Read - and get fit!

I watched the Marcialonga on TV yesterday. It is a beautiful cross-country ski race in Italy, 70 km long, packed with some six thousand participants ranging from professionals to “twice-a-week skiers”.  I almost skied this race a few years ago, but had to pull out due to injury. My friends went and they absolutely loved the track, the atmosphere and the whole experience in general.

As I sat in front of the screen yesterday and watched the pros double pole up the last 2 km long hill – without any kick wax under their skis – I couldn’t help but think “these guys are not human”. To be able to do this is one thing, but to do it after battling though 68 km first is simply beyond my understanding.  I wondered how on earth one could get so extremely fit. Then I skipped training.

This has been my story for the past several years. I spend a couple of hours watching a marathon run or a ski race, or brief through a few chapters in one of the numerous books on training and racing that are out there, and the result is that I have to skip the training session for the day. The thing is that after work there are only so many hours available, and the kids need help with the homework, the living room doesn’t paint itself etc. If I spend my precious time on watching TV or reading, that means my training time is gone.

My friends used to tell me “you can’t read yourself into shape”.  That, however, is not always true. I did my first half-Ironman distance triathlon a few years ago. As I don’t have a proper coach, I had to make my own training plan for the season, and as I’m no expert on these things I soon found myself spending a lot of time reading through the triathlon literature. I soon found a book called The Triathlon Training Bible by Joe Friel and decided that this was what I needed to make a sound plan. This is a big book, loaded with information, so there was a lot of reading to be done and digested. I, therefore, made a decision to skip all training for the first two weeks of the training season, and use my time instead to read the book and create the plan for the rest of the season.  My friends thought I was mad, but my reasoning was: "my main race is almost a year away. I don’t have the time to both read and train every day so I’ll sacrifice two weeks of training to come up with a good training program" (one might ask “why didn’t you train right after work and then read the book in bed before going to sleep in the evening?” Answer: “If  I try to read in bed I pass out before I finish quarter of a page”).

This worked. I finished my first half-Ironman distance race in 5 hours and 46 minutes, which was way better than I expected. More importantly, I beat all my training buddies – for the first and, so far, only time. So don’t let anyone tell you that you cannot get fit by reading!