How do you even train for that?
I’m aware that most of the people who read this blog are not athletes. So as the year passes and I talk to you about the adventures that we go on and the races we try to complete, I’m going to discuss with you about my journey to be in the best shape possible.
After reading my last blog post, my auntie Helen (who confidently runs 10km) asked “how do you even train for that?”, referring to Leadville 100. So I thought I’d take you with me on this challenge over the next 29 weeks. For those of you who don’t know much about me, you should know that I’m not going to be winning this race, far far from it. I do want to complete 100 miles on my mountain bike, at 10,000 – 12,000 feet above sea level, in under 12 hours though. If I were to attempt that now, I would fail.
My year will be ultimately be focused on getting faster on the bike, through smart training and taking a holistic health approach
The other piece I’d like to add into the mix here is that I have a Bachelors degree in Exercise Physiology, a Masters degree in Health Education and I’m a Certified Health Education Specilaist (CHES) . I particularly love the interaction of these two areas. My approach is always “How can we develop our holistic health to better improve our performance?”
As I implement some more holistic health practices into my life, with the goal of improving my performance at Leadville, I’m going to talk you through what I do and hope that some of you might also attempt these changes with me.
Starting the 2019 with a commitment to improve my health and therefore my performance on the bike
I am a firm believer in a concept called asset building when it comes to health. The concept revolves around the idea of instead of makes changes where we stop doing something completely like cutting out sugar or alcohol, or stopping drinking soda, we’re instead simply going to add things in. So while we might correctly identify that drinking soda isn’t benefiting our health, instead of saying “I won’t drink any soda”, we’ll go a different route and drink more water. If we are drinking enough water, we will almost certainly drink much less soda. This is asset building and its how I’m going to improve my health and ultimately my performance for my big races this year.
Each week I intend to add something that benefits my health and try to keep it to something that takes no more than 15 minutes a day. These additions will need to fit into an already busy day (I work full time as a health educator) and they will need to be either very low cost or free. I’ll drop a blog post each Tuesday, with a run down of how the week prior went and setting up our intervention for the week ahead. If you’re interested, please subscribe to this blog with your email. I’d love to hear from you, so comment or reach out to me on social media. Instagram is best (www.instagram.com/nickyjen_13) and through there you’ll see these challenges roll out day by day.