With the debauchery of the holidays over, you might feel that it’s time to repent and start training. A month of over-consumption and inactivity has left you feeling lost. Having strayed from the path, you look to the web for guidance. The Google leads to many websites, books, magazines, and blogs offering recipes for success. Dissatisfied with the current state of things, you begin to find inspiration in the testimonials and meaning in the words of those with the answers.
Thin-air squats: Crossfit at almost 19,000 feet.
Brimming with enthusiasm and the promise of salvation, you feel motivation building in the New Year as you vow to improve. “If I just do X, Y, and Z, I’ll be set. This time I’ll get it right!” you think, as the sugarplums dancing in your head (actually they probably already made it to your belly …) are now replaced with visions of killer programming and previously unimaginable physical prowess.
Whoa … Whoa. Take ‘er easy. Before you start chasing the training dragon, completing your first workout or penciling in that periodized plan, take a deep breath. Training is a lot like religion: once invested in a program, social structure or belief system, people tend to cling to it tooth and nail. So before you go down the wrong spiritual (or physical) path, it’s important to examine your beliefs, er, I mean goals, and keep the big picture in mind. If your goal is training, then cool; go nuts. But if you at least pay lip service to improving at a sport, then you should read on.
I too have (repeatedly) succumbed to the lures and pitfalls of TMI: Too Much Internet (or was it Intensity?), often shooting myself in the foot by over-thinking, over-structuring, and just generally overdoing it. Before continuing and potentially scaring you back into a state of sloth, I must say there isn’t anything wrong with training. In fact, you should train, because properly applied honing has great benefits for one’s health and sport-specific performance. The problem is that certain people (like me) get overly enthusiastic or overly invested in a particular program. Despite harmful consequences to health, mental state, social life, and performance at sport, they (OK, I … ) continue to engage in recurring compulsive training activities.
In the hopes of helping those prone to over-zealousness in the training department, I would like to present some cautionary tales from my own time spent as a self-coached athlete. What follows are a few examples of my silly behavior in a little place I like to call The Hone Zone. The New Year is all about countdowns so here is mine …
Top 10 stupid things I’ve done in the name of training:
10. Gone to the climbing gym to lift weights and campus on a sunny/powder day (many)
9. Attempted to consistently and exclusively consume 40% of my calories in the form of carbohydrate, 30% in the form of protein and 30% in the form of fat (“Please pass me four macadamia nuts to offset my four ounces of chicken and two cups of broccoli.”)
8. Completed a “depletion day” of hiking 9,000 feet of vertical gain, with only one liter of water and a single 100-calorie energy gel as sustenance (done with a severe hangover to maximize suffering effect)
7. Done heavy deadlifts and running intervals the night before a powder day (didn’t get too many runs in.)
6. Done box jumps in dirty Peruvian streets with air quality that warrants a mask (resulting in bronchitis at altitude a week later)
Eighty rounds of kettleball swings = complete boredom
5. Completed 80 rounds (40 minutes) of kettlebell swings after a day of climbing (got really bored)
4. Attempted to eat only that which Paleolithic man ate while maintaining a very high training volume (soon realized why they didn’t live so long back then … )
3. Done Tabata Squats at nearly 19,000 feet during an acclimatization hike (OK, “climb”) in Peru
2. Labeled my wedding day as “Long Slow Distance/Wedding: Timpanogos Hike: 13miles, 4900ft gain. 3.5 hrs up, 1 hr on summit, 3 hrs down, 7.5 hrs total” on my training calendar.
1. Passed on an ice climb that hadn’t formed completely in over a decade to complete a bouldering pyramid at the climbing gym. (“Man you really missed out. The comp kids were gone and the bouldering cave was empty!”)
Wedding? Or training?
Honor thy KB swing
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