As a working athlete myself, my time is supremely limited during the day and at current, a source is irritation to me. Lately I have been working on some ways to save time whilst still being able to see mates, get through training, eat correctly, sleep enough and get in a full day’s work.

Some of these require some planning, but the time planning outweighs the time wasted by not doing these things:

1. Pack the night before: Make sure you have your training gear out for your morning session. Save time by showering at the gym and pack your breakfast in with you. Getting up earlier is far worse than going to bed a little later. Time saved: 60 min per week.

2. Food tips: Pack breakfast and eat it while your mail is downloading in the morning. Keep healthy snacks with you, rather than walking to the shops twice a day. Time saved: 60 min per week.

3. Mobile email: If I absolutely have to, I take my phone with me for a lunchtime spin (indoors at the gym). I can bash out 10-15 replies whilst still getting in a great 45min session in my lunch hour. This leaves me with time to do proper work when back at the office. Time saved: 20-30min per week.

4. Find a regular deli. Making lunch at home is often not condusive to time saving. I have a regular deli where I can get a warm take out lunch for more or less the same cost as what I could make it at home. Worth having twice a week at least. Time saved: 40min per week.

5. Take it easy. We rush and push and never take a moment to breathe and relax. Stopping what you are doing when you are in a tizz is often condusive to collecting yourself and working better after an hour out. If you are too tired, close your door and power nap for 30min on the floor. You might come back and what would have taken you 3 hours to do would now, with a fresh mind, take you 2 hours. Time saved: up to 120 min per week

I`ll continue with this post next week, as I find I lose people after point 5 anyway…. but more on that next week.

have a great weekend.

Continue Reading →

I don’t know who is responsible for making these, but I love them. Granted, I am a sport nut, but they amp me up, give me goose bumps and often get me out the door when I am being lazy. Thank you, whoever you are…

groovy.

Continue Reading →

So you`re milling about your office, not sure what to do. You already had a singing session with yesterdays post, and after you`re 14th cup of coffee you certainly aren’t working. Your F.O.M.O behaviour last night has you left with a seriaas case of L.C and the P.P.S is off the chain today. The aircon is up full and you resemble a Turkish Bath right about now…

What to do? Have to look busy for the boss. Make these 5 clicks and you will have stuff to talk about across a platform of stuff today, in case somebody cares.

1. Deadly Sins are on topic. There is only one when it comes to changing habits.

2. Is there truly a mental edge to professional athletes, or is it all in the numbers? What makes the real difference?

3. We Love Real Beeris a cause close to heart, and the reason for a slightly fuzzy head this morning. Comment, follow, tweet, blog it. Get involved. It’s time for us to stop drinking chemical plastic beer.

4. Jackets are a personal favorite. This one I want in particular. Phew…

5. Creating Ultra Loyal Customers is something you could definitely talk about in the office today. So read this and look smart.

That’s it for today. Sports, Fashion, CRM, Beer, Balance all covered in 5 easy clicks. You will seem smarter to people, even if you have a head full of #realbeer. Have a great day!

Continue Reading →

Ok…

Click the video and get it to load fully. Turn the volume up full and plug in any speakers lying around. Now do the following:

Close your door.

Pull the curtains together.

Take off your jacket/tie/loosen your top button.

Take 5 deep breaths….prepare to sing your lungs out without a freaking care in the world! Throw your arms out, bang your head in all directions, cry if you feel like it. Throw away your inhibitions and forget the world exists. For the next 6 minutes you are the king of the moment, the master of the now, and you are going to go beyond yourself to a moment where nothing else matters.

Now go… FULL VOLUME.

You’re beautiful.

Into the night
Desperate and broken
The sound of a fight
Father has spoken

We were the kings and queens of promise
We were the victims of ourselves
Maybe the children of a lesser God
Between Heaven and Hell
Heaven and Hell

Into your eyes
Hopeless and taken
We stole our new lives
Through blood and
In defense of our dreams
In defense of our dreams

We were the Kings and Queens of promise
We were the victims of ourselves
Maybe the Children of a lesser God
Between Heaven and Hell
Heaven and Hell

The age of man is over
A darkness comes at dawn
These lessons that we learned here
Have only just begun

We were the Kings and Queens of promise
We were the victims of ourselves
Maybe the Children of a Lesser God
Between Heaven and Hell

We are the Kings
We are the Queens
We are the Kings
We are the Queens

Continue Reading →

So I am struggling in the last week, officially. I figure its better to put it out there, rather than do the typical athlete thing and keep it to myself. My experience on the weekend was just a manifestation of this “kidding myself” process in the last few weeks.

