I have just been on a 2 day course to improve my work skills. As a project manager working with incredible, yet corporate clients, my job is to take the pressure off my teams in the office so that they can produce the best product, and by that, I mean the best value, for the client.

Simple. We develop in Agile methodology and it’s worth noting the Agile Manifesto and relating that to my sport of choice, Ironman.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

If I had to imagine the endurance athletes manifesto, it would look as follows:

Individuals and interactions over teams and equipment
Results and Performance over smack talk & speculation
Sponsor collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

When I clicked those simple things, a massive pause occurred in my mind. I had to rethink the way I went about everything. I consulted my peer group for the smartest info, worked with a coach, a strength coach and developed working collaborations with my sponsors instead of race reports and negotiation. Today, I got the go ahead from a sponsor for 2012 on just what is says in the manifesto there. Collaboration, Interaction, Change, Performance. I am so excited about the future at the moment because the present is filled with opportunity.

Next year, I plan to race 3 Ironman races. Stupid? Read THIS FIRST. Add in 3 Xterra races, Sani2c, Wines2Wales, 70.3 Buffalo City, 2 Oceans Half Marathon, possibly African-X and who knows what else, right? Does NOT mean I am racing them all to win, but whilst I can, I am going to race as much as possible, before life settles into the routine where it’s not possible to race AS much.

Whilst the pause for the end of the year is approaching rapidly, I urge you to find a space to truly pause before the year resumes with a bang in January. Recharge fully, breathe deep and for a week or two, walk slowly, ride with open eyes and run some new trails like a kid. The pause is coming quickly, are you ready?

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As you may know, in 2011 we started Pure Planet Racing to raise awareness to the large footprints we, as athletes, leave on our planet.

Here is a short reel of some of the highlights from the year so far. You can find all the info on www.pureplanetracing.com as we head into the final stretch for the year.

We still have Wines2Wales, Double Century and the small matter of planting up R10 000 worth of shrubs, trees and plants along the bike paths in Cape Town left before the end of the month.

A big thanks to the sponsors who have been involved this year so far… BoE Private Clients, Garmin, Velocity Sports Labs, Fairbairn Private Bank and Axis House. Watch out 2012, we are coming for you.

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Have you ever wanted to flow through decisions and processes effortlessly, having things fall into place seemingly effortlessly? Whilst we obsess over this effortlessness enough while out swimming, cycling or running, how often are we putting in the same amount of work towards these elements existing in our work lives, our love lives and our family lives?

One of Taoism’s most important concepts is wu wei, which is sometimes translated as “non-doing” or “non-action.” A better way to think of it, however, is as a paradoxical “Action of non-action.” Wu wei refers to the cultivation of a state of being in which our actions are quite effortlessly in alignment with the ebb and flow of the elemental cycles of the natural world. It is a kind of “going with the flow” that is characterized by great ease and awake-ness, in which – without even trying – we’re able to respond perfectly to whatever situations arise.

This may not mean you are doing nothing. Sometimes, going with the flow means making complex situations work with incredible decisions.

But we can make these effortlessly in a way, by being mega aware and very awake. This allows us to respond correctly the first time and satisfy the situations with the least amount of effort.

While I have your attention, make sure you read these 4 articles in a while about how to be the change you want to see (each line contains a link):

1. Start very small.
2. Do only one change at a time.
3. Be present and enjoy the activity (don’t focus on results).
4. Be grateful for every step you take.

Whilst this is all quite zen and out there, it’s still relevant to what has been a crazy year for every person I speak to. Often we listen to the stories of others’ lives and surely, like me, you wonder if people are trying too hard.

I find myself trying too hard, often. Then – if we step back just a little, let go just a little to the attachment and the outcomes, things flow better and success comes. It’s a fascinating process. Often, as my great friend Collin says, we should just walk slowly. It reminded me of this quote:

‘Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.’ ~Thich Nhat Hahn

We have to walk in order to run. I try and start all my runs with a walk as well as finish them with a walk, to remind myself to be aware because being me means I want to run out the door and back into it most of the time. Often I cannot tell you if a race went through a beautiful area if I was on the gas. At O till O, I tried to take in every step of the scenery as I felt incredibly blessed to be out there on that route.

Back to being effortless (yes, I am much like a Labrador puppy when it comes to attention span).

To summarise, we need to look at right now. To make some choices to attain this effortlessness. Cut down on certain things and go with the Happy Scared feeling that comes with that. Being effortless takes bravery and commitment. Ask any pro athlete. To be a pro takes massive Happy Scared commitment.

But it’s out there.

How badly do you want it?

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It’s a natural thing.

