SimonHarlingBlog Posts

The quantity, diversity, and quality of the food we consume, together with our individual responses to our nutritional intake, makes the field of nutritional science a very deep rabbit hole down which to go.

Here’s where I am with it. 

Diversity of my food choices 

My breakfast is constant. One less decision to make.

Currently, I’m using Hemp protein with almond, cashew, or oat milk to achieve 35-40g of protein after a morning workout. Without a high protein breakfast, I find it hard to hit my protein target for the day of 135 g (calculated using 1.5 g per kg of body mass), which I find helps retain my muscle mass. 

My other constant ingredients include. 

5 g Baobab powder

10 g Maca powder

10 g Flaxseed powder 

We have a fixed shopping list with a simple rotation of recipes. Nothing elaborate and someone else chooses the vegetables we eat.

Quantity of food

I see a choice between chaos and control. 

Chaos for me is to overeat. When I was a kid. I had no control. I eat what I liked. 

My choices were chaotic. I trained relentlessly. I didn’t care much for nutritional planning. 

When I began to work on breath control, one of the changes that helped me to become an asymptomatic drug-free asthmatic, got me thinking about where else I could apply the thinking, chaos vs control in my life.  

It seemed an obvious extension to explore fasting. I found I enjoyed the training, particularly running, on an empty stomach, feeling lighter and counterintuitively more energetic. The Zero app was really helpful in reinforcing a habit of holding off eating until I had trained in the mornings.

One thing that has really struck home with me throughout writing this is how I use applications, like Zero, or processes like protein content monitoring, to dial in a routine that works for me, establish that it does work, and then trust it. I did a similar thing with heart rate years ago. I’m now happy with my pacing and I no longer use a heart rate monitor. There is something to be said for not obsessing over detail once you know it works for you on the whole. 

Quality of food

Food is an extension of my thinking on the quality-quantity continuum. Moving the dial towards quality, I enjoy taking the time to create connections with local producers of high-quality food, people who care about what they do.  

As a family, we have chosen a simplistic rotation of food which we adjust seasonally, reviewing our decisions quarterly with the intention of moving us closer to eating locally sourced, organic, simple food more of the time.

What I do to help my Asthma

Asthma is an inflammation of the airways. Here are the supplements I take in my efforts to shift my nutrition towards an anti-inflammatory bias.  

Omega 3 Vegan Oil 1200mg capsule

4 x 1000mg MSM capsules

Zinc 50mg capsule

Magnesium Citrate 500mg capsule

We are what we eat 

To wrap this up. Nutritional science is complex and so are we. In the face of complexity, we could make everything very simple. 

Simple can be the billion-pound industry that tells us what to eat. Of course, they don’t know who you are, but if you are happy to comply, they are happy to supply. 

Simple, but not easy can be to accept that not all our choices are reflective of who we want to be. YET. 

Not easy because the truth is not for everyone, and neither is owning our choices.

If you do choose to embrace the idea that what we eat is indeed a reflection of who we are then slowly and with good judgement we can change what we eat to better reflect who we are NOW.

Control: Professional athletes who are breathless strive for breath control. 

Chaos: Athletes who don’t get paid use breathlessness as a sign of success.

We are always somewhere between breathlessness and breath control. 

Those who feel they can’t control their breathlessness know they need breath control.

The rest of us assume we have breath control because we can choose breathlessness.

Rather than assume. Let me help you take a look at your choices.

I had no idea breath control would change my life until I developed breathing awareness. In life, I thought I wanted chaos. I thought I operated at my best, on the edge, taking risks, with very little control. 

Get fitter, get stronger, lessening the impact of asthma was the story I was going with. The more you do the better it is. The truth, it got me only so far. 

What’s your story? Maybe you too think the idea is to push hard in each training session, as an escape, a platform to show yourself, or others, how far, fast, or how much you can do. A marker, of your endeavour and effort. Chaotic and adrenaline-fueled. You choose chaos. Life in the red zone. No, breathe control, no off switch.

