I’m just guessing you’re at Rob’s blog because you are a bicyclist.  I’m a good guesser, so I am also guessing that you are an adult with competing responsibilities and interests, and that finding time to train is hard as hell.

I hear you; I feel your pain.

My husband and I ride for endurance.  Neither of us are known for our speed, but we are still holding our “first hour” pace at hour five, when we have the time to train.

But there’s the rub.  Finding the time to train.

I have three teenagers at home – and yes, I want to donate them  to another family a lot of the time.  I own a business and work full time.  I write novels, and I have a rockin’ blog. And I happen to adore my husband and like to spend time with him as well.  Like you, I’ve got a lot going on.

I’m no expert on your life, so I can’t imagine how you manage to squeeze it all in.  I will tell you how we do it, in case our experience helps you at all. We deem training both urgent and important, and we eliminate all the non-urgent, non-important stuff from our lives to make room for it.  Sounds like hopeless babble, I know.    But it works.

Here’s how I make training fit.

1.    Schedule races.  Training becomes urgent and time-sensitive when you have a big race coming up.  Never let your calendar become empty.  If I don’t have a race, then, training always slips down the priority list.
2.    Make health and fitness a core family value.  If your kids and other family members never lose sight of the importance of wellness, and you do all that you can to promote theirs, how can they argue the importance of your training?  Go ahead, make a family mission and values statement.  We did.  It works.
3.    Eliminate the crap.  Most people don’t like to hear me say this, but I eliminated all TV except for football from my life.  I also don’t drink alcohol because it dehydrates me and makes it harder to get up early to fit everything in to my day.  I don’t take long lunches with friends.  Making these changes freed up a tremendous amount of time for me.  Find the non-urgent, non-important things in your life, and dump them.
4.    Learn to love your training stand/stationary.  I highly prefer long rides on the open road, taking in the scenery, and smelling the roses.  In the real world, I only have the opportunity to do that once a week on average.  The rest of the time, my beautiful pink Trek Pilot is up on the training stand in the living room.  That way I can ride when it is dark outside, I eliminate driving to and from (lovely) riding spots, and I can remain available to meet my kids’ needs, which brings us to #5.
5.    Multi-task, multi-task, multi-task.   My husband and I discovered that, with the right attitude, training can substitute for date time   We are together and we are doing something we enjoy.  And if the bike is up on the training stand, we can add a third category into our multi-tasking and look over kids’ homework, watch movies, or, in my case, throw a lap desk over the handlebars and write!

We still don’t train as much as we would like to, but we manage to get in enough training time to stay respectable in our distance riding.  Someday, some magical day, the “time” fairy may grant us some more hours for training, but, until  then, we treat training like a heart attack: it’s urgent, it’s important, and we have to force ourselves to take care of it RIGHT NOW.  Instead of calling for an ambulance, we elevate training into a priority position by eliminating the other crap, loving our training stands, and multi-tasking like pros.

See you on the road.

Pamelot