I started this blog when I was a boy and while I may still cherish some boyish things, there is much more man here now. I can tell, not only by the need to think about potentially getting a nose hair trimmer, but by the way I approach things. It’s evolution in its most basic form. Change is the only constant, if I am quoting someone random correctly.

Due to this fact, change will happen over the next few days here, on this particular domain.

What I can only hope will be an improved experience for you, as you too have grown over the years. Easier to find information (now that we are over 1000 articles on the site) and better segmented information. Faster load times & the ability to browse Urban Ninja on a mobile device have been key priorities. Maintaining the cleanest look and feel an obsessive habit, stemming from my love of economy.

On Tuesday morning you will find a new look and feel here. I wish I could tell you more, but I really do not want to ruin the experience.

See you on Tuesday, with a whole new bag of toys…

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Recently I discovered there was a term for collecting all sorts of data on devices and measuring your performance gains over time. I mean, I work with one Paul Cartmel, possibly the king of gadgets and measurement. When I went through the process of losing 8kg a few years back, I tracked my calories, progress and weight, I wrote down how I felt when I woke each day and tracked my training as well. The project was a success because of this, I am sure.

So now, Quantified Self is a great way to explain all this behavior. The video gives an intro to that and I wanted to drop you some resources if that was your thing, well, because I have a hunch there are more than just a few people who read this blog who would fit into this “box”.

Quantified Self Tracking Guide.

Quantified Self and the Future of Health Care.

Changing Behavior Using Data.

Invasion of the Body Hackers.

That should keep you busy for a few hours.

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I recently discovered that I am a bit of a Quantified Self guy. I have also long been fascinated with what it takes to qualify for Kona. I come from a massive athletic background and had the perfect build up for Ironman racing as a kid (not that I even knew of Ironman racing until I was around 17). All these things count in my favor to qualify for Kona. So often I hear of guys who spent 6 years racing 18 Ironman’s to qualify and it breaks me a little inside when I hear their stories, especially those who have yet to qualify. Recently, Endurance Corner have started running a series on what it takes to qualify for Kona. This post is about the realists view on qualifying. It makes for fascinating reading.

by Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

Last week I talked about the different improvement curves that I’ve observed for different types of athletes. I identified three basic athlete types: the natural, the realist and the worker.

As part of our new “How to Qualify for Kona” section that recently kicked off, I’m going to put some of those observations into the context of what it means to different types of athletes looking to qualify for Kona.

In a previous article for the Training Peaks site I conveyed some of the typical chronic training load ranges that I tend to see for athletes of different types and ability levels. The table from that article is reproduced below.

The times that qualify an athlete for Kona are getting faster by the year. The 2010 ranges for flat (Florida, Arizona, Brazil) and hilly courses (Lake Placid, CdA, St. George) for differing age-groups and genders is shown below.

So, comparing the two tables, if you’re a young(ish) male, you’ll likely need the fitness level represented by a VO2max/VO2 score of 60-67ml/kg/min* corresponding to a Chronic Training Load somewhere in the 75-150 TSS/d range. If you’re a young(ish) female, you’ll need the fitness level represented by a VO2max/score of 57-60 ml/kg/min* corresponding to a CTL somewhere in the 70-130 range.

*I am using VO2max here as a general indicator of fitness here, but in reality the components of ironman fitness necessary to qualify are more complex and multi-faceted. I elaborate on some of these factors here.

As I conceded in the training load piece, these are some pretty big ranges! In hours per week terms, we could be talking about an average training week as low as 10 hours or as high as 25 hours per week! This is where last week’s article on different athlete types comes in. There will be a fortunate 15% who can sign up for one of those “Get to Kona on 10 hours a week” plans and actually get to Kona on 10 hours a week! If you’re one of those athletes, you can close your browser; this piece isn’t for you. But for the vast majority of us, Kona level fitness is going to be take more – a lot more! If we convert these CTL numbers to hours: a chronic load of 18-20 hours week of easy-steady training for five or more months prior to the event.

Think about this, two-and-a-half to three hours a day of training, eight to 10 hours of work/commute, eight to 10 hours of (necessary) sleep, eating, bathing, etc., is going to lead to five or more months of very structured living and not doing much else. It is no coincidence that those who qualify typically have atypical work or family situations. Kona qualifiers have different fitness levels to the rest of us generally because they have different lives to the rest of us.

According to VO2max data from the Cooper institute, Kona qualifiers are in the top 0.5%-.0025% of the population when it comes to fitness. In other words, if you’re a young (college age guy) and we randomly sampled 200 folks from your dorm, you would consistently be the fittest. Taking this a little further, if you’re a 40-something guy living in a pretty good-sized town of 40,000 people, you’re the fittest guy in town! This kind of stat doesn’t happen without living a little differently to those 39,999 folks who have more “normal” fitness.