Insights that change how you view the world and the story you tell others can come from the unlikeliest of sources. I had taken a Postural Restoration Institute course and when I was asked to blow up a balloon with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, I knew something was not right. I could outrun everyone else in the class I was taking, yet I could not blow up a balloon. 

Three months and a lot of hard work later, I had made breathing through my nose the default option. Blowing up balloons was no longer an issue and neither was my asthma. Having dug deeper into breathing techniques I had become an asymptomatic asthmatic. I was sold on my new perspective.

Having a breakthrough moment, an insight into a new world, a new perspective, is never enough.  If the change we seek to create means that much and we want to be constant and consistent in our choices, we need to issue ourselves a daily challenge. A mechanism by which we can keep the standards we set ourselves intact for today at least. 

I write and think each day on the prompt. Chaos or control? 

Am I bringing chaos because that is what the situation needs or am I bringing chaos because that is what I think is expected of me?

Over time by working with the challenge. Do I bring chaos or control? I have successfully edited the design of my life to walk, train, run, paddle, and ride with breath control > 80% of the time. 

An asthmatic endurance athlete does not need to continually prove to himself that he is resilient, productive, and determined. You don’t get to be an asthmatic endurance athlete if you are not. I didn’t think of myself as stuck, busy compounding a virtue that was already in abundance, reinforcing patterns that once served me well. But I was. 

I have learned to slow down in all aspects of my life. To challenge my thinking to take on new perspectives and skills. To become curious enough to learn breath control gave me the flexibility of choice. If you were less busy doing what you have always done. What else could you learn? What skills could you develop, and apply with the time you have?

My journey towards the flexibility of choice started with developing breathing awareness. Here’s how you can do it too.

STEP 1: Breathing rate at rest

Control: 16 diaphragmatic breaths through your nose in a minute.

Chaos: Anything else

Do you bring chaos or control to your breathing?

If at this point you fail, because you are a mouth breather, don’t worry. I spent 3 months learning to breathe through a broken, seemingly dysfunctional nose. 

If you can breathe through your nose but can’t diaphragmatically breathe. Consider your breathing as uncontrolled.

Finally, if you breathe through your nose and diaphragmatically breathe but you take in excess of 16 breaths per minute, sitting quietly. You too must consider your breathing as uncontrolled.

Take note and continue. 

Now you know if your breath control is either controlled or uncontrolled. Are you frustrated or curious? 

An interested observer is open and curious. Think, growth mindset. 

The alternative is a harsh critic who will (possibly unintentionally) shut down options with criticism and of course bemoan the inevitable problems that occur when making a course correction.

Developing breath control is a creative process. There will always be problems, progress is not tracked with a straight line and success is not with every footstep. Prescription drugs and pharmacies are popular for a reason. 

Are you willing to commit?

IF you choose curiosity, you need to know where you are currently and that begins with building awareness of how you breathe. The very first step to taking ownership of your breathing patterns. 

To remain curious is a choice that will serve you well. 

STEP 2: Breathing rate during the day

Over the next 3 weeks (21 days for a habit) each morning try writing out a table (see Table 1). No right or wrong. You are simply interested. 

At the end of each day or the beginning of the next. Estimate how much of your day is spent with uncontrolled breathing. 

For example, 80% of my time controlled and 20% uncontrolled. 

Annotate the table with the activities that either help you bring control or chaos. 

For example:  

• Going for a walk
• Training
• In conflict 
• Working
• Resting
• When worried

Stressed, talking a lot, training relentlessly hard? Was that reflected in the %-age proportion of time you spent with uncontrolled breathing during the day? 

If you spend too much time thinking, with total control, never choosing chaos, could you rip it up occasionally and let go of your emotions. 

Have you chosen to do more when choosing to do less would bring control?

Table 1. Breath awareness

STEP 3: Control or chaos

Here is a challenging question you can work with daily in your journaling process. 

Today, did I bring chaos or control into my life?

If you repeatedly ask yourself to look for red buses, you will increasingly see more of them. Not because there are more red buses on the road each day, but because daily you have built up your awareness to a task in hand. 

