing for it.

7. You own your time until you sell it. Sell it for what you truly want.

There are a lot of time parasites that seem important but just aren’t. If you sell your time to email and do bullshit that is total unmemorable and mostly useless, and most of it is, then you won’t have time to do something physical. Or play with your kids. Or knit. Or whatever it is that turns you on for real instead of just sucks your time… I fail so often at this, but I will do better. If you don’t organize life so you have chunks of time to move then you have decided that everything else in life is more important than moving. It’s not. If it truly is then something is really wrong with life and I, and you, need to change it.

8. Don’t say you want to be good at something, get better at something, endlessly, obsessively.

Doing something physical just to do it is enough. Walking up a hill 100 times a year is great, and timing that walk may just frustrate you and ultimately ruin the experience, so don’t. Celebrate the success of walking up a hill, rad! But if you want to get good at something then you have to get better at it every single day. If you’re not getting better at it then you don’t really want to be good at it, and need to examine why. Seriously, it’s that simple. If you want to run better then run better. Think about what you’re doing, figure out the slop, get rid of it, repeat. Examine, cut, build, succeed or don’t, but you should go to bed every night better than you were in the morning or knowing how to get better at it if you want to be good at whatever “it” is. Or admit you don’t want to get better at whatever it is and just do it. Cool. This year I want to get better at big wall climbing, really big lines. I am today.

9. Don’t weaken. Ever.

I’m often asked, “So how do you keep going when it’s so hard?” Usually the journalist has seen some footage of my friends and I suffering to achieve something, and feels that it’s some incredible effort that most people couldn’t do. Bullshit. You train for not weakening in the big moments by not weakening in the little ones. If you’re doing sets in the gym and quit when they get uncomfortable then you’ll quit when it’s time to push harder for real. If you don’t get out of bed in the morning to go for a run when the alarm rings then you won’t get out of the tent when the alarm rings on summit day. Don’t fucking weaken in training, and you won’t when it’s uncomfortable and shitty in the defining moments of life. You’ll forget how to quit if you don’t, and you’ll never know how to push through big uncomfortable moments if you don’t do it every single day. Over the last 30 years I have trained with a lot of athletes who were better athletes than me. They had better genetics, more support as kids, whatever gave them the athletic skills they had, but I believe I beat them in comp after comp because I do not weaken and give up, ever. I go down when it’s too dangerous, I cut my losses, but I do not give up until my muscles will not twitch upward again. I hang on long past the point of futility when climbing hard new routes. I do it in training, and I do it for real in comps or in the air or whenever. When I do give in and collapse mentally I hate myself so much that it’s a cattle prod to not let it happen again. I fail lots and get beaten lots, but not because I give up. I can live with losing and anyone who competes has to lose regularly, but I can not live with myself if I don’t do my level best, all the time. Never weaken.

There is no 10 for me, but I bet there is for a lot of people. I made the above up to remind me about what’s important athletically for me for the coming year. I made similar private lists for family, work, life, and balance it all out as best I can. Now I gotta go outside. I hope you do too.

Posted in: Blog

Comments