Faced with such stats, it is tempting to pull the genetics card, but based on what I’ve seen, genetics isn’t the limiter, at least when it comes to getting to Kona level fitness. The vast majority of folks respond to training load quite similarly and most of us have the potential to reach a very high level of fitness. As I suggested in the previous article on athletic types, for 70% of folks, if they do the work, Kona is within reach but setting up your life to do the work is another matter and for many it is far easier to attribute the limiter to genetics than to make the required change.

Merely setting up your life to have the space to fit in five months’ worth of 18 to 20 hour weeks of training in your Kona build isn’t enough. The realist knows that even with the life space to fit the training and sufficient attention given to recovery, you can’t just get up off the couch and throw down one 18 to 20 hour training week after another. You also need a fitness “base” to pull this off. So you’ll want to factor in a period of preparatory “training to train” weeks, progressively building up the fitness to tolerate the back to back big weeks that will comprise your Kona build.

Based on my experience, most folks coming in from normal active fitness levels are going to need to both be generally fresh and healthy (that is, come into the hard training unloaded), and have a base fitness of five to six months of preparatory training in the 12 to 15 hour range to tolerate those 18 to 20 hour weeks of your “get to Kona” push. If you’re coming from below normal fitness (less than 45 VO2) you’ll probably need another five to six months of preparatory “get in shape” work before even beginning the “train to train” period.

Additionally, we both know that your chances of putting together 20 or more back to back weeks in the 18 to 20 hour range without recovery isn’t good. You’re going to get tired and need some recovery weeks sprinkled in to your Kona build. In fact, if you manage a ratio of 3:1 loading to recovery weeks in the context of a 9-5 job and family life without getting sick or injured you’ll be doing very well! So that five months of specific training, more realistically becomes six or seven months.

Adding it all up, the realist should be planning for:

Six to 12 months of uninterrupted, consistent “basic training” to get ready to train for the event.
Six to seven months of focused “specific training” directed specifically towards your (first) Kona push.

This is harder than it sounds.

Think about how many ways life can get in the way over a 12 to 18 month period…

You start a new job/your work commitments increase beyond the 9-5.
You start a relationship/end a relationship/have relationship issues
Your family commitments increase
You get sick/a family member gets sick.
You get injured.
You move
You go on vacation
You race too frequently (and have too much time for each devoted to taper and recovery)
You/your significant other plans a home improvement project!

It only takes two weeks of disrupted training (or disrupted recovery) to lose a significant amount of fitness. Any of the above could lead to that. Any more than one of these interruptions over the course of a six month period and maintaining fitness will be a best case scenario. The realist doesn’t fight this, is aware of a certain level of unpredictability in life and is committed to “as long as it takes.”

That said, the realist is also going to be inherently aware of the consequences of inconsistency and is going to control the controllable and whatever they can to avoid the above and put together at least a couple of relatively uninterrupted seasons where their training load is limited by their level of fitness not by life circumstance. Gordo wrote about some of the proactive ways to enhance life stability in the intro article to the “How to Qualify” section.

Also, the realist is going to realize that there are no guarantees. While a VO2max of 60-67, a threshold of 85% and metabolic fitness of 4-5kcal/fat/min are all likely going to be necessary to qualify, they are not in themselves sufficient. You need both the fitness and a good day on an appropriate course to pull it off. In other words, you may need to put together more than one of these builds before high fitness and a good day coincide!

In my way of thinking, it is the combination of these factors (physiological, life and race) necessary for ironman success that make up the beauty of ironman racing. We’ll go into some of these additional factors that maximize your chances of qualifying in coming articles.

Until then…

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This weekend was my first solo ride in a while. On Saturday, I put out 140km with 2200m vertical ascent, about 50% of that with a cool group of triathletes and one Perel brother. Always decent. It was a steady ride, with no freewheeling and I spent much of the time just focusing on pedaling efficiently, trying to find the quiet power. It was showing signs of arriving near the end of the ride, but alas, fell apart on the last 2 ascents of the day, twice up to Signal Hill.

On Sunday, the solo ride was a test. 90km, 60km of it in flat out, bruise your back rain. 20km of it in that annoying drizzle where it’s just there, doing it’s best to annoy you. On tired legs, I had to make a deal with myself early on to be there, just there, in that moment.

I just pedaled, one minute at a time, just totally focused on riding with ease, oblivious, as much as possible, to the weather conditions.

I looked back at some of the rides (in my mind) I did in prep for Kona last year.

I found some strength in them.