Building breathing awareness is no different. There is no magic formula to copy. In our efforts to be a little wiser about the choices that we live with, we get to choose the things that we pay attention to. 

What are you paying attention to?

The argument for reading hundreds of books is that knowledge accumulates, building up like compound interest. 

As a kid, I remember writing revision notes in an attempt to push the required knowledge into my head. Now, I compress down insights and thoughts into concise statements or directives. An idea that I picked up from Derek Sivers. 

If reading books is about banking the knowledge for some time in the future, then writing book notes and creating directives feels like having cash in your pocket. It’s useful now.

A process that has challenged me to slow down and consider what I’ve read. To embrace, reject, or accept another viewpoint. 

Once I’ve decided that I want to engage with an idea. Directives bring constraints. Do this. Don’t do that. A way to practice commitment to a decision. 

Nobody has to listen. There is no pressure to impress or perform. It’s on you to develop the idea and your belief in the usefulness of the knowledge you have acquired. 

The first draft helpfully named the vomit draft, gets me started with no expectation. After that, each edit and rewrite builds commitment to an idea. The challenge is to become clear and concise in my communication. Leaving no doubt in my words. 

In coaching, we ask students to learn a concept and then teach it. Poor student coaches collect knowledge in the hope it will someday be useful. Which is like collecting lego in the hope it will someday make you a good architect.

Good student coaches know they need to constantly work with the knowledge they have now.

Goodhart’s Law has been generalised to state.  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Although the background to Goodhart’s law is within economics. What can it teach us in the field of health and fitness? In this article, I look at how we have come to confuse measures with targets. What impact that has on our outcomes and why we so often fall into the trap.  

I know a cyclist whose trackable measure of progress is the number of watts he produces on a bike. It began with an intention. Healthy, happy, and slim enough to fit back into clothes he likes. The narrative that goes with the measure is simple enough. Get on a bike more often, get fitter, lose weight, feel happy.  

Only nowhere does it say you need to hit 300 watts to qualify as a happy healthy cyclist. The narrative and the measure do not fit. So we make them fit. We do that by conflating the measure and the target. Mixing our hard, objective measures with our subjective reality.

Fast forward 6 months. What would be the consequence of my cyclist friend throwing out 300 watts on a bike? It seems implausible that health, clothes sizes, and happiness would all be aligned for evermore provided the reading on the power meter says 300 watts. 

To work with the story we tell ourselves and align it with the measures that we use to track our progress. We would do well to introduce soft measures that are as easy to track as money, weight, or miles per hour. Soft measures give us a chance to positively reinforce the actions that we would like to take towards our intent. Helping us to shape who we are and how we show up. Our intent, the experience we would like to create for ourselves then becomes as good as the question that we are trying to answer and the measures we use to help us answer it. The alternative is to hope that happiness is at the end of a rainbow. 

Clouds and rain come with hope and rainbows. And when progress falters on our hard, objective measures, as it inevitably will. We get to decide what it means and for some, that will be a chance to negatively reinforce undesirable behaviour patterns. The martyrdom narrative, no pain, no gain, is as unhelpful as going easy on ourselves and choosing denial as a strategy. Despite telling yourself that you are useless because you keep quitting, quitting is the smart move, as all are avoidable behvaiour patterns. 

It is hard to imagine that you will show up and do your best work if your intent and measure are not aligned. Hard objective measures are easy to fall for as they are simple, accessible, and relatable. But what if they don’t speak to you? The entrepreneur once distracted by profit who no longer recognises the business they built. A runner who started with the intent of feeling good is now wondering why they keep frantically checking their watch for progress on Strava. Feeling unmotivated? I doubt you’re apathetic, you just choose the wrong measure.   

When we begin with a hard measure and conflate it with the outcome we seek, we begin in the middle. If we start with the experience we would like to create it gives us a chance to examine the narrative that we are working with and the outcome we seek. Measures can come and go, as we work with the question that we are trying to answer. Our intent, the experience that we seek to create, should drive the creative process until it makes sense to us, not the measure. If we allow a measure to drive how we experience the world we create questions like the one we started with. Will producing 300 watts on a bike make me happy?

