Focus. That’s been on my mind a lot lately and at least in part over the last couple years.
My pursuit of a sub-5:00 mile got sidetracked a little bit as my Ultimate (frisbee) Summer League came to an end at the beginning of August. On top of Summer League, my day job started to intensify a bit. I also thought, what the heck, I might as well also take on a secret side project for work! Oh yeah, and then there was that other side project that I’d already committed to. So I had a lot on my mind. I think I was suffering more from mental overload than anything else.
The good news is that our Summer League team dominated the finals and I had the opportunity to be on my first winning Summer League team ever.
Having read Born to Run, which emphasizes the spirit of running, one thing that I definitely did not want was to feel guilty about not running or missing workouts. Running should be an enjoyable, rewarding, stress-relieving activity - even if it does tax you physically and mentally during hard workouts. If you have to take time off from running, whether due to injury or other circumstances, consider it an opportunity for your muscles and brain to recover. When you get back to running, you’ll be refreshed both physically and mentally.
So now I’m back to running consistently and have been running every other day for the past 2 weeks. I have renewed focus and I’m putting running first. I believe that you can only be really successful at something if you make it a priority. You can be kinda good at a lot of things, but you won’t excel in all of them at the same time.
Over the last two years or more, I’ve been trying to get better at the art of single tasking. Multi-tasking was glorified during the rise of the web and the ever-increasing digital distractions in our lives, but there’s been a noticeable backlash over the last few years as we realize that it’s not actually a good thing to divide your attention across many things. This applies both to working at a computer as well as with the greater whole of your life. It’s simply not effective to try to crank out a new feature on a web application while instant messaging and responding to emails. Similarly, you can’t divide your focus across multiple different athletic endeavors while trying to put in extra hours at your job. Something’s gotta give.
In the past 3 weeks, I read 3 really great books that I think will help direct me towards my goal:
The Primal Blueprint prescribes a total lifestyle that takes advantage of 2 million years of human evolution (give or take). It provides 10 simple rules covering everything from the proper diet and exercise to sleep and preventing stress. I’m gradually trying to incorporate elements of the blueprint into my daily life. You can read daily articles and advice at Mark’s Daily Apple.
The Power of Now is a book about applying the principles of mindfulness to every day life. It is clearly written with language that is easy to understand - which is difficult when you’re talking about Zen Buddhism. The Power of Now definitely emphasizes focus. The big challenge is to try to stop the running commentary in your head of everything that you’re worried about or need to do and focus on the present. It’s clearly something that’s going to take a lot of practice.
And finally, I decided that I needed to add a little structure to my training, so I bought the most recommended book on training for competitive running. Daniels’ Running Formula gets down into the specifics of training for races. The most important message in the book is that when you’re training, you should know the purpose of each workout. Why are you running a long run today? Why intervals instead of repeats? Should you rest one minute or five minutes between reps? I think I learned more about running while reading this book than I did in 4 years of high school running. To be fair to my high school coach (who was the best coach I’ve ever had in any sport) the book did trigger a lot of flashbacks about specific workouts we did at various points of the season - I just didn’t know exactly why we were doing them at the time.
So what’s next? I’m just about to leave for the airport to take my first mini-retirement in Buenos Aires. B and I will be renting an apartment in Buenos Aires for a month. I’ll be working remotely part-time during the middle two weeks, but will be taking the opportunity to get my mind and priorities in order. I’ll be taking lots of pictures and laying out my training plan in more detail over the coming months, so stay tuned!
