One of my earliest mentors warned me about the dangers of being a one-legged stool — the three legs being work-family-self. It’s very unfashionable to talk about family/self in certain financial firms and the other partners joked that he’d been listening to his life coach too much.

Divorce, burn out, injury, illness… all stem from imbalances in our lives and, ironically, often flow from the commitment necessary to be externally successful.

As an athlete, perhaps your stool is built on… Sport, Friends, Finances.
As a parent, perhaps your stool is built on… Kids, Marriage, Self.

Consider your “legs” in the context of your life goals. My legs are: Monica, my physical body, freedom, financial balance, and learning/teaching. I’m a funny looking stool but I’m okay with that.

I’ve heard people say that the path of an athlete is inherently selfish. Looking up selfish in the dictionary, it notesconcerned excessively or exclusively with oneself. Most of the athletes that I work with have the opposite problem — we fill our weeks with commitments that have very little to do with our selves.

Much of what I preach, athletically, is about creating space for our selves in daily living:

• A consistent weekly schedule
• Daily, moderate, exercise (low standard deviation training)
• Alignment between our likes, our lives, our peers, our spending

A unique aspect of the American character is the desire to “Go Big or Go Home.” In a way, ironman is the ultimate expression of this cultural tendency. It’s certainly big! Extreme athletics (or chasing athletic achievement) gives us cover to carve some “self time” into our busy lives. Quite a bit of work/planning went into setting up my training camps job.

When I was working in Hong Kong, a large part of my endurance motivation stemmed from a powerful drive to escape. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to get to (!) but I certainly wanted to get away. Mountaineers, addicts, ultrarunners, off-shore sailors, entrepreneurs… there’s an element of escapism in many pursuits. I’ve known experts in all those fields!

Do you feel hemmed in by your daily life? Our typical response to stress is a desire to dig into our existing patterns deeper and deeper. The result is more and more stress — a leading cause of disease and illness.

As a coach, my advice for sleep, simplicity and a focus on stamina is a way to treat the symptoms. Only you can address the root causes of the stress you experience in daily living.

Freedom
Are you looking for athletic performance? Perhaps, more accurately, you are associating exercise with freedom.

If this rings true then here is how I chose to maintain my personal freedom:

• Adventure in Nature: Spending a winter carving a groove in the cylinder of your bike trainer gets old! Make time to live in nature. If the time you have is your exercise time then that’s fine. However, I think that the “nature” is more important than the “training.”
• Unplug Daily: Turn your phone off when you train, eat, sleep, talk. Monica often catches me living in the Matrix rather than with her, my child and my peers. We coach a doctor that has his phone off every single weekend and… he’s an important guy at his hospital (life and death stuff). His decision to put his family first on the weekend reminded me that I over-estimate my importance to the world!
• Unplug Weekly: Start with a day a week where you don’t reply to e-mail. Radical stuff! The most peaceful people I know limit their exposure to electronic noise. They reply slowly to e-mail but they always reply. Interestingly, the slow responders give me everything I need. Mark Allen is my role-model for e-mail — he gets more into five lines than anyone I know. Why? Perhaps his mind is clear and he’s able to respond with what I need — not feed my need for a reply.
• Unplug Monthly: If you only get two weeks vacation per year then change your job (this applies to full-time parents as well but I don’t advocate leaving your kids). Once a month, pull the plug on your daily routine and get away. When I unplug, it’s nearly always an adventurous escape. I’m not sure if Monica shares this need to escape (I’ll ask) but I can see it within all my male peer group. My “man camps” are usually just me… I enjoy a lot of solo time.

There isn’t a material luxury in the world that will soothe your psyche when your freedom is impaired. Wealth accumulation is habit forming — make sure to live before you die.

If you are like me then you will be able to list all the reasons why you can’t increase your freedom. You might even have stoic tendencies and seek out difficulties to test your resolve! I hear you and I accept your position. However, remember that even if you choose to remained chained to your past decisions — you’re still exercising a choice.