Of course, the inflexibility of the measure may just be a tactic to ensure we remain closed off to possibility, a reflection of our thinking. When we are truly committed to change we show up, open and curious. The change we seek overrides the need to look assured. Besides what are we assured about? Our narrative, the data, decisions, and experiences we have created for ourselves? If hard measures are hard to take then soft measures can be hard to create. Begin and work with them, let the experiences that you want to create for yourself drive your iterations.

Here is an example of a soft measure I created.  

On a scale of 1-5. Rate your experience of today’s activity as a positive reinforcement of your intent.

0: Not related

1: Couldn’t relate to the session. I can’t see how this will help.

2: Could somewhat relate. I’m not sure how this will help

3: Could relate. This could help.

4: Definitely relate. This does help

5: Loved it. This will definitely help

This particular scale was designed to encourage self-selected sessions that become increasingly affirmational over time. Building on what was working, iterating that which was not. 

The world we experience is created, so go create. Make soft measures out of emojis, find out how you make your customers feel or kick off a weekly conversation with your kids by asking them. On a scale of 1-5, how much fun was it to be in our family this week? 

I don’t mean to bring this conversation down but a bit of tough love can also be helpful. So, keep your hard measure, your objective reality in the background, and work with it, just don’t beat yourself up with it, or confuse it with the experience that you want to create for yourself.

The type of innovation that changes a marketplace, how people think, and how things are done requires us to start with why, after all, a movement is only as good as the reasons for starting it. So here it is. Public healthcare provision in the UK is on the defensive. 

Currently, 60% of our healthcare spend is on cure and rehabilitation, our NHS is overwhelmed and under committed. Other centrally funded agencies deliver predictable programs in the hope of predictable results. In the private sector, the health and fitness marketplace is in a race for the bottom, and innovation is borne out of the need to survive. In this article, we will take a look at how we got here, what the future may hold and why putting purpose before profit is in all our interests.

We all know at our own costs that when we are busy and chaotic we fail to look at innovative long-term solutions, instead, we look towards the surety of the tried and the trusted, a short-term fix. Talk is of control, deliverables, KPI’s and broad brush stroke policies in lieu of creativity. Embracing the possibility of innovation requires the type of trust and commitment that doesn’t come with a pension plan, 25 days holiday, and a company car. 

There is, however, a rapidly growing group that we have not yet mentioned, that if given the support and direction required can challenge how we shape the future of healthcare provision in the UK. Helping us move from defensive to the offensive in our thinking, a group of people with very little to lose and everything to gain. 

Sports-based entrepreneurs. Coaches who are attracted to creating a lifestyle business with the intent of inspiring change in others only to find themselves making short-term decisions, focused on the quick fix and attention-grabbing headlines. Who better to begin a conversation about putting long-term offensive thinking into practice than the people who would be learning the lesson themselves? Building businesses that put purpose before profit, design of life before the rigors of life, and the values of their community before the value of their services 

If we are to place our trust in a group of people with nothing to lose and everything to gain. We should at least do some background checks. Let’s begin by looking at the environment in which they currently operate. A marketplace is said to be in a race for the bottom, when heightened competition between parties, results in a sacrifice of product quality in order to gain a competitive advantage. Busy and noisy marketplaces can be good news for the consumer if we are talking about making transport or water supplies more affordable, but when it comes to people’s health, then it is a problem for the Government, society, and sport-based entrepreneurial coaches. 

Who wins when a consumer wants to change and a coach needs long-term thinking? The conflict a coach faces is between trying to deliver near-term results, profit while paving the way for long-term thinking and investment, purpose. The same defensive thinking that sees us spend 60% of our healthcare budget on patching up the preventable diseases of our time. Quick fixes and client appeasement are the harsh realities of the current marketplace. Society is getting what it wants, not what it needs. 

