Recipe for Success - Planning & Consistency

What is the recipe for success? 

1 Cup of hard work (6 days a week)

1 Cup of clean food ALL THE TIME

Pinch of tough love from the GURU

1 tbs - planning

Large tub of Consistency.......

This week is the start of week 4 and this means mini milestone and Fitness Test/Measurements.  Whilst considering what I was going to do this week, mini milestone wise I thought I would look back and see what I had put down as my 1 month goals at the start of the program.  These I will touch on below, but before I looked at them I was wondering what my goals were and why I had set them. 

What was I hoping to achieve and how did that impact on what I have decided to do over the next 3-6 months and impacted on my training.  I have never been that proactive with my goals in the past and set mini goals.  I am not sure why this is the case, but I have always (since starting this program) had a huge goal I was striving for at the end.  For me last year this was my Ride to Conquer Cancer.  That consumed most of my training and focus.  Now that I have that challenge conquered for now and the base fitness there, what was my next challenge.

To be honest I had not really come up with anything different for this year other than the fact that I was going to take on more cycling and do it bigger and better than last year.  This is still the case but I have now decided to add a few extras and as my last couple of posts have mentioned included a lot more running.  Looking at my goals that I entered into the program 4 weeks ago, I did not have anything specific for any of the mini milestone weeks.  I am not sure why I don’t do this to be honest.  Perhaps it is because our schedule is all over the place and hard to plan, but that can also be a poor excuse as Michelle has always said that planning and organisation are the key to this journey.  I might also say that Julie and I have both never really talked about doing anything special for mini milestones or to reward ourselves, that is not what this is for us, well for me anyway, she may disagree. 

But it got me thinking.  Why does it have to be anything earth shattering?  I have mini goals now with my running, so why not just set myself a challenge to see if I can achieve something within the next 4 weeks.  My first month goals had me wanting to achieve these:

1 Month Goals

Lose 10 kilos. (almost there & still 5 days to go)

Run 10km non- stop (done)

Complete 50 push ups in one go (done)

I have achieved the run portion and the push up portion already and I am close to the weight lost portion.  If I don’t get there that is fine as 10kgs in 4 weeks is a huge ask, but I have worked hard and know that I am close.  So this got me thinking.  I know other people set themselves mini milestones, like running 8km’s or round the lake etc in that week and build up to it, but I haven’t done that and tend to just go and try it if I want to achieve it rather than wait for a specific week. So what can I look at setting myself, or do I even need to?  This I am still unsure of actually but what it did highlight to me is a lack of planning in what I have been aiming to achieve and how I am going to get there.  I have goals in place for the rest of this round which are as follows:

3 Month Goals:

Lose 20kgs

Run 15km non- stop (hopefully under 90 minutes.)

Complete 100 push ups in one go.

But in looking at them I have no plan on how I am going to get to each one.   Looking at my run progress over the last month I have no doubt I will smash the 15kms out of the park within the next 4 weeks let alone the next 2 months and I will be working on the push ups.  I have done over 200 in one training session so far on a couple of occasions so this I am confident in getting out.  The weight goal is something that will be a little tougher as I get closer to goal but as long as it continues to go down I will be happy if I just miss it. But none of it is planned or has been planned it has happened through a bit of luck and hard work.

So what is my plan moving forward?  I need to take a page out of my wife and a few other ladies in the program’s books and organise my training more methodically.  I have no idea from one day to the next what I am doing.  Everything is haphazard and spur of the moment.  The only time I know what is going on is Saturday morning and that is because there is a group of people relying on me to be organised but that only happens Friday night.  The thought of preparing for a half marathon is something that scares the hell out of me, but in a good way and also excites me.  I am looking forward to sitting down with my mate, who will do this with me and see what he suggests training plan wise. This will give me structure and force me to be organised if I aim to succeed, failure is not an option really.  If I aim to be an athlete (no matter what degree of one that is) I need to prepare a bit more like one and planning is involved.  I suppose this means a few very early mornings for longer runs and maybe some swimming in there as well. 

But up to this point I have been lucky that it has worked for me.  Yes I have put in the work, but not being organised is a recipe for disaster and I want to ensure that this is not the path I am travelling. So to all you other spur of the moment people or those wondering why you might not be doing as well as you hoped, have a look at how you have been mapping out your path to success.  If you have been as haphazard as me and not been planning then we all need to get this sorted now to ensure we smash out the last 8 weeks and drop the numbers we hope we can.

Oh yeah and with the words of Michelle Bridges ringing in my ears, “It is all about consistency. Be consistent, go into robot mode and JFDI.”