In May 2015, i.e. a little bit more than a year ago, I did something I hadn't done in 15 years: enter a race. The task was to run 5km as fast as you can, and the race was a part of a recreational activity sponsored by my workplace (Blodomloppet). Since I have a background of intense training from my youth (I was one of the best table tennis players in my age in Sweden, and trained 2-4h per day), I had a certain speed in my normal running step, and - inspired by the runners around me - I started out in this "normal" pace. However, already after a few hundred meters, I started to get seriously out of breath, and after 1km, I had to stop, and rest for a little while. For this reason, after having dragged myself to the finish line, I decided that this cannot do, and that I want to devote some of my ambitions to getting back into shape. To lose some weight, and get back into a fit body that represents who I more truly want to be!
Shortly after this race, I talked to a few members of my research group, and they told me about a race that they were to enter in August 2015, i.e. a few months later: the Stockholm Triathlon competition. This race was the Olympic version of the triathlon race, i.e. 1500m swimming, 40km biking and 10km running in one go. This seemed like a good first goal, and reasonable to accomplish within two months, with my strong but ancient background in training. And surely enough, despite some initial problems with my foot (due to me initially wanting to run in FiveFingers), I got myself up into shape enough to do a perfectly reasonable performance in the race. In the biking part of the race, I was even among the top 25% of the competitors, despite having no previous biking training.
However, at the same time as I decided to do the Stockholm competition, I also made the thing that is quintessential for me to get truly excited about something: I identified a cool and more long-term goal for which the first goal can be a stepping stone. In this case, I decided that I wanted to become an Ironman.
The Ironman is the original and full version of the triathlon, and there you swim 3.8km, bike 180km, and run 42km (i.e. you end with a marathon). This is a quite typical kind of goal for me, since it fulfills all of their key characteristics: its obtainment would require me to grow quite a lot and in several steps; it really gets me going - I am really super-enthusiastic about being able to write "Iron Man" to the list of titles on my CV; it is something that would put me in a club of a select few people, in whos company I would love to be; it would do me good - I need the exercise; I can see myself getting there in a sequence of steps taking a number of years - i.e. despite its vastness, it should still be obtainable. In short, one could say that I am looking for goals that are on the border between "crazy impossible" and "crazy, but possible". After having the goal, the timing also needs to fit. I need to be in a position where I don't have too many other similar time-consuming goals, since then, I will have to wait to another time point to start up my plan, although it may fulfill all other requirements. In this case, the timing was perfect: I was already looking for a way to start to get back into shape, and my previous dancing goals were accomplished or put on the back-burner since quite some time back.
My initial long-term plans were as follows: Olympic distance in 2015, half Ironman in 2016, and full Ironman in 2017. After that, things are more undecided, but I will most likely want to improve my times as well, to put myself in an even cooler family of peers (e.g. to run the marathon part below 4 min/km would be cool!). So far these plans have held, and I therefore want to write a little bit on my main principles for obtaining them.
- Incremental additions: I always do small steps forward. Steps that feel like the natural next step. Like something that - given what I did in a meaningfully recent past - seems like something I should be able to do, by just stretching a little bit higher than last time. Example: 10 days ago, I biked 60km and ran 20km (Figure 1). A week after (during my next long-distance run, after some intermittent short-distance heats), i.e. two days ago, I scaled the biking up to the full distance for this year's goal: 90km (Figure 2). Having now accomplished a heat of 90km biking and ~21km running, I have already accomplished the two main hurdles for this year's goal: the half Ironman. The final remainder, which I will add in the next two events where I go long is to also add 1900m swimming. Since I didn't have any problems with the swimming, but felt it quite relaxing last year - and since that distance (1500m) was almost the same as this year's distance (1900m) - I don't foresee any major complications from the swimming. In other words, reaching this year's goal in two weeks from now feels like the next logical step.
- Continuity: The main thing that needs to go along with the "Incremental addition" principle is the continuity principle. For the first principle to work, one needs to stay put, and come back again soon after any shorter lapses in training appears. Here, I could instead exemplify with my piano training. I am soon half-way through a project that - once accomplished - will make me the third Swedish pianist in the history of Swedish pianists to have accomplished: playing all of Beethoven's piano sonatas. Through this quite extraordinary feat, I have gotten this far by playing around 30-90 min per day, which is not very long time. However, that time would mean nothing if I didn't do it regularly, i.e. almost every day (say, at least 3-4 days/week). By playing regularly, I always add on to what I already learnt, and can build upon the tiny incremental improvement I did last evening (I learn perhaps 5-10 seconds of music each night).
- Keep the fire going, by returning to and evolving your Visions and Dreams. To be able to keep doing the incremental additions with continuity, I need to have the Vision clear in front of me, and it needs to be alive and beating, calling forth enthusiasm within me. This I can do in several ways, but there is one way I would like to mention here: to watch and be inspired by masters in the field. For this principle, I could return to my original and in some ways first passion: table tennis. Every day when I came home from school, and before going to table tennis practice, I always sat for some 15-60 minutes in front of the TV, watching clips of some of my heroes back then: world-champions Jan-Ove Waldner, Jörgen Persson, and Mikael Appelgren (good documentary with sub-titles here). Watching their successes made my desire to become as good as them grow stronger each time, and watching their way of playing activated my mirror neurons, who allowed me to improve my body movement patterns without even moving. I have done in similar ways in all my other goals, e.g. piano (watching Horowitz, Ashkenazy, etc), dancing (watching Jordan and Tatiana, Johnny Vasquez, etc), in meditation (reading books by yogis Yogananda, Paul Brunton, etc), etc etc.
- Be willing to improvise, listen, and to attract people and circumstances that move you forward. Be always open and listen: listen to your body, listen to opportunities that come and go. Be willing to find people that know things that you don't (in all of the things I have gotten really good at I have had excellent teachers with deep knowledge about what they are doing), seek to find other people who have a similar passion as you, and who are on a similar or perhaps even higher level than you, and find places of thought and practice where you can immerse yourself in the vibration of these peers and idols. Talk to them. Allow your inspiration to be lifted by them. See how you can make use of each other. Can you completement each other? Can you help each other? Can you help bring each other forward? Be open for the continuous creation of the circumstances, places and events that synchronistically can form themselves around you as you incrementally move forward towards your goals.
- Believe that you can. None of the above will help you, unless you believe that you can do it. Then you will only prove to yourself that you cannot. Again, I could take table tennis as an example. When I played table tennis, I was quite young, and even though I knew yoga, I didn't know very much about how I create my own reality. Therefore, I didn't know how to mentally prepare myself for matches, and especially important matches. Therefore, I could beat almost anybody in practice matches, during summer camps etc, but during the most important competitions, I felt too small, and played thereafter: in an insecure way, that manifested my insecureness, loosing against players that were many levels below my own. Since then, I have learned how to work with my thoughts - to mentally prepare myself to be in the state where I am already mentally doing whatever it is I want to accomplish - and therefore am usually performing at my best during today's "most important matches". If I give a science lecture, if a give a piano recital - as long as I am properly prepared, I will almost always perform much better with the audience in front of me, compared to during my practice rounds. That is because I then can let go, and let my inner inspiration talk through me. Because I can allow myself to drift off to super-inspired gamma states, and not be afraid that things will go wrong. And that is only possible if all thoughts of inabilities have been washed away from my mental patterns: it is only possible if I believe that I can.
So, that was it for this time. I know that I will return to this topic many times in the future. So look at the list above as a first set of principles, as a first stab at creating a good list. As the first step in a continuously improving set of steps towards one of my new long-term goals: to be able to really help others in obtaining their goals!
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