Consistency

As I was rolling through the last of my long runs before the Chilly Half with the Sunday morning long run duo (now up to three today) the topic of consistency came up. One of the three of us said, "since the beginning of November when we started this, I'm the only one that's been out consistently every Sunday". Although strictly speaking this statement was technically true in fact while being untrue in spirit (go ahead and figure that out) it did bring up the topic of consistency, a subject I may have opined upon before.



Others wiser than me have held forth on the subject of consistency. One of my favourites, since I'm results- and data-based and also a visual learner is borrowed from Alan Couzens:

Without going into the entire explanation - you can read that yourself here and I highly recommend it, there are several different interpretations of this data. On the left are finishing times of IM athletes. On the right are their cumulative training hours for the year. The boiled-down truth at least as relates to this posting is that one must be pretty consistent in training if one wants to see results. Disclaimer - this is out-of-context from the topic of the original post but related enough to be included here.

So what's the point? In training as in life consistency is one of the cornerstones that yields results. It doesn't necessarily mean consistently doing the same thing every day, but doing something every day. Getting up in the morning and ignoring the snooze button, one of the most oxymoronic inventions dreamt up by the human race. Getting moving. Having a plan and sticking to it.

The other two "cornerstones" patience and frequency are just as important. But they weren't the topics today, so they're not included in the discussion.

This weekend upcoming is the Chilly Half - let's see how consistent I've actually been. Preview to follow.

Thanks Mats for thirteen good years.

Peace.