(Pic: A good book or two on a long-haul Sydney-Huston flight was a great idea.)
Key takeaways:
– Grit is essential to Ironman training and race.
– Grit plays an essential role in the success of your life and career.
– The best gift from an Ironman race!
Dr. Angela Duckworth wrote a NY Times’s best seller book, Grit. I bought that book on my way back to Sydney after a conference trip in December 2016 in the US. As usual, I read before bedtime and managed to finish the whole book in a few months. I learned a lot from the book about grit. In fact, being able to finish the book by using spare reading time before going to bed is gritty already!
The biggest lesson I have learned from an Ironman race is that you need to exercise your grit in your training and on the race day, in your race again the clock. I used what I learned from Dr. Duckworth’s book in my pursue of Ironman.
It was hard, very hard indeed!
My weekly routine for Ironman 70.3 looks like this: Monday off and train on core muscles; Tuesday- a long 2 hour run (15k); Wednesday- 2km swim in the pool; Thursday- 2hr cycle on a bike trainer (60km); Friday off and train core muscles; Saturday- 90km long bike ride; and Sunday- 2.5km long ocean swim. All training started at 5am on weekdays and 7am on weekends. This routine lasted for three months until the week before the race day.
It was hard and you can tell. Even my wife said I was mad, but she also acknowledged that it was necessary and showed her sympathy! Grit drove me through this 3-month routine to finish my first Ironman 70.3 and that’s the best gift I got from the Ironman.
As the Ironman says: anything is possible. Yes, once you have the grit, then anything in your life becomes possible. You just need to apply your gritty power and do it!
Dr. Richard C. Wu @ ReeaConsulting.com
(subscribe to my blog)