It all started with a big fall. Yes, my leg was pretty heavily cut up, but the real damage was not in the blood, infection and swelling. It was hidden in my back. I spent the week after the fall nursing my leg and arm back to health, all the while ignoring the tell tale signs. The headaches, the return of the sore right knee in the first 20min of running, the nerve under my right elbow twitching.

Lighthouse to Lighthouse went amazingly, my legs felt amazing, my head was in a great space, my hands dealt well with all the work, but there was a nag in my back, like a T-rex with a itchy bum, it was there. By tuesday morning I was in serious trouble, the “sinkplaatpad” had turned the niggle into an official problem. Massage on Wed confirmed that I was misaligned and needed to get back to Rob, my chiro guru.

He fixed me up, but it was the longest, most painful session of alignment and releasing I have ever had. My body completely skewed and my tireless ambition getting the better of me.

Stupid athlete. Tirelessly telling yourself you are ok, that its just a niggle. I should be better adjusted to listening and seeing the signs.

Anyway, we did what we could, but it was too little, too late. Friday I had the most amazing session of activation with Line, but the results were yet to show by yesterday. Xterra was a mare. 3 hours of frustration as I couldn’t find the strength to pedal, to run, no matter how hard my mind tried to push.

The alignment and the activation are two things which really take it out of me. My body was still in shock, even though my mind was roaring to kick ass and take victims, this being SA Champs and all. Disappointment in myself is without a doubt the thing I deal with worst.

Am I all better? NO. I reckon one more adjustment should do it, along with a session with a fitting expert. I need to work on some minor tweaks here and there. It’s all very tiring and emotional, but tirelessly I have to go about the healing process.

Silly fall. At the time, shock and adrenaline kept me going. I hope to have learned this lesson now. I gave out some advice regarding this exact subject to a pro a while ago, and there I was, not listening to my own advice. Silly athlete.

Continue Reading →

Designed by Puma and Sagem Wireless, the Puma Phone is an “active smartphone,” offering the expected features — like mobile Internet, messaging, GPS localization, video calling, Bluetooth, a 2.8 inch touch screen, a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash, music player, and 3G — as well as sport-minded niceties like GPS, a compass, a pedometer, GPS tracker, and stopwatch. Oh, and it’s got a built-in solar cell for charging when you’re out on the trail, at the track, or just relaxing by the pool.

Sweet.

check out the functionality…

I wonder if we`ll get it locally? Stay tuned to find out.

Continue Reading →

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Everett Bogue, author of The Art of Being Minimalist, and blogger at Far Beyond the Stars.

Have you ever had a creative evening when time suddenly flew by? A day when you executed a difficult project at work flawlessly? A brief moment in time when your challenging exercise routine felt effortless?

All of these times you were in a state of flow.

Flow is a concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago, who has studied the phenomena his whole career. Daniel Pink reintroduces the concept in his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Many people flow through their lives in an effortless fashion, while countless others have a difficult time achieving a flow state.

Why flow is hard to achieve
Flow is a moment in time when you’re both challenged at the activity that you’re doing, and when you also have complete autonomy in the task you’re conducting.

We engage in flow under your own volition, with a skill which we’ve had some amount of experience.

If you’re not flowing, it’s probably because you aren’t allowing yourself to be challenged, you’re completely overwhelmed, or someone else is holding you back.

The majority of my experience with flow has been with dance and writing. I’ve studied dance for many years, and one of the technical skills that dancers work on is called improvisation. Improv is very tricky in dance. You have to turn off your mind and simply dance with your instincts.

When you’ve mastered improv dance, you’ve reached the sweet spot between your brain transferring commands to your nervous system. There is no longer any thinking involved, as thinking in improv dance will make everything stop. There just isn’t any time for brainwork when you are constantly moving.

Csikszentmihalyi hypothesizes that these moments of flow occur because we’re simply activating too many neurological functions. Because of this we no longer have capacity to be aware of what functions we’re engaging in. So the ‘conscious of me’ part of the mind switches off, your awareness of yourself slips away, and you just do.

You’re simply flowing in the the present moment
I have also experienced flow in writing. I think it’s very important for writers to engage in flow. A lot of writers stop and meticulously edit their work after every sentence, but writing this way (for most people) is counterproductive.

