PATIENCE=FITNESS
Our society has become to expect anything and everything now. We live in a time where we can get and expect to get things without waiting.
Want a new tv? Amazon can have it to you the same day! For some of us even same day is not good enough. We want it the moment we purchase it.
I myself fall into this trap from time to time and we must remember that having patience and waiting for something now can yield better things in the near future.
A great example of this is fitness. When someone looks to hire a coach they expect their fitness to greatly improve. In most instances this is accurate. What is not accurate is the expectation
that this increase in fitness will happen within the first week or even the first month.
The more patience you have the better and stronger you will be in the future. I learned this the hard way and it is something I try to instill in my athletes.
What you do each day is a building block for the next week. Each week builds onto the next month. And, you guessed it each month builds onto the next year. So what you do this year is
going to have a big impact on what you do next year. If you are new to the sport of triathlon it is a tough sport to become good at unless you just have some natural, God given talent.
Becoming good at a sport that is a mix of four disciplines, yes I count nutrition as the 4th discipline takes time, skill and patience. If you are patient and spend those first several months
to a year building a solid aerobic foundation, working on core strength, mobility and flexibility your going to be twice as strong in the coming year.And if in that next year you are strong,
consistent, determined and patient, year 3 is going to be even better.
Everything compounds and adds up. And the more consistently you do this process day after day, week after week, month after month and year after yeart the stronger and faster you will become.
You are also much less at risk to get injured. Yes it can always happen but the risk greatly goes down when you execute with consistency and patience in everything you do.
This not only means consistency in your running, swimming, cycling or strength training workouts, it also involves consistency with yoga, sleep, hydration, nutrition, so many things go into success.
Combining all of those things consistently you will be well on your way to success.
Let’s think of this in a couple of different ways. If you were seated at a table and someone put $500 in front of you and said. You can have this now; but if you wait until next week I can give you $1,000 what would you do?
I would like to think most of us would have the patience to wait a week to double that outcome.
Now let’s take the fact that you are going to build a new house and you want it to be big and fancy with all the latest techonology but your not willing to wait, you really have to have it now! So maybe a few steps are skipped here and there, do we really need that wall here are these types of insulated wire here? Hopefully none of us would look the other way when it comes to building codes and safety but we do it with our fitness and our lives at times. To have all those nice things you need to have patience. Patience in saving up enough money to afford it and to deal with unexpected expenses. You have to have the patience to build the foundation of that house sturdy and sound. The stronger that foundation the more stuff you can build and put into it and on top of it. Very similar to our running or cycling, swimming, whatever your sport of choice is.
We focus so hard on wanting progress and our outcome goals to happen now instead of waiting to have it later to where it will last with less risk of becoming something bad for us.
We all to it from time to time, we skip strength training here and there, we skip yoga, we don’t warm up or cool down and we get into the habit of thinking I am doing fine and then one day, INJURY, SICKNESS or in the case of the home, a fire, roof collapses, foundation cracks. Things that were skipped in order to speed up the process will cost us more in the future than having patience to achieve it correctly.
The point is patience is something that can yield a great deal of success in your athletic endevours not to mention our personal and professional life endevors as well.
So take a moment to be patient and trust the process and by this next time next year you will be twice as good as you are now!
Coach Ray Delahoussaye
Coach/Owner Endurance on Demand