To break the cycle of short-term thinking of value before values, somebody needs to go first. The agile and the quick, sports-based entrepreneurs, or the slow and the old, the Government and its agencies? In the next section of this article, I will outline how a growing group of disenfranchised coaches can be mobilised to challenge our thinking, contribute to new standards of treatment in preventable diseases and change how we do things.

Perhaps then a more accurate term to describe sports-based entrepreneurs who choose to enroll in the idea of purpose before profit would be “social entrepreneurs”, no overwhelming desire to create or own fixed assets, but a strong desire to make a positive contribution in their community.  Enrolled in their purpose, sports-based social entrepreneurs would require the trust of central agencies to own their methods without impediment. 

Trust until now has been in short supply and to decentralise control would require a shift in thinking from the Government and central agencies. Projects are driven by their measures, not their purpose. The same is true of most businesses and research. Research is plentiful in the world of measures that are accessible and easily understood, the link between physical activity and the benefits to the participants is one such example. What is less well understood is the link between the economy, society, and our well-being, where measures are more difficult to come by. 

If we are to develop links between the economy, society, and our well-being it is hard to imagine that a project designed and driven by measures will in the long term outperform a project reverse-engineered from its purpose. Unburdened by defensive thinking, flexible in their design, a social entrepreneur sees value in the process, lessons in the failures, and measures as tools that inform the project. 

Valued for the generosity of their thinking, acting as catalysts for increasing social capital within their communities, sports-based social entrepreneurs can facilitate personal leadership through a simple Be. Do. Say, model. Professor Richard Dawkins, famously coined the term “memes” associating the word with learned behaviours that are imitated and passed on. Sports-based social entrepreneurs know that their success begins with enrollment and is built on engagement. In search of an R number >1, a tipping point at which the narrative changes, ideas spread, and how things are done brings quantifiable change for the community.

When R < 1 and the idea is rough and its assets intangible will you lean into the idea and support it?  Few will, and that is ok. For it is only a few that are needed, more will come, when the idea becomes polished and the signs of success are difficult to ignore. The alternative is to go big and watch people lose their nerve at the slightest sign of a wobble.  Physical literacy was a heavily backed concept that was like a bad run at the theatre, people quickly did not want to be associated with a flop. The idea failed to gather enough momentum to see it through the difficult phase of multiple iterations that are required to turn a good idea into a great concept.  

Why then ask for the strength of leadership from the many, when you can focus on the few? Why ask for big budgets when the stakes are high and the environment in which you operate is chaotic and unstable? Instead, utilise the unstable nature of a marketplace and turn it to your advantage. Create stability where there is none. Sports-based social entrepreneurs strive for the stability and financial freedom that would allow them to do the work that initially attracted them to the marketplace. A strong desire to make a positive contribution to their community.

Stability and creativity on purpose are at the heart of this change. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we do our best thinking when we are stable and secure in the knowledge that our needs are being met. So meet their needs, train them, support them and allow them to become a value-based social entrepreneurial coach. A catalyst of change. Who better to lead an empathetic conversation about change than the person learning to innovate in order to thrive?

To facilitate the change in thinking outlined in this article would require the Government and its centrally funded agencies to incentivise sports-based social entrepreneurs. Reallocation of a small proportion of the healthcare spend towards a reorganisation of the health and fitness marketplace would see social capital thrive where once it was crowded out. 

Sport-based social entrepreneurship for the benefit of others is not something you believe in, it is something you do. Purposeful practice is the difference-maker. Measured by their contributions to our communities, the change they bring, and the impact they have on others. Sports-based social entrepreneurs can and will build their practices with purpose in mind. It is now up to society to provide that purpose.

For the rapidly growing number of entrepreneurial sports coaches. 

Good coaches own their training philosophy, values, and principles, not their methods. A good coach leaves no doubt in their words. Committed to providing distinction and definition, a good coach uses written manifestos, standards, and expectations to challenge and provoke. To build a sense of urgency that action is required, now, on the values that lay within. 

A good coach wants to be told the truth, an average coach wants to learn, a bad coach wants to be left alone. A good coach creates opportunities to hold their clients and themselves up to the standards they have set. Bad coaches resist challenges to their thinking, hide from failure, and defend what is not working. Providing roadmaps and shortcuts to replace a lack of curiosity, yet complain when their clients are inflexible.

