It takes a long bike ride (65 miles in 4 hours this morning) to get to the bottom of some of the things you’ve thought about for a long time. Efficiency is one of those things. First of all I don’t know why I was thinking about that this morning and then I realised that I had been counting up my training hours trying to convince myself that I was in a fit enough state for this time of the year, heading forwards to a massive (one of my biggest) events in July with my friend David.
It turned out when I counted my hours that I’ve done more cycling in the last year than I’ve even done, 100% more. Of course this is offset by the fact that I don’t run anymore and I haven’t done much swimming at all but if I compare overall training hours with overall training hours this is probably my biggest year by 25 – 30% so far.
So why is it then that I don’t feel fitter? Well one of the reasons is my terrible self-deprecating fragile ego personality means that I’ll always think I’m the worst at everything but the other is just possible that I’ve not been efficient or effective in my training. Which one is which and what does that mean?
Business coaches and business scholars will tell me that one of the most important aspects of my business is tor reduce my costs as much as is humanly possible as this is a straightforward way to increase profit. Similarly it’s like losing weight for a cyclist, it’s free speed apparently. I don’t like efficiency, not anymore, because it’s become synonymous with as cheap as possible or as cheap as you can get away with.
While in my business we don’t spend money hand over fist for no reason, neither do we focus our attentions on efficiency and cost reduction – I’d rather focus my attentions on being fantastic and hope that ensures that the profit and the costs will take care of themselves (so far so good over the last nine years)
So back to the bike… when I get to this stage where I think I’m not good enough I trawl through the statistics and the numbers that I’ve collected over the past many years to give myself some glimmers of hope and encouragement and inspiration. And so it turns out that the best decision I ever made was to seek advice from Simon McCarthy in September 2014. Simon never taught me to be more efficient in my training but he definitely taught me to be more effective. The lead up to the Ironman in 2015 was a staggeringly low amount of hours compared to what I expected to have to do for an extraordinary result from my point of view.
Today’s session on the bike was four hours long but in ‘Colin old money terms, pre-Simon’ it was as good as an eight hour session. Training on a watt bike in your shed in the mornings is extraordinarily more effective than riding tired out on your bike for an hour and a half and back in again (sometimes the bike out though is essential for psychological well-being).
For me I focus on effectiveness from now on and today’s bike ride was the turning point. No more (if there ever was) obsessions with efficiency. A subtle difference, but an important one.
Blog Post Number - 1247
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