Train Like an Athlete
IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE A SERIOUS ATHLETE WHILE JUGGLING THE DEMANDS OF WORK AND HOME LIFE? YES, ACCORDING TO IAN WALKER, WHO BROKE THE GUINNESS WORLD RECORD FOR THE FASTEST BIKE RIDE ACROSS EUROPE WHILE HOLDING DOWN A FULL TIME JOB
How to fit elite-level training into everyday life
If you’re into any sort of endurance sport like running, cycling or triathlon, there’s a good chance that, at some point, you’ve looked at the professionals at the sharp end and had a thought along the lines of, Imagine how much faster I would be if only I could train full-time...
However, as I found out, you don’t necessarily need your days to be empty in order to reach your sporting goals.
IN AT THE DEEP END
A few years ago, I waited nervously at the startline of my rst ever bike race. I’ve always been a bit impetuous, so my rst event wasn’t some local ten-miler. I was in Belgium ready to begin the legendary Transcontinental Race: a non-stop 4,000km dash to Greece without any sort of outside support. I’d gone from not even owning a proper bike to getting myself ready for this mammoth race in a matter of months, and I did all those hours of training despite a demanding job and a social life.
e following year, I nished in rst place at another 4,300km ride and then, in 2019, I broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest ride between Europe’s most northerly and southerly points. roughout all this, I continued to work full-time in a location over 40 kilometres from home.
at last sentence might have given away my secret weapon: my commute was the golden ticket to success. My daily trip to work went from being essentially a waste of time to being the backbone of my
tness regime. Before I started training, I commuted by bus and train – a round-trip of over three hours. Cycling to work took around the same time, at 90 minutes each way, and meant that I was able to get in a solid three hours of quality training without even having to nd any extra time in my day. Realising the training potential of my commute was like discovering time travel.
I became fascinated by how many people had not spotted this opportunity. I had a colleague who spent two hours commuting in his car each day. On his way home, he tried to spend an hour in the gym, although he often found he skipped it if he was short of time. Yes, my journey itself took longer, at 90 minutes, but at the end of the day we’d both been away from home for three hours.
e di erence is that I had spent all of those three hours getting tter, whereas he’d spent just one – if he was lucky.
“e daily repetition of commuting turned training into a habit”
BUILDING HEALTHY HABITS
I’m a research psychologist, and part of my work is on how people can form healthy, sustainable habits. To psychologists, a habit is any behaviour that gets triggered automatically by your situation without you needing to think about it. A good example might be cleaning your teeth when you’re getting ready for bed. I doubt you spend any time thinking through the pros and cons of grabbing your toothbrush – rather, you just
nd yourself autopiloting to the bathroom at the end of the evening because that’s what your routine tells you should happen next.
When training for my world-record attempt, I was able to do 20 hours of workouts each week, precisely because the daily repetition of commuting turned training into a habit. After a few weeks of cycling to work, slipping into my riding clothes and getting on the bike each morning felt natural and inevitable, because that was just what I did whenever it was time to head out of the door. It soon felt like more of a challenge not to cycle to work each morning, even when the weather was bad.
The fact I was developing serious endurance ability at the same time was almost a happy by-product of having deliberately built those healthy habits.
FINDING THE HOURS
For a long time, deliberately trying to build training into existing journeys was all I talked about when people asked me how I managed to juggle sport and real life. Perhaps you are in a position where you can release big chunks of workout time ‘for free’ by repurposing your everyday trips like this. If so, try it – it’s a game-changer.
But Covid-19 shook everything up, and I know there will be a lot of people reading this who, like me, are not sure right now when they’ll have a regular commute again, if at all. With routine journeys suddenly wiped from my life, my training volume dropped o a cli . For a while I experimented with a ‘fake commute’ – an hour on the bike at the start and end of each working day. is was great for introducing some separation between work life and home life but, now I was riding just for its own