Coaching is not something you just believe in, it is something you do, an active choice, a creative process. While methods sometimes fail. Purpose, commitment, and consistency of action is an investment a good coach is willing to make, measuring their endeavour by the value it brings. A good coach trusts the process, keeps perspective, and learns to live with the choices they make. They share their unfettered progress, create assets, look for leverage and embrace their incompetencies. Bad coaches live in the land of excuses, preferring shortsightedness to the uncertainty of possibility.

Valuing curiosity over professional pride, a good coach cuts options, providing a focus on what can be done, not on what should be done or can’t be done. Stable enough to be creative, strong enough to provide leadership through uncertainty, and comfortable enough to accept a lack of progress as a phase, not a label.  A good coach goes first, demonstrating personal leadership, working on their inner game, and accepting that it is far easier to recognise faults in others than in themselves. Coaching is an uncomfortable conversation about how clients experience failure.

A bad coach knows it is far easier to convince a stranger of their market value than it is to navigate through their own values and beliefs. A bad coach relies on tactics, non-binding word-of-mouth agreements, and a large, non-specific marketplace in which to operate. Providing detailed and specific answers to non-specific questions. A good coach spends their time helping their clients develop specific questions that only the client can answer.  

A good coach will carefully create and define a measure for their success. Embracing their constraints to build a business that aligns its values to its purpose, not its profit. Busy with the how, bad coaches obsess over tactics, prices of their products, and delivery of their services. A bad coach confuses market value with personal value, a good coach knows we are what we value, a product of the environment we create.  

The distinction between the teaching and coaching marketplaces is ownership of knowledge. Good teachers push knowledge and work off a curriculum, asking questions of themselves and their clients, to find better ways to get to a fixed endpoint. Bad coaches confuse teaching with coaching. Good coaches pull their clients through fear towards hope. For fixed endpoints, see endless possibilities. 

A good coach chooses enrollment to create clients, treating them as volunteers. Clients explore the real motivation behind their questions, build awareness of what their situation is telling them, and are inspired to take ownership of their own problems. A bad coach is busy accepting all comers and all problems to create dependency in return for money. They waste time defending what is not working and miss the opportunity to create a collaborative space in which to work with their clients.

Using the simplest of business models, so as not to choose between coaching and business, a good coach scales only when necessary, preferring to iterate in pursuit of excellence, growing only as fast as they can keep their promise. Simplifying or outsourcing areas in which they are good enough, a good coach creates space to invest in those areas in which they are best in class. Best in class, could be best in your street, that does not matter, what matters is a good coach, who leaves no room for doubt. 

A bad coach loses patience, nerve, or focus and blurs the lines between business and coaching, which is a choice to be good at neither.

This manifesto—which I considered my training manual—has since become a book: https://simonharling.blog/book/

What can you tolerate?

“It is ok for you, you’re fit!” is an unhelpful comparison we make when we are frustrated. A bad coach will quickly label it as an excuse. A good coach will help you see it as a phase you are in. In this article, I’ll tell you how I initially missed an opportunity to help myself while rehabilitating from a COVID -19 infection, what changed my mind, and why it changed how I approach my coaching and training. 

Labeling a frustrated rant as an excuse keeps us stuck tolerating the situation we are in. Those around us learn to accept, ignore or quit the scene. Quitting is hard unless you have defined the conditions under which you are willing to quit. Acceptance is no picnic either since you choose to stick around to do the work. Which leaves us with ignoring a situation. Finding a way to wear it, often for far longer than we should and always in the hope that something will change. 

When it’s your health and you are tolerating a situation, hoping that someone else will take responsibility, a doctor, therapist, or even a coach. Then your money is on quitting, a way to feel better without any more work. After all the situation you are in, isn’t that hard enough? No matter how hard a situation is, how tough you have it, good doctors and therapists are like good coaches, they don’t own your problems. They can care, treat and even cajole you into making better decisions but they don’t own your outcome. 

