Balancing Passions - Running & Relationships

Very few of us have the opportunity to pursue running full-time, which means we have to balance training for our athletic goals with a career, family, social life and numerous other obligations. Many runners are incredibly passionate about their sport. And frankly, having such a strong passion can be stressful amidst the many priorities we have in life. 

However, this is not all doom and gloom. Using the five methods below, you can have your cake and eat it too. Put differently, you can achieve your athletic goals without sacrificing your personal life and time with family and friends. Whether you're training for your next marathon or simply exercising to stay fit, you can optimize your life with these simple techniques.

1. Be Flexible

Flexibility is an essential trait to adapt to any situation thrown your way in an already busy schedule. If you have a big workout planned for Wednesday morning, but Tuesday night ends up being a late night at the office, it may be beneficial to push the workout back a day or two when your mental capacity and stress levels are back to normal. On the contrary, if you have a planned easy run but feel like a million bucks, you can elect to take advantage of it and execute your workout instead.

Another option is to modify a planned workout. If you are short on time you can modify a workout, for example, to be an interval session run with short reps of higher intensity. Focus on giving an honest effort, and be intentional with the time. That way, you're still getting in a quality effort and adapting to the situation.

It should be noted this is not an excuse to repeatedly cut workouts short or skip them entirely. If you find yourself in a long-term rut, there is likely a separate issue that needs to addressing (more on this below). Nonetheless, adjusting workouts by a few days or tweaking them to support your available time and energy will not affect your long-term fitness progression - as long as you stay consistent over time.

Oh, and one additional tip - our electrolyte infused coffee is the perfect pick-me-up to fuel your run and renew motivation. 

2. Train Smarter, Not Always Harder

In the business world, decisions are often made by predicting the return on investment (ROI) of any particular project. The concept applies to life as well - always consider the return on time invested (ROTI) to help decide how to best utilize time. With this mindset, there's a focus on the activities that deliver the most significant results. As humans, we only have so much mental capacity to dedicate to the plethora of tasks we need to complete each day, thus making the most of the actions we take is key.

If short on time, you may elect to cut my run a few miles short in favor of lifting weights to get a higher stimulus to help build strength, power and speed. Or. maybe you only do four one-mile repeats instead of six but run each rep faster. Perpetually increasing workload isn’t the only way to improve performance. Our performance can also be enhanced by training smarter and ensuring we maximize quality.

3. Take Care of Your Overall Self

Ample research indicates that performance is affected by both physical and mental health, so it's crucial to take care of your overall self to perform to your maximum potential. Some best practices include eating nutritiously, sleeping plenty and maintaining healthy stress levels. If you only focus on executing the training itself and bypass everything else, you're leaving performance gains on the table.

Thanks to technology, it is relatively cheap and easy to track a number of biomarkers so that you are cognizant of, and can correct, any possible health concerns before they have a substantial impact on your training and life. Measuring Heart Rate Variability (HRV) daily is perhaps the single most effective because of its ability to assess overall well-being and indicate when the body is ready to push or needs to rest.

It can also be useful to track other metrics, such as sleep, steps, and stress via one of the many wearables available on the market today. If you are not a big fan of technology, you can achieve a similar outcome by being conscious of and assessing how you feel physically and mentally. Our brains are pretty smart at telling us when we need to back off.

4. Set Up Each Day for Improvement

The easiest way to 'hack’ your day is to eliminate the possibility for yourself to make any decisions that will negatively impact your progress toward your goals. Studies show that the more choices we have to make on a given day, the harder it becomes to make a good decision as the day wears on because of mental fatigue. Thus, setting up our day by making potentially hazardous choices ahead of time will give us the greatest improvement holistically. Also, we can develop healthy habits that warrant growth in all facets of our lives.

Some examples include meal prepping to avoid selecting unhealthy food choices, taking the stairs, using a standing desk or sitting on a yoga ball at the office, taking regular walks throughout the day, meditating and focusing on posture. Even in a job that requires sitting for the majority of the day, incremental fitness improvements happen by developing good habits throughout the day. Each of these examples promotes not only increases in physical health but also improvements in mental health that will cascade progress in all you do.

5. Have Fun

Without a doubt, enjoying what you do is the recipe for success. It may be cliche, but it is true that life is too short to not do what makes you happy.

If you're truly doing what you love in all areas of life, then balancing your fitness goals with a career and personal life is not about finding a balance at all (balance implies a trade-off). Instead, it's about creating harmony for your holistic self where all pieces of your life are integrated to create synergies.

If you're happy in one aspect of your life, that spills over into everything else.