I recently finished ‘Grit’ by Angela Duckworth. I have been listening to a series of audible books given the amount of time I’m spending on the treadmill and on my bike. Both lend themselves to committing time to listening to… something. Music has become boring at times. Podcasts and Audible books seem far more appealing to pass the time. The latter particularly when on the bike. One of the audible books I listened to was ‘Grit’. It had been on my list for sometime.
"done by intention or design" - Websters Dictionary
It led me to rethink a number of things, but lent itself particularly well to physical training. I thought about the idea of ‘junk miles’ and simply putting in the miles for the sake of putting in the miles, but without the idea of reaching any specific objective or goal.
I’ve been running for over twenty years and spent a significant number of those years running without intentionality believing that if I simply put on my shoes and ran, it would lead me to my objective or help me achieve my goal. What I realized in listening to Angela Duckworth is that there needs to be an intentionality. Doing something for the sake of doing something wasn’t enough.
When committing to a physical training program, there needs to be a balance between intentionality – or, for me, workouts with a specific goal, and recovery. Every workout can’t be a recovery workout, and every workout can’t be a hard hitting workout where you push yourself towards a strenuous outcome.
I’ve begun to think about this idea in every workout I do. As I look at my calendar for the week ahead, I try to understand the goal of each workout. Is it to build my strength or is it active recovery from the workouts I’ve been undertaking? It was so easy to hop on my bike and ‘just ride’, but I realized that ‘just riding’ wasn’t necessarily getting me anything other than time in the saddle. Don’t get me wrong – time in the saddle when preparing for a 3800 mile bike ride across the country is important. But time in the saddle won’t ensure that you are prepared to ride 70-80 miles per day back to back for roughly 47 days. There needs to be a careful planning in the training to ensure there are workouts that build strength and workouts that provide active recovery.
The choice is always mine as to whether to ‘do’ the workout, or to just ‘ride’ or just ‘run’ or just ‘swim’. Since listening to ‘Grit’, I’ve made the conscious decision to be intentional in my workouts and follow them to a ‘t’. Doing so has ensured that I am obtaining the optimal intention of the workout from a physical perspective, but it has also ensured I capture the mental goal. For example, today I had a 2:40 bike ride on hills. Where I am at the moment has no hills. Instead, I focused on pushing my power efforts to mimic what I’d be doing on hills. It would have been so easy to simply ‘ride’ and cruise along for 2:40. This effort is… intentionality.
I’m working hard to implement this across all aspects of my life – living a life of intentionality.