When COVID-19 kicked my butt in March 2020, I was well aware I had a problem, I just didn’t want to accept it. If consciously incompetent is the technical term for the phase I was in, the feeling could be better described as overwhelmed and under committed. Overwhelmed by the uncertainty and doubt. Under committed because what I was doing about it was not good enough. And I had nobody to call me on it. 

The overwhelmed and under-committed want answers, NOW. The emotional mind has us frantically looking for signs of progress as we hurry through the steps required to truly frame and understand the situation we face. And I was no different, my definition of success was loose, scruffy, and obvious. My story was I just wanted to return to a level of fitness I had enjoyed prior to COVID-19.

The difficult work of accepting where you are now is not for everyone and it is not difficult to see why. It feels messy, uncertain, and unlikely to make a difference. I had been hit by breathlessness, fatigue, stressed-out dysfunctional sleep patterns, headaches, sore throats, and the type of doubt that gets to your core. Lunging back and forth and doing press-ups on my landing, I tracked my efforts using scribbles that would not have looked out of place on the walls of a prison cell.

Figure 1. The early days. Months 2 and 3 (April and May 2020)

In the film Rocky Balboa, Rocky is frustrated, he still has stuff in the basement, a calling that will not go away. So what are you going to do about it? How strong is that rumble, how bad do you want it? Change and the speed at which you change depends on the strength of the stimulus.

I know the strength of the stimuli, the intent, is what separates out my clients. My successful clients build on the stuff in the basement, however faint the rumble is. They work on their definition of success, obsess about the change they seek, build belief in what they do. Until the rumble becomes a roar. 

The difference-maker arrived for me in the form of a question. A new route to go down, a reason to keep going. I switched my focus. How much work can I get done across a day if I split the workouts up into small sessions?  To a specific question. Does my training kick off my symptoms? Although I didn’t get any clearer on the answer, it was too unstable to see any trends,  I did get my change of perspective. A mantra that guided my mindset throughout my rehabilitation. 

I value the stability of my symptoms over the progress of my workload

Figure 2.  Months 5+ (Aug 2020)

If a challenge to your thinking is the equivalent of the tough love of a coach. Then setting standards below which you do not drop is like the consistency of a training camp. You work to uphold them each day. I had developed a question that challenged my perspective and created new training standards, including rules by which I would quit my training. In over 9 months of training, I quit twice due to unmanageable headaches missing fewer training sessions than I had when I was well. 

Training camps are designed to use the pressure of an upcoming performance to create a successful environment. Good training camps apply pressure positively to challenge your thinking, standards, and how you do things. Badly designed training camps pointlessly build pressure on the outcome of the performance. I had pointlessly put pressure on myself. My definition of success was to return to pre-COVID -19 fitness levels, a drug-free asthmatic, training for a world-class multi-sport event. 

In unstable and unpredictable situations taking pressure off the outcome is a smart move. The overwhelmed and under-committed don’t need to build pressure. They need to build meaning and find value in the process they have invested in. To find a way. And keep going.

Changing from making a comparison, historical vs actual performance. To an open-ended question that allowed me to provide answers with no limits. Took the pressure off the outcome and put the focus on the quality of my actions. 

What can I tolerate? 

It was on me to find a way to come up with a better answer each day. I still work with the same question. No unrealistic targets, no emotional comeback pledge, or pointless comparisons. Instead, the question meets me where I am now. Providing me with a  motivational, inspiring, and guiding challenge to live by. As I write this some 15 months on I have quit all my asthma inhalers for a second time. Become more disciplined in my training and I have learned to own my story, my definition of success. 

Just Do It. Is a call to action. An inspiring brand story that helps Nike sell trainers. Turning the stuff in your basement from a rumble to a roar is more than getting started. It is about ownership, owning YOUR definition of success. Crafting the story you are telling yourself until you care so much, you get up, again and again, just like Rocky. 

If you would like more resources on COVID-19 rehabilitation click this link.

For access to the tracker, I used click here.