How Sport Is Important For You?
Meet Adam.
Adam is a regional sales manager.
This position allows him to earn well.
He works 50-60 hours per week, often with more overtime.
He hates overtime because these days it’s hard to make a proper workout.
Adam loves long-running out when he can’t stop thinking about everything and focus on the pure joy of running.
After years, he realized he’s always busy, being in a hurry from home to work, from home to workout, from workout to home.
Do You Know This Kind Of Situation?
I guess you do.
Do you count how much time you spend on the sport every day, every week, or every month?
It’s easy when you go to the gym and you have planned 60-90 minutes for a workout and in most cases, after that time it’s difficult to work out more.
Running is different.
If you run and prepare for ultra races like me, it’s easy for you to go on Sunday and run for 5-7-10-12 hours, you need only some water and food. Easy.
What happens if you want to run also on Saturday for 8 hours? It’s fine, you work a lot during weekdays and workout a lot during weekends.
But you want to run more and you add 1 hour every weekday before work and maybe 30 minutes after work.
I don’t mention core exercises and stretching after each run because you do it, don’t you?
Do you see some challenges here?
When you spend more time running, you have to reduce it from something else.
Hello, Mr. obvious.
Suddenly, you can find out you don’t have time for anything else besides, working, running, and sleeping. And eating, but it’s during work or running.
If you like it, then it’s fine, it’s your life and your choices.
If you’re stressed because of lack of time, it’s time to find out why.
So what to do with lack of time?
In my case, the most important thing was to count how much time I spend on different things. I save how much time I spend on writing blog posts or how much time I run. This works for me, but it might doesn’t for you, but test it before you say it doesn’t work.
In January of 2021, I worked out more than usual and I found I spent around 80 hours on the sport. Is it a lot? I don’t know, it depends. It also depends on how the sport is important for you.
Sometimes, maybe, it’s worth it to go all-in during a workout and plan the next day with an easy one because you’ll need to spend more time at work or home or you just want to finish the book.
Maybe 2 hours of the fast run instead of 8 hours of a long easy run? Knowing numbers it’s easier to experiment with what works best for you.
Maybe different job with more free time?
Being aware of how much time is needed for sport helps in long-term planning because you know how much time you can allocate for different things or projects. Of course, sometimes there are emergency cases but they don’t happen all the time in most cases.
Test what is the best for you because there isn’t one unique path, reading and learning more and more about great runners, it looks like everyone says something different and often opposite to the rest.
Some of them are vegetarians, some are on keto, some eat only meat. Some run everyday easy pace, some only short distances at a high pace. Some run only on flat routes, some only in the mountains. Some have the great running technique and don’t.
What To Do With It? Test It.
I think the worst thing you can do is to reduce sleep time because it’s quite important unless you aren’t gifted and you can sleep 4/5 hours per day and be rested. Don’t try to reduce sleep time in a long period of time, I did, it’s not worth it.
Sport is a great thing and I recommend it to everyone and if you can earn money from it and you don’t have to have a “normal” job that’s awesome, you have at least 40 hours per week more free time 🙂
If Adam knew about it earlier he would definitely be less stressed.
How much time do you spend on the sport every month?