To Live, To Love, To Learn, To Leave a Legacy

Many, many books have been written on the subject of prioritisation, planning and time management. Many of them are actually quite good. One of my favourites is “First Things First” by Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill. I was first introduced to it on a management course which I did as part of my day time job and the title of this blog is from this book – the four basic human needs: to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy.

No, no, I haven’t completely lost it. This is still a blog dealing with all things triathlon. As mentioned in my last blog we’ll look at addressing planning and including sleep into our planning and you’ll recall I ended with the below quote from the article “Sleep-Deprived Triathletes Face an Uphill Battle” by Dr. Krishna R. Polu.

“Unfortunately, sleeping has become equated with laziness and fails to find its way onto our list of priorities. This perception is skewed in a society that is preoccupied with doing too many things at once. Adequate sleep is part of that balance, and in triathlon it may be the most important choice in our preparation for the next race.”

Whilst I’ve never really thought of sleeping as laziness, I have to agree that sleep probably doesn’t feature high enough on my priority list and I see the same issue with many of my fellow athletes. Given that we now have a better understanding of the importance of adequate sleep, it seems only reasonable that we include it into our planning and if adequate sleep equates to somewhere between 7 and 10 hours per day, we’re going to need some serious help. This is why I’ve turned to the corporate world for some help. Time management is something most successful executives have a black belt in.

The planning principles

The book “First Things First” suggests an entire way of life and very eloquently provides guidance and suggestions on how to live a more balanced and principle centred life. I’m not going to deal with all the aspects of the book as I probably wouldn’t do it any justice and the real value would be for you to read it. What I am going to do is take two concepts mentioned in the book which focuses on planning and use it to assist us to get to an adequate amount of sleep.

Firstly we need to understand the difference between importance and urgency and focus on importance first. Many of us get caught up in doing the urgent things first and then don’t get to do the important things.

“Urgency itself is not the problem. The problem is that when urgency is the dominant factor in our lives, importance isn’t” – First Things First.

Secondly we need to identify our roles in life and place them in priority order. Each of us will play different roles: i.e. Husband/Wife, Father/Mother, Coach, Athlete, Manager, Brother/Sister, Son/Daughter. With seven probably the maximum we should be focussing on at any one time. Understanding the importance of our roles in life allows us to understand the importance of the activities we’ll plan for.

Where does your training fit?

The purpose of a triathlon coach is to help you achieve your triathlon goals. Your goals determined by you. For your coach to be able to help you achieve your triathlon goals, you should:

·         Know what it is you wish to achieve

·         Know where it fits on your life priority scale

The better understanding a coach have of how triathlon fits into your life, the better equip that coach would be to help you to have an enjoyable and successful journey.

For a professional athlete training to win a gold medal at the Olympics, the importance of training time would be quite different from the 40+ year old dad training for his next Ironman finish. Both of them wish to do the best they possibly can. For both it would be highly unlikely that they will achieve their goals and be happy if the importance placed on their goals does not value the interdependency of that goal on the other roles of their life.

“Values will not bring quality of life results… Unless we value principles.” – First Things First.

In other words, when you determine where your triathlon goal fits on your priority scale, be realistic, don’t forgo good principles and allow the people close to you to be part of this prioritisation process. For both the Olympian and the dad, the people around them are the ones that’ll get them to the start line.

Food for thought

Armed with a good understanding of where your training fits in, we can now look at how much training  time you have available each week. Understanding this, a coach can adapt the volume and intensity of your training appropriately – and this should include sleep and recovery time.

You may not think you have a lot of time available to train but remember you’re more likely to have success following an achievable training plan with the support of your family than following a plan which leaves you sleep deprived and stressed for months on end.

Live, Love, Learn and make Triathlon part of your Legacy…

Sleep? Are you kidding me!

 

During the past month I was listening to some of my fellow athletes mentioning how they battle to sleep during the hot summer nights. I thought I may do a bit of research about sleep, how much we need, why it’s important and if we struggle with it what we can do about sleeping better. As expected I found quite a bit of material on this subject, however the more I learned the more I realised sleeping might be a bigger challenge than I initially thought.

In this and the next few blogs I’d like to chat about:
• The fundamentals of sleep – how much we should sleep etc.
• The practicalities of fitting the right amount of sleep into our daily lives
• How we can plan and build our schedule to meet our sleep requirements.

Hush my little baby…

Before we get brave I thought let’s have a look at what the experts say about sleep for an athlete. Probably the most appropriate article I found was one on the Australian Sports Commission’s website:   Strategies for quality sleep by Michelle Austin, Psychologist, ACT Academy of Sport.
Before you do anything else I’d urge you to read this article.

What this article will teach you is
• What sleep deprivation is, the symptoms and consequences
• What you can do before bed and in bed to get more sleep
• Strategies that will help you get better quality sleep
• And that an athlete probably needs about 10 hours of sleep a night.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!  

On what planet does One Day, less Family time, less work time and less training time leave 10 hours for sleep? Clearly the target market for that amount of sleep must be full time athletes! Or is it?

Which way do you sleep?

Not being satisfied with the 10 hour a night recommendation I looked at different forms of sleep to see if there’s a way out. Naturally when I saw an article titled “Alternative Sleep Cycles: 7-10 Hours Are Not Needed” I was curious, very curious. Enter the Polyphasic Society.

I don’t believe there’s all that much value in reading this article by Joe Martino but if you wish you can do that here.

In summary it describes different sleep cycles namely:
• Monophasic - This is our normal 7 to 10 hours of sleep.

• Byphasic - More commonly known as siesta sleep i.e. 6 hours at night with 20 to 90 min naps around midday.

• Everyman - I’m not sure what is so “everyman” about it. It consists of 3.5 hour core sleep and 3 x 20 min naps.

• Dymaxion - Only for those of us who are genetically modified with the DEC2 gene and consist of 4 x 30 mins sleeps.

• Uberman - The name says it all! 6 to 8 x 20 min naps per day.

Practically I believe we mainly use Monophasic and Byphasic sleep and a combination of these should be adequate for us to remain healthy. According to the article "Brain Basics: Understanding sleep” published by National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (I’m assuming in the USA)

“Getting too little sleep creates a "sleep debt," which is much like being overdrawn at a bank. Eventually, your body will demand that the debt be repaid.”

The good thing about that is that it implies the debt can be repaid and therefore if our busy lives doesn’t allow us 10 hours of sleep a night, working in a good nap, especially after a training session on the weekend, is still a really, really good thing.

Not everyone requires the same amount of sleep. As with all things triathlon, know and listen to your body – if it needs sleep, sleep, it’s really important.

Food for thought

In the article “Sleep-Deprived Triathletes Face an Uphill Battle”  by Dr. Krishna R. Polu he says the following:

“Unfortunately, sleeping has become equated with laziness and fails to find its way onto our list of priorities. This perception is skewed in a society that is preoccupied with doing too many things at once. Adequate sleep is part of that balance, and in triathlon it may be the most important choice in our preparation for the next race.”

Now that we understand the importance of sleep, let’s prioritise and plan our sleep as much as we do the swim, cycle and run. More on this in the next blog.