What Training For 12 hours a Week Has Taught Me About Achieving Your Goals

Cycling is in my blood as I was born and raised in the cycling centre of the world: Flanders. As long as I can remember, you could always find me on some type of bike.

I still ride my bike today, although the last couple of years I decided to take it up a notch.

From weekend warrior to riding more kilometres on a bike than with my car in a year.

Working out like this has had a profound effect on how I understand growth in life and business.

You get better in bed

In 1980 Joep Zoetemelk, the Dutch winner of the Tour de France said “You win the Tour while asleep”.

I always thought the more you train the better. But when I gave my all day in day out, it was quite the opposite. It was only when I started to take a decent amount of rest in between training session that I felt I was starting to get stronger and faster.

This applies to live as well. We still live in this toxic working culture where working 100 hours a week seems to be the ultimate humble brag.

Working like this, you are torturing yourself on a daily basis. Your body is in constant overdrive, and productivity goes down like an ICO in 2015.

Plan days of rest, and you will see the days you work increase in output in no time.

Go hard on the hard days, and slow on slow days

In a cycling training plan you don’t go hard all the time. Instead you divide your total amount of training time between mostly easy days and extra hard days. But the hard days should be extra hard, and the easy days extra easy.

We tend to believe that we have to give our all every day to achieve what we want.

I say, don’t. Choose your days where you go all in, and other where you just do what’s asked from you.

Week by week those 100% days will get more and more effective over time without even trying, and on the hard days you’ll feel like Elon Musk on steroids.

This is the preferred way your body wants to grow, and in the long term the most effective one.

It’s all about that base

To get in shape is repeating the process of getting back to a base conditioning level that was a bit higher than the one from the week before.

The accumulation of workouts increases your condition over time. Soon what you thought was almost impossible, has become the new normal.

The bad news is, this takes time. And we humans are as impatient as a hen at dawn.

To change our basic perception of what is growth we need time to settle in and make steady progress. Consistency is key here. The long term always pays off, if we are willing to wait.

Yes you can

Last year I decided to do a 180km ride through the Pyrenees. With 3600 meters of climbing it was the hardest thing I would have ever done.

I felt ready for it, although I had never ridden 180 kilometres in one take.

I finished the race and the dopamine hit was better than any drugs I ever tried, combined. Reaching my goals has never felt so good. It works addictive.

But a small voice still thought this would have been impossible. I countered this voice on a weekly basis. I would set my self smaller goals week in week out, slowly pushing myself to the limit.

I gained confidence with every goals that I reached. And it was that confidence that pushed me through the hard times during that 180 kilometre ride.

Reaching you goals has less to do with skills than it has to do with believing in yourself.

By building that confidence patiently, you turn what seemed impossible before into the new normal today.