Why? I believe it’s because of the same reason that dancers can’t stop dancing in improvisation. If you just keep writing for 30 minutes without stopping, you give your mind a chance to turn off the ‘conscious of me’ brain functions. This in turn grants more brain power to challenging the boundaries of your writing ability.

You cannot edit while you’re producing work. If you do, you’ll be constantly switching between your right brain and your left brain. Your creative center will be switching off and on and it will be harder to produce anything meaningful.

A classic example of real world flow
Ray Bradbury was a freelance writer who was trying to support his family. However, he was working at home with his cute little children. This proved to be incredibly distracting, so he had to find somewhere else to write. So, he headed over to UCLA’s Lawrence Clark Powell Library.

In the basement of the library there was a number of typewriters that gave 30 minutes of writing time for a dime.

Ray was very poor at the time, and needed all the money he could to support his family. Whenever he popped in the dime, he wanted to get his month’s worth. This forced him to write at a frantic pace until his time was up. The most frustrating element of writing the novel was when the typewriter keys tangled, because it meant that he was wasting valuable time.

In between these 30 minute typewriter banging sessions, he would wander the halls of the library studying books and contemplating what he would write for the next 30 minutes.

The novel Ray finished was classic sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451. He created this novel in record amount of time, and recalled feeling as if the flow of time had accelerated. The novel wrote itself, effortlessly.

Think about how important it is to flow
I really believe many people miss this aspect of engaging in their work. If you aren’t flowing, you’re not reaching the peak of your ability. There is so much untapped hidden potential in flow, just waiting to be retrieved.

People who have learned flow are challenging themselves and creating work at their best.

We no longer have dime typewriters at the library, but there are a number of ways to practice flow without them.

9 simple ways you can bring yourself into flow

1. Pick a enjoyable, challenging activity. The easiest way to enter flow is by doing something you love. The activity also needs to challenge you, one you are extremely passionate about, that you enjoy doing, and that causes you to grow. If the activity is boring to tedious you won’t enjoy it, and so there is no way you can engage in flow.
2. Eliminate distractions. Turn off your phone, log out of twitter, switch off gmail. If you’re constantly flipping back and forth between different tasks you’ll never be able to achieve flow. A foreign distraction will quickly bring you out of the flow mindset.
3. Think before you do. Do any research or preparation before you engage in the activity you wish to flow in. If you stop and do research while writing, or have to grab a bite to eat in the middle of a run, you’ll throw yourself out of the grove. Preparation is the only way to avoid that.
4. Isolate yourself. The best way to achieve flow is alone. If you’re in a room full of people, your mind will constantly be drawn away from what you’re doing. Shut the door, put on headphones, or find another way to isolate yourself.
5. Let go. Give up any expectations that you have for yourself. If you enter a flow situation with preconceptions about the results that you’ll get from the practice, you’ll inevitably disappoint yourself. You also run the risk of narrowing your focus to a point where you can’t change coarse naturally if your flow takes you down a road less traveled.
6. Give yourself a time limit. Like Bradbury, set a timer on your activity. Give yourself 30 minutes of uninterrupted flow time and just go at it with everything you’ve got. Forget about how much time you’ve been doing the activity, and how much time you have left, just flow. You may just find that you lose track of time completely.
7. Keep moving. Continuous motion is key to flow, don’t give your mind a chance to start second guessing what you’re doing. Keep moving with the activity you’re flowing in. Go at a pace that’s challenging for you, but not overwhelming. You want to be calm and collected, but also have forward momentum.
8. Don’t think. Switch off the part of your brain that observes what you’re doing. This is your self-consciousness, your ego, your sabotage. Why flow is so important is that it circumvents the necessity to constantly critique yourself. This can be hard, if you’re used to constantly second-guessing everything you do, but it is so important to successfully entering flow.
9. Practice. Like any useful skill, flow takes time to master. Don’t stress if you can’t do it right away. If you’re interested in achieving a state of flow, you need to practice regularly. Set a time every day that will be dedicated flow time. Eventually you’ll start to recognize when you’re flowing, and when you’re not. After many hours of practice, you’ll eventually become a flow master.

Everett Bogue is the author of The Art of Being Minimalist, and writes about living a simple minimalist life at Far Beyond The Stars.

