Friday with Heidi: What 100km can teach you part 2…
What a flurry of a week.
Since we last spoke our daughter has returned from Australia for good as she heads off into 4 years of education to be a midwife. This has been all very quickly decided and acted upon, so we now have a house guest!
I also seem to have had a week full of coaching calls, networking meetings, planning days and reviews with the other people who help me to keep the wheels rolling here at Fit Camp Towers. It’s been a productive week.
Last week I shared with you the first four points of what I learned whilst walking the Jurassic Coast Challenge two weeks ago. Let’s finish that off.
You don’t know what you don’t know
This is such a great lesson in life. You can’t and don’t know it all. And even when you are prepared and ready for something you’ve worked towards, you just don’t know what other situations are going to arise.
Despite having worn her walking boots, very comfortably, to climb Snowdon and walk the hills and dales of Yorkshire, Sophie got a blister at 5km in. You don’t know what you don’t know. Why did she get it? We’ll never know. But she did and as such all our planned, prepped and considered parts of our event were altered.
The same was true of the weather. It was ruddy windy. We weren’t to know that. It changes a lot of things. If it had been raining it would have been a completely different animal. Last year they walked in temperatures topping the high 20s. You just don’t know what you don’t know.
Apply this to health and fitness and you don’t know if your job is suddenly going to change and now you need to eat out to entertain clients more often. That can put the mockers on a healthy eating plan.
You may start a new fitness regime only to discover that it reawakens an old, forgotten injury that puts you back a month or so.
As frustrating as it was for both of us, I decided we just had to go with the flow and see what happened. There was nothing else that we could do in that moment other than that.
Go fast, go slow, but go…
Following on from the blister lesson, I learned by about 18km in that it’s tricky to travel at someone else’s pace. Sophie was slowing down because of her blister and, despite my best intentions, I was drifting ahead only to have to stop and wait for her to catch up.
In life we travel at our pace, rhythm guides us and gets us to where we need to be at the right time. It’s frustrating to be going at a pace that doesn’t suit you. I was drifting ahead and she was edgy. I went slower and I was niggly. In the end you need to be doing things for you, at your rate and pace and ability to get satisfying results. When I was able to head off on my own and walk to meet the others I quickly found my pace and felt immediately more comfortable.
When you’re losing weight or getting fitter, it’s nice to have a buddy. But if you are comparing your speed of progress with theirs you could get easily put off that you’re not doing as well. Sometimes we are slowed down, sometimes we need to speed up but generally we work to our own tune. As long as we’re moving or taking action we’re doing well.
Personal Responsibility
Ahhh, my favourite and top personal and business value! To me it’s essential that we take full responsibility for everything we do. I’ve done this for about 10 years or so, it’s part of my psyche and I accept the good, bad and ugly in life as something I may not always be able to control, but I can control how I react to it.
For the challenge it was frustratingly obvious given my recent history with regards to my health and my food choices. If I made a mistake it was when I stopped taking responsibility for what I needed to fuel my walk when I read the joining instructions. We’d had to provide dietary requirements and were told that food would be provided and that we didn’t need to weigh ourselves down with supplies.
Bad move on my part. Yes there was a lot of food, there were provisions for different dietary types but it still didn’t fit with what I could eat and as such I was eating the middle of sandwiches at lunch and chips and salad for dinner because I chose not to eat what was available. Could I have eaten it? Yes, of course. Would I have finished the challenge? I don’t know, but I’ve spent the past 18 months cleaning up my health through my food choices, I wasn’t going to bugger it up for this. So I chose what I knew I could eat, but it wasn’t enough. As such I was lacking the right stuff when I needed it most.
If I’d taken full responsibility for that (like I’ve told myself I would every time I do a challenge) I’d have had more grunt in the later stages.
When you’re improving fitness and working out with a buddy, it’s not their fault if they don’t go and you chose not to. It’s yours.
When you’re losing weight, it’s not your partners fault they have a pudding and ‘make’ you have one. It’s yours.
And when you’re tired all the time but don’t go to bed until midnight because you’re scrolling social media or watching Netflix that’s your choice.
Sodding Gravel
Good grief. If there is one long lasting memory of the challenge it isn’t the hills, the wind or the speed, it’s the sodding gravel!
At about 90km we had to walk across 3km of a gravel beach. It was slow, hard work and endless. It became a mind game.
I knew that once I was across it I was so close to the end. I just kept plodding…
And that’s life in a nutshell. Sometimes it’s a bloody slog, but you know it’s not forever (even though it feels like it), you know that there is better to come (even though you can’t see it) and you know that if you stop nothing can change (you need to keep going for a new opportunity).
So there you have it. Eight little tips for life from the thoughts of a wandering 100km walker. I hope you can transfer them into your own life challenges. My goal is to remember them next time I find myself in a similar situation.
This Sunday we are hosting a Family Charity Fit Camp to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. We start at the normal 9am time at Bearwood Recreation Ground in Winnersh and all monies go to the trust. If you can come and you have something yellow (who does?) please wear it as it’s their company logo colours.
Clean, Green Fit Camp
What’s new with our Social Enterprise activities this week?
More trainers! Thank you so much! I’ll be bringing a sack to Sunday sessions from now on so please bring them along so we can get them recycled and out of landfill.
BeeBombs! We’ve sold 11 packets of wild seed pods so far. To get your British wildflower pouches please click this link and we’ll get them to you. I really hope we can get 100 pouches out and about around Wokingham before the end of the year.
Litter Picking Sticks! The delivery we’ve taken was depressingly in multiple boxes and plastic bags, oh the irony, but at least we can dispose of carefully.
Tree Planted! I’ve been bought a planted tree to offset carbon dioxide. I am so happy! More of these to come.
Client Birthday Treats! I’ve made the decision this week to stop using Graze who we’ve used for many years to supply a little birthday gift to our clients. I love the concept, less so their use of single use plastic. So we have a new fully recyclable product going out to our birthday campers in July.
Bananas! Did you know that to save throwing black bananas away you can peel them and freeze them? Once frozen you can use them in smoothies, to make a banana and peanut butter ice-cream or dipped into melted chocolate. All way better than throwing out. Food waste has a big impact on our environment. To put it into perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, surpassed only by the United States and China. Get using, freezing and eating!
Happy Summer Solstice!
FastTrack Fit Camp is an outdoor fitness business with the focus on improving people on the inside so they feel good on the outside. In 2019 FastTrack Fit Camp became a Social Enterprise and committed to distribute a minimum of 50% of profits back to community environmental projects each year with the goal of helping our local citizens feel good whilst being outside too.
