Life is an Endurance Sport

“Every human experience from birth to death either improves or impairs a person’s mental well-being, and in turn their human potential.”

~ Mike Pascoe

January is the perfect time for you, and your coach if you have one, to be looking at your life and determining what in your life is either improving or impairing your mental well-being, and in turn your human potential. I have coached hundreds of athletes and non-athletes over the years. I learned very quickly that my role and responsibility as a coach are to manage people’s energy, and to do that I need to look at a person's entire life. In 2004 I came up with a name for this type of coaching, I called it ‘Whole Person Coaching.’ Like many things I probably should have done more with the concept at the time as this type of coaching is becoming more popular now as coaching is evolving… thankfully, this is so important.

My version of Whole Person Coaching is looking at a person’s entire life and everything within it that will be impacting their mental well-being and in turn their performance. For an athlete, I say, ‘I coach the whole person, not just the sport.’ If I am coaching someone about their business I say, ‘I am coaching the whole person, not just their business,’ and so on. This type of coaching is so important because all of us have just one brain, and one body, and everything in our life will impact that. As much as we all try to ‘leave home at home’ when we go to work or ‘leave work at work’ when we go home or leave both when we decide to go for a run or to the gym… it is impossible to separate any of this. This type of compounding stress is what leads many people, especially the overachievers I work with (and me), on the road to burnout.

The secret to avoiding burnout lies in energy management. It is not by accident that I am writing this article in January just as people are starting to look at their goals for the year and this often includes beginning a fitness program. I began in the fitness industry in 1993 and the one thing that has frustrated me over the years is that this industry is an ‘entertainment industry’ and one that likes to advertise ‘quick fixes.’ In the fitness industry, this shows up as high-intensity training. Why? because it is sexy, it brings out immediate feedback, lots of sweat, and quick gains. The problem is that as soon as high intensity is utilized regularly 2- 3+ times in a week that it starts off what I call the ‘ticking time bomb.’ When I am coaching athletes, my secret is to slowly build up the intensity that builds closer and closer to the intensity, and pace, that my athlete will need to race their event at. It is in the final 6-9 weeks before a main event that this ‘race intensity/pace’ will kick into place. This is because any human on this planet can only tolerate about 3-9 weeks of high-intensity training before they ‘peak for their event.’ In the case of the average person that is hitting the gym for the first time in January with aspiring goals to improve their fitness, they will hit the high-intensity fitness classes, begin weight training (low reps, heavy weights) and begin to show immediate results (assuming they don’t join the 80% of people who injure themselves in the first or second week of the process.) To go back to what I called ‘peaking for an event’ this same thing applies to this person, they will show incredible gains in the first 3-9 weeks of training and then they will ‘peak’ and the next day, without understanding why, won’t have the energy or desire to get out of bed, never mind going to the gym. And sadly, all the gains that will have been made, will now disappear, as will the desire to do anything about it until the person’s mind and body have recovered from the previous assault, usually in January of the following year.

In fitness, in business, and in life in general there are no ‘quick fixes,’ The tagline for my coaching business Endurance for Life is, ‘Life is an Endurance Sport,’ this was not by accident. Endurance is the foundation for everything we do, whether you are a working parent that is desperately trying to juggle your kids drop offs and pickups, or someone who is training to complete a Marathon or Ironman Triathlon. And of course, the people I coach, and me, have AAA personalities and are juggling all of that. There is an expression that is often used in many contexts, ‘It is a marathon, not a sprint’ and this is true for everything in our life, but it doesn’t mean that everything needs to be always long and slow. Another thing that I learned quickly when I began coaching in 2003, was the 80/20 rule… but I didn’t have this name for this coaching philosophy back then. And sadly, I didn’t write my book prior to Matt Fitzgerald writing his book called, ‘80/20’ in 2014. This concept is that 80% of training needs to be done at low intensity and 20% can be done at a higher intensity. This means for someone who is doing 10 hours of training in a week that only 2 hours of that training will be done at a higher intensity. The one big piece in this approach that is often not recognized is that I say higher intensity, not max heart rate intensity that most fitness classes put their ’victims’ through. (Save this for another article)