Riding solo in bad weather is one of the best lessons you can experience. Energy management, route management, equipment management all need to be looked at a little more carefully. An energy bonk is just waiting to high five you in the face. Unpredictable wind conditions means taking the back route at times.

Solo gives me energy, despite everything it takes from me. Today I feel calm, tired but knowing that it’s in the bank.

Nobody can take that away now.

Solo let’s me empty the mental junk from a big week at work, from the stresses that I allow into my world. It’s the eye of the storm. The quiet center in a crazy world which I create for myself. It’s near close to being a reward.

Crazy, but true.

It motivates me, inspires me and gives me the quiet power I long to feel. Where the only noise in my head is the tires on the road, the crisp air whistling off various parts of the bike and the noise in my mind is absent and I am left free to play, to create new worlds out there before I head back into the fray where responsibility, commitments and circumstance intersect to form “my life”.

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How is that? Feeling inspired or feeling like you need to try harder? Right now, that is what is driving me for Monday`s race. What lengths will I go to in order to maximize the experience? Did I go the extra mile in preparation?

This video left me feeling that I do a lot, but that there is more that I could be doing in ALL spheres of my life. I live an easy life by many standards. That should never create the feeling that it will always be that way and if you feel the same, we should strive to always be putting in the extra work.

Assume Nothing, Pursue Everything…

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Thank you for all the emails regarding yesterday’s post. It has inspired me to challenge anyone reading this to take on a challenge for the weekend. Do it for yourself and nobody else. We live in the Age of Noise. Let’s run through a quick description on that:

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire—we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

Huxley is talking about the radio and the newspaper, the carriers of noise at the start of the 20th century, but his words could just as well have been written today. Today, silence is a thing to be shunned, with the social ecosystem of apps and devices ready to help you do just that.

Just now, Twitter is augmenting their already busy feed of messages with even more messages. They call it the “Activity Stream”. Anything that’s not a message but could be turned into one is. Who are your friends following? What tweets are they adding to favorites? What are they re-tweeting? The stream of messages is not enough, we’ve got to transmit everything else. Of course it’s not just Twitter, it’s the whole social ecosystem of applications, platforms and devices. Everything needs to be turned into a feed, and everything needs to be sent as an instant notification, pushed right to your mobile device so you can consume it wherever you are.

In such culture, silence doesn’t have little value, it has negative value. To remain in silence is to be “disconnected”, to miss out on something. Silence is so unbearable that whenever we’re on the go we’ve got to pull out the iPod, plug earphones into our ears and murder that cruel torment of silence with the sweet torrent of noise. Mobile connection speeds have advanced so far that we can now consume the Web on the go, on our mobile phones and tablets. When we’re back in our homes, the soothing sound of the TV set helps keep silence at bay, or perhaps we sit down in front of our computer and see what’s new, and here a myriad of websites and apps is ready to flood our mind with a firehouse of content.

Of course all this is not really negative or positive, it’s simply change, but I do agree with Huxley on silence. Silence is the only time when you can truly think, yet this is the time you’re trying to destroy. What are you afraid of? Is being trapped with your inner voice truly so terrifying—or worse—so boring?

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You are NOT boring. You may have completely lost touch with your interesting self, but that is why I am putting you to task this weekend. A bit of Ninja Homework…

Tell your significant other (if there is one) you need a few hours to yourself. If they love you, they`ll get it straight up.

Take a hike, a ride, a drive, whatever, but get away from your usual surroundings. Try and end up somewhere beautiful, inspiring…

Now just sit there in quiet. For at least an hour. You`ll get bored, your mind will get agitated and you`ll wonder just what you are doing there. But do it. Be quiet and still and just sit there alone, without any distractions. Eventually, your inner, non-boring self will come out to play, taking your mind to incredible places, dreaming of the future instead of reflecting on the past. Make sure you stretch it out until you feel renewed of energy, balanced of mind and ready to eat. Then head back to your loved ones. They will notice that something in you has returned.

Just do it.

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Life Cycles OFFICIAL Trailer from Life Cycles on Vimeo.

All the talk, all the banter, all the incessant he said she said….

All the excuses, the “reasons”…

Shut your mouth and get on your bike. Get on the road. Hit the trails. Pedal till you`re dizzy and your legs ache like your first broken heart, then recover and do it all over again. Do it for nobody but yourself. Get in the zone and don’t come out for hours, just be there, comfortably in the zone where your world has paused to let you give everything you have to yourself for just a few hours.

This post is inspired by the boys who come on Epic Unsupported Tour. Who let life pause for a week or so in the search for the quiet power out there, somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, where it’s always be to be found. With a bit of tough love, we all find our best self out there.

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