Working for success
Getting meaningful outputs from your inputs
Hard work is necessary to achieve an athletic, professional, or life goal. Lazy inputs hardly lead to successful outputs.
A question worth asking yourself, though, is whether making something hard should be the goal.
“That workout was hard, so that means it was effective, right?”
“I am working 100 hours a week. I am busy!”
Challenges are good, but making something hard without a clear reason is a poor choice.
Harder than it needs to be
I always get excited when I find a reading passage that helps me view something from a different perspective. I have spent 2025 working my way through The Daily Stoic and was intrigued by the the February 6th installment. It reads as follows:
“I don’t agree with those who plunge headlong into the middle of the flood and who, accepting a turbulent life, struggle daily in great spirit with difficult circumstances. The wise person will endure that, but won’t choose it—choosing to be at peace, rather than at war.”
—SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 28.7
The name of this passage is Don’t Seek Out Strife and the main idea preaches that we should not make the mistake of assuming a productive life is also one that has us on our absolute limit of workload we can handle. The idea that we must suffer to be successful is only partially true, but also partially flawed.
Platitudes glorifying the grind such as
“Your competition is waking up at 4 a.m. to get an edge”
“Losers hit snooze”
“No days off”
pervade the social media timelines.
The grind mentality is fun to get behind because it can be motivating. Working hard when there is a payoff is and should be rewarding.
However, it is incredibly DEmotivating when you are grinding and getting almost nothing in return as happens in many athletic, career, or other life endeavors. You would have to be plain ignorant to do this indefinitely without having the self awareness to perhaps check your work.
Dose needed to improve
I welcomed a new athlete to the team at Elite Edge last week. He asked me in the initial meeting how he could avoid always feeling like he needs to train more or work harder. A great question.
My answer—
Let’s say you have 10 hours in a week available to train. You may need less, exactly 10, or more than 10 to drive improvement. That depends on training history, the sport you do, and other factors. A training program rests on the idea of trying to improve something (fitness, race times, race placing). This is why structure is helpful rather than blindly doing whatever you please.
How would you feel if you found that the program that works BEST for you required 6 hours a week? Or required more focus on intensity than volume? Would you feel cheated? If your answer is yes, I completely understand because I have LIVED that way in the past. Maxing out the load “because I have the time” may feel like the right choice, but it can lead to subpar results.
You would have be certifiably insane to choose to do something that runs counter to OBJECTIVE data that shows you how you train best (ie 10 hours vs 6, only zone 2, double threshold, etc…) just to say your are doing the most.
Do you have a performance goal or is your goal to see how much you can tolerate without crumbling?
Neither goal is bad, you just need to choose what you are aiming for.
Ideally, as you improve, you afford yourself a chance to train more. You will probably need to do more at some point in order to challenge the body enough to get better. But the idea of having to max out your schedule sometimes is unnecessary.
If you think your training is going well, simply because you are working your hardest, but you are not performing well at races, your training, by definition, is NOT going well.
You may also face the fact that your goals require more time than you have available. In that case, you might have to sacrifice time, give your goal a longer time course to play out, or choose a new goal.
Experience with doing the work helps you figure out how to create a program that is training but not straining.
A note on being tired
Feeling good mentally or physically during exercise or training is sometimes the best thing that can happen to you. If you are always so beat up that you do not ever find out what feeling good is, you lose out on building confidence. Confidence comes from what you show yourself you can do. How can that be built if you never have the mental and physical reserves live up to the challenge?
It would be a grave mistake to say that you should avoid fatigue. It is going to happen if you are pushing yourself to be better at the tasks or activities you want. You do, however, need to have some evidence that the fatigue you are creating is
Manageable (your life is not crumbling around you)
Helping push you toward improvement
Get tired the right way. When you have evidence (data), it is not hard to figure out whether or not you are doing this.
It still won’t be easy
In a sport like triathlon, running, or the like, the intensity is often not the hardest part. As we have touched on, you’ll be burnt to a crisp pretty quick if you are grinding and hacking your way through a training plan. The hard part is participating in training that is quite boring, repetitive, and calculated.
You’ll encounter challenges and maybe even setbacks on a modest training plan, career plan, or the like. There is likely little need to be seeking to make those plans more difficult, especially if you are achieving consistent progress.
Stay in the game.
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