Training to Train

How long does it take to be an overnight success? How much time and effort does it take to produce a personal best performance that might only last for a few minutes...or perhaps a few hours? Well, I'll tell you...give me a lifetime, and then some, and it might be long enough. And for most of that time it will be work in progress. Yoda would say something like, "Patient, you will be.".

I've learned that sports (and life, for that matter) is a game of patience, and experience. You only know what you know by doing things, and it takes time to know what things to do to know what you want to know!! Does that make sense? I couldn't fast track experience, but I could be open to learning from every situation I encountered, where each new thing I learned built on the last thing I learned. Like a rolling snowball that picks up more snow as it rolls down the mountain, it's size at any point along the route only represents the amount of snow it's collected by that stage.

So it is with training. Fitness is best done as a lifetime activity, where our best performance today reflects the stage of our fitness today. (By the way...performance is a relative term closely related to age...as I'm learning first-hand!!)

The intrigue of fitness is that we never quite know what or where our absolute best fitness and performance level is. It's only by keeping on trying, training, pushing, exerting, testing, etc, that we actually realise what we might be capable of. As T.S. Elliot said..."Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."

Although I don't necessarily advocate pushing to the limit every day, each time we do push our boundaries we're doing so against the level we previously reached, which is (or was) not necessarily our absolute best, anyway!! The excitement is trying, trying, and trying again.

The key point in all this is actually having a fitness level to enable us to push our limits. To reach our best level of fitness and ability, and then improving it. To train as well as we can, and then to train better. Each level we reach is simply a stepping stone to the next level, and so on.

In essence, we train in order to be able to train some more (or better). Training to train. One session...or one week...or one month...or one year is not enough to reach our best level. Our fitness can't be fast-tracked, and consistency wins out in the end. Train hard enough today so you can still train tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. It takes patience.

The people who are an "overnight success" have been along this path, for thousands and thousands of hours. Olympic Champions began training as young children, each bit of exercise building them towards the pinnacle of achievement.

Our own pinnacles are different, but the process is the same. To be our best is an on-going commitment to the essence of what we enjoy in being fit and fabulous. Don't stop trying.