There is a concept in endurance sport, adopted by athletes that participate in those sports to allow them to overcome an obstacle that’s almost too big to think about.
The first time I read about this was from Chrissie Wellington, describing how she manages to survive the marathon in an Ironman and it helped me for some of the events that I participated in and helps me in some of the things in life in general.
Imagine if you're at the start of an Ironman race.
You are sculling in the water with something like 1,500 other people waiting for the horn to go off at 6 o’clock in the morning as you get ‘ready to race’ for the next 10-17 hours.
I’ve only experienced this as an individual on one occasion in 2015 but the prospect is quite terrifying and you wonder how you could possibly get through the distances and the effort that’s required to take you across the finish line.
So, you ‘chunk it’.
When the horn goes you try to get into a position where no one pulls your goggles off, you try to get ‘on the feet’ of someone just a little bit quicker than you to draft you along.
You try to hit the halfway point in the swim at 1.2 miles inside some sort of time that you thought was acceptable but still keeping you fresh and then you try to get out the water at the other end.
You get on the bike for 112 miles and you ‘chunk it’ into 10 or even 5-mile segments and knock them off and then start to run your 42 km.
In my race it was chunked into Km at approximately 5- 5 ½ minutes each.
If I had broken it into 5 km sections I would never have made it, if I had tried 10 I would have stopped before I started.
As you click them off you can see that you're 25% of the way through and then 50% of the way through and that you’re closer to the end and the finish.
And so now, on another day of part working from home and part going into the Practice I begin to 'chunk' again.
Everything that I have to do to get myself and my business through the other side of this crisis is too big a task to even comprehend.
Part of the problem is that I don’t even know what the task itself is but what I do know is that if I chunk today into small sections, by the end of today I’ll be a tiny fraction better than I was at the start and the same again tomorrow and the same the day after that.
When we closed the Practice down on the 23rd March, I was completely unprepared for any possible start-up at any time in the future.
I’m not sure I’m prepared now but I am better prepared than I was then both mentally for what is to come and structurally within the business.
It guarantees nothing but then you’re never forced to finish an Ironman even with the best plan as you scull in the water at the start.
Blog Post Number - 2364