Continue Reading →

I think the fact that Lance arrived in a skin suit, averaged 56km/h and only rode 15 odd seconds into an Ironman guy shows the strength and power Chris Lieto has in him. Well done Chris for keeping us Ironman guys in the loop with arguably the best cyclist of all time.

I loved the comment from Lance that they will have another showdown, in a few years, in October…..

Continue Reading →

Adaptation refers to the body’s ability to adjust to increased or decreased physical demands. It is also one way we learn to coordinate muscle movement and develop sports-specific skills, which for me at this stage includes going 50km/h downhill through rock gardens, pedalling on a flat road in tt position at 50km/h and running faster and faster on my long runs. Repeatedly practicing a skill or activity makes it second-nature and easier to perform. Adaptation explains why beginning exercisers are often sore after starting a new routine, but after doing the same exercise for weeks and months they have little, if any, muscle soreness.

Additionally, it makes an athlete very efficient and allows him to expend less energy doing the same movements. This reinforces the need to vary a workout routine if you want to see continued improvement.

For me, adaptation leads to economy, which is something I am also hugely passionate about. To reach economy, we need to go through the adaptation phase, but we also need to do an overload phase as part of that. I am talking about this today, as we (all guys going through to IMSA) are all going into an overload phase right about now.

The exercise science principle of overload states that a greater than normal stress or load on the body is required for training adaptation to take place. What this means is that in order to improve our fitness, strength or endurance, we need to increase the workload accordingly.

In order for a muscle (including the heart) to increase strength, it must be gradually stressed by working against a load greater than it is used to. To increase endurance, muscles must work for a longer period of time than they are used to or at a higher intensity.

For some, this will involve a training camp. For me, I am racing Cape Epic as a top priority, but it also doubles up as the most amazing training camp ever. Its 50/50 though in how I am going to recover in time for a proper IMSA, as Cape Epic is at the same level of importance to me.

The guys I coach are all going to get emails this week relating to their adaptation environments for the next 6 weeks. They are going to go through some seriously tired moments, hence the video above. I have seen that exact thing at training camps, where guys are totally blown, at breakfast, but still pile in a 6 hour ride at pace that day.

The human body is amazing.

Hope you learnt something in that today, and that you will find a place to apply overload to your body in the next few weeks. It really does make an amazing difference in the long run. Make sure its 6 weeks prior to your A-race, and do not be scared to fall apart somewhere in the middle. That is the point.

Continue Reading →

I am sitting here going through some things and there really is just an amazing vibe about this year. There is so much on the go already and it’s just not going to slow down. Here are a couple things you should be taking note of:

Find these around town… its important for future use. take a photo and tell me where you found it.

Short movie which someone passed on to me, very cool. Everyone should watch it.

Then found an amazing extension to the Moleskin family, called passions, here. My favorite is the wine one, click the image to enlarge…

There has been quite a debate going today because of a little thing that went down on Twitter.

You got to love Twitter.

Why?

Because the social network site is great for digging up fun, exiting and breaking news like…a potential TT (time trial) race between 7-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and Chris Lieto, the second place finisher at last year’s Ironman World Championships in Kona.

Click HERE to see the best moments from the Ironman 2009 Championship race including Lieto’s second place finish.

As you may (or may not) be aware both Armstrong and Lieto are on the big island of Hawaii training.

A few hours ago Armstrong twittered this to Lieto:

“Just passed @chrislieto going the other way. He was hammerin. Hey Chris, a little TT showdown on the Queen K tomorrow?“

And Lieto replied:

“see u on the Queen-K! Will have to be after 8am cause I have to swim first. Flying out mid day. Give me a call.“

And Armstrong just replied:

“Queen K Hwy TT Challenge. Tomorrow 9:30am. Start – Waikeloa Beach Dr to Kukio Nui Dr. 14 miles. Full gas. Take it easy on me“

and

“This won’t be a twitter ride. First ever “twitter time trial”. Love it“.

So it looks like we might have a epic Kona Ironman smack down brewing  on the Queen-K tomorrow between two potential Ironman rivals.

Armstrong says he’ll race the Ironman World Championships as soon as next year.

Check out Armstrong’s TT bike HERE.

Stay tuned tomorrow.. source

We’ll keep you posted if and when this epic race of TT champions goes down.

How crazy is that? Gotta love twitter. With snow in 49 states, no wonder 2 smart guys went to Kona, an amazing place.

Its also Earth Hour next month again? What else can I tell you except to go to their website to check out this noble cause.

That’s it for today…

Continue Reading →