Prioritisation

17 Mar Prioritisation

Another big question that we get asked the time all the time is, how do we fit in with life, family, and work? Our training, how do we prioritize all the events that we want to do? Now that’s a really tough question because you are the expert of you, just like I am the expert of me. And it depends on how important your goals are to you. It’s one of the most important things that you’re wanting to do.

You might actually have a big goal such as running UTMB, or climbing a Himalayan peak, or some of the bucket list trip. You might have got lots of other little goals along the way as well, that you don’t want to lose sight of. And this is where it really pays to try and categorise the things that you want to do in a sequential order of how you’re going to do them where the priorities lie. We use this technique – it’s used a lot by runners, but we’ve transferred and we use it in all kinds of other activities as well, and that is creating A, B and C event.

Runners and OCR athletes nowadays tend to have lots and lots of events on that they’ll do, they might even have multiple events across, multiple different activities, such as you know, if you enjoy a bit of recreational trail running, some mountain biking, and the occasional OCR race as well. So what we’re going to try and do is categorize them into A, B, and C.

A class events: These are really, really important, these are the ones that you really want to go for, you might only have one or two of these a year. And that’s your main event. The B class event, that’s a key event, but it’s not as important as your main goal. And so it’s one that we can actually use as a marker to track our progress, and see how we’re improving and responding to training. So we’ll still have a proper taper, we’ll still train for it. But we’re seeing as to where it stands us for the A class event for our big, big, big goal. And then there’s the C class event. Now these are the nice to haves. And this is where we see the problem with people training too much and doing too many. These are the things that we’re just really, really want to do, because we might like that event It’s the local competition that’s on next weekend. It’s something that you just really enjoy taking part in. And it’s just, it’s something that we need to just treat as part of our training. And this is where people make the mistake because they treat it as a race. And they go hard every single time they do it, they might be doing one every weekend or every other weekend during race season.

Now with these ones, we don’t want to taper for them. And unless it is actually part of at a part of your training requires max effort, and race pace and speed, we won’t actually do it at that pace, we’ll do it as what is required for that part of our program, and just go through the through the motions with it. Now we can actually also we got to look at life, we’re going to see how this is all going to fit in with everything else that we’re doing. Because some stuff is going to have to give, we’ve got to remember that all exercise is stress. And we might have shitloads of other stressors in our lives as well, you know, I don’t know might have kids going through the HSC

might have a new job on the horizon, we might be planning to renovate a house or we might be in the middle of renovating a house, we’ve got all kinds of things like this in with your training. So where’s it all going to sit? If you’ve got that happening in the same year, as you’re planning a big bucket list event, are you really actually going to be able to devote the time to doing the things you need to do for that event? And vice versa, the things that you need to do for your home life, the you know if you’re married, to keep you’re married? And so is this the best time to be training for something that’s going to take up a lot of volume. So we need to work on learning to prioritize, and some stuff has to give. And there’s some stuff that we just can’t compromise on if we’re taking our training seriously. So when we look at our training and training for everything, as I’ve gone over before in our other videos, first we want to build a foundation. We don’t want to compromise on that. So you need to build your strength first need to build your aerobic function.

These must be a priority if you’re training for an endurance or wilderness based event. Now I’ll be honest, I don’t care if your favorite thing in the world is to do high intensity style training all the time just because it’s your favorite class. You need to work out if you are training for the events that you want to complete, or your just after entertainment based exercise that makes or fills a psychological need. High Intensity training is a useful part of our training program, but it is not the main part, okay? It’s not the priority and might not be needed for the majority of your journey. You need to look at them as being tools and only one part of the whole program. They’re part of your nice to haves. If you are already time poor are they essential to you achieving your A or B class type goals? So prioritize everything, split it up, work out where it fits, work out, what are the stressors you’ve got in your life, work out how it can all fit together, and then put them into these channels and space them out. A, B and C.

If you want, I’ve created a form that you can do exactly that helps you work through the process, or you can just contact us and we’ll talk you through. Okay, see ya.