a bailout plan for fitness

Students and faculty sometimes get "too busy" or "too tired" or "too cold" in the winter to take care of exercising. Here is a fun article I read about giving endurance athletes a "bailout plan" before disaster strikes:

1. Avoid a credit crisis. Think back to this past year's races and give yourself a pat on the back for training and racing to the best of your ability. Yes, things may not always have gone as planned, but those instances will make you a wiser endurance athlete next year.


2. Avoid a housing crisis and get your Fannie off the couch Freddie! Get outside, no matter the weather. Buy some cold weather attire at your local specialty retail store so you don't have to lock yourself up in the gym or the house all winter long.


3. Being adjustable is not always a good thing when it comes to mortgages, but it's great for keeping you motivated to train. Shake things up by restructuring your tried and true in-season training routine.


4. Get rid of subprime technique. Get a coach, read a book, or attend a local training seminar. Moving with greater efficiency next year will pay big dividends.


5. Deregulation is bad, particularly with respect to your food intake. The obvious holiday eating pitfalls are already lurking. Be smart about what you put in your mouth and your body will thank you.


6. Don't go bankrupt on intensity. Now is the time to build a strong and wide base for the training pyramid by focusing more on longer, less intense, training sessions. Doing so will allow your body to tolerate the higher training intensity that your training plan calls for in a few months.


7. Take stock. Go ahead and assess your strengths and limiters. Be as objective as you can about which areas need attention and which areas need maintenance. Whether it's aerobic endurance, anaerobic endurance, speed, power, muscular endurance, or flexibility none of us have arrived yet and all of us need to return to the drawing board at this point in time. There are surveys out there that will help you with this process.


8. No short selling. Set a few ambitious goals for next year and begin training toward those goals now. Pick one or two A-priority races and build the rest of the racing schedule around them.


9. Ask yourself the $700 billion question: how does taking care of myself positively impact other areas of my life? You probably don't do this often enough, but it's important to keep you from feeling selfish about pursuing your sport of choice.

I have been thinking a lot about the last point on this list lately. I have found it recently invaluable to have an "endurance perspective" in my life. There are all sorts of trials and tragedies in life that you will have to endure as we grow and change. Becoming an endurance athlete has many parallels to becoming the type of person who can endure and persevere - and maybe even triumph - in the face of extreme adversity. We can only hope.