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Due to the changes in my working life over the past 2 years or so, I find myself given opportunities to travel more and more (again).
In the olden days, I used to travel a lot around the UK, presenting at study clubs or implant courses or wherever. In reaction to this, we set up our own education centre in Nottingham to try to travel less and to educate more and that worked out well, or at least it has so far.
And then the reach gets greater, and then you travel more, and then you travel further, and at first, it's glamorous to get invited to sit in the expensive seats to fly to China (I travelled first class on Emirates to China in 2018).
That was the first big international thing I got asked to do, and then there were some other things that tied in with the ITI job. Then you find yourself in Singapore, South Africa, or Muscat in the Middle East or with other invitations to other places coming up more and more (it's called networking, I think; 1 gig generates another two gigs if that's how you want to work).
And then you find yourself starting to say to people that it all sounds glamorous, but it's really quite exhausting, and people turn away and go, "Yeah, yeah, what a d*ck, isn't it terrible for him?".
But the truth is, I learned this ages ago, and I have to take my own counsel, manage my own diary, and manage my own opportunities.
The watershed moment really came from me back in 2017, and it was after I had been diagnosed with my knee injury and couldn't run anymore and decided I was going to do some sort of bat sh*t mental cycle challenge to prove to myself that I wasn't over the hill.
And so, I signed up for La Marmotte, which is one of the oldest and most iconic sportives in the Alps, and it's a crazy big day out, and off I went with my friend David Nelson.
But in preparation for that, I decided to do a 'training camp' in January in Tenerife at the end of my first-ever sabbatical.
What I realised about the training camp was, though, that getting ready for it and travelling to it was hellish, and then doing it was great, and then coming back was hellish.
And so you would return back exhausted, need about 3 days off and then you could get back to training again, and I realised that if I wanted to train seriously, I just had to apply myself at home for all of those 8 days (instead of 4 days of cycling abroad) and I would be at least as fit or fitter, having not spent the money and not accumulated the exhaustion.
That's kind of what it's like when you travel for work.
If you can travel like an athlete, not drinking, eating properly, and sleeping really well, there's not too much damage, but the truth is, on a business class flight, you don't sleep properly, and you eat what they put in front of you, and if you're me and someone offers you a beer when you're away, you probably take it. And so you return back more tired than you went.
If you'd focused on your business for that time, the business would probably be better than the travelling. Therefore, the opportunities have to be grandstand to take you away because travelling every week like that is utterly exhausting.
I was reminded of this because there was an article in The Athletic that I read at the weekend about the impact of travelling on professional football players, and again, everyone will say, 'Yeah, yeah, it's not a big deal,' but the proper athletes, the ones that don't get paid like professional footballers, the ones that go rowing and control their environment entirely for 4 years, they're better and fitter for that because they don't have the impact of the big journey every week to somewhere else.
Be careful what you wish for and careful how many times you say yes to things because you can fall into the trap of being a much worse version of yourself.
Blog Post Number - 4096