Many of you may be thinking what this all has to do with me as I am not an athlete. When I am ‘whole person coaching’ an athlete or non-athlete I am managing their energy in the same way. What everyone needs to understand is that all of us try to achieve peak performance at something, a work project, an education achievement, being a great parent, or chasing a finishing medal at a marathon event. These are all great aspirations, but they need to be approached in the same way that I would peak an athlete for an event. Sustaining max attention, focus, and energy on a work project for longer than 3-9 weeks will result in burnout if the end of the project is not at the end of this time frame... not to mention there is usually another project waiting in the queue.

Therefore, the secret to achieving great things in your life is to manage your energy based on the 80/20 rule. This means that if you are working 40 hours a week then no more than 8 of these hours should be done at a ‘higher intensity’ than normal, which means a 'crazy day' with very few breaks. And to quickly reference another fitness concept, no one should ever increase volume and intensity at the same time. So that means if you know you have to do overtime in a week then you will need to ensure that you slow down the pace at which you are getting things done, eliminate 'crazy days', and need to increase ‘recovery time.’ Most of you just read that and thought, that is my life and if that is the case, you likely have already started the 'ticking time bomb.'

What is the recovery time? In the world of fitness recovery time would be the amount of rest that comes after an ‘interval.’ The secret about intervals is that a person only benefits from an interval during the rest period. That means if you do a 2 min interval on the bike at a higher intensity your body will learn how to adapt to that intensity during the 2 min, low-intensity, recovery phase. So, for someone who works 8-10+ hours in a day, then the recovery phase needs to be higher, which means a person will need to take more breaks during the day and sleep more as mental breaks and sleep is the only way that a person can recover from your day's interval’ and be ready for the next day. This is great in theory, the problem is that the person who is working this hard is also adding on a high-intensity fitness class to ‘burn off the steam’ of the day, going home to make dinner, helping kids with homework, transporting their kids to their many extracurricular activities, doing choirs, and then crawling into bed. Life truly is an Endurance Sport.

To make energy management work in real life, you really need to take a good look at your life. As my life coach says, "You can have everything, but you just can’t have all of it at once." As a chronic overachiever that has gone through two significant burnouts in my life, I know this is a tough pill to swallow. My ‘seize the day’ personality that came after my mother passed away in 1993 gets me in more trouble than I like to admit. But that is the most important part of all of this, you need to look at your life, your past, and what is it that you can change so that you won’t continue the ‘path of self-destruction.’ It is very easy to blame an organization for all our burnout troubles we are having, too much work, too high of stress, not enough time off, etc. But we also have a responsibility to look in the mirror and identify if our AAA personality is also part of the problem. If your reflection looks anything like mine, being an overachiever feels good when flying high, but is scary when at 30,000 feet and you run out of gas and are aiming for the Earth below. Trust me, I know that organizational culture and the experiences during the employee life cycle are responsible for the other 99.9% of the problems, but someone needs to call out to you that running away from one organization to another organization will not solve your burnout issues if you continue to ignore that you are an overachiever and therefore a huge candidate for burnout.

Our bodies do not know the difference between physical stress and emotional stress, all of it impacts our mental well-being. So that means whether you do too much high-intensity exercise, have a high-intensity lifestyle, or like most of us, both, you have likely started the 'ticking time bomb.' And if this is the case then you will need to look in the mirror and see what you can do to change. When I wrote the article, ‘Quiet Quitting is a Big Red Flag Waving’ I was thinking of these people who had hit the detonated stage of the 'ticking time bomb. ‘Quiet Quitters’ are the large number of people who have hit the 3-9 week point of too much high intensity in their life, they went to bed as 'high achievers' and woke up in the morning 'Quiet Quitters.' This feeling is like no other, it is like the realization I had when I was dying of cerebral edema while climbing Alpamayo in Peru. "My mind was writing cheques that my body couldn't cash." I luckily survived. I want you to do the same thing. Please take the time to look at your life, don’t let this be you. It is a VERY DEEP HOLE to crawl out of... trust me, I have been there!