Discipline equals Freedom.

According to former SEAL team commander Jocko Willink.

Well that was a wild night : we’ve just had the second named storm whistle through so there are trees down, debris everywhere and stuff blowing around our yard, I was awake a lot of the night because of the noise and also because I seem to have lost what I can only call my sleep/night discipline.

Right now i’m trying to get beyond enthusiasm or dismay when it comes to my exercise, such as it is, and instead i’m trying for discipline : currently what that means is that I plan to go out every day, rain or shine, and have 45 minutes of tramping around the lanes near our cottage. Discipline then is very much the theme of this post and I have three areas to work on : rest and sleep, as I said above, exercise + diet and the more difficult subject of how to stop my mind wandering off around the lanes itself when I should be resting.

Last week. I made a mistake with my application of discipline and a misused training plan – instead I used a brief rush of misplaced enthusiasm during my daily walk. Instead of 45 minutes around my usual route I not only took on the next lane along – the one with the very steep and narrow lane – but I even went beyond that with a triangular route which took at least two hours to complete. At the finish I was cock-a-whoop that i’d done it and celebrated with a big lump of shortbread from the local cafe. I suffered of course that night and the next day….and the next, in fact I was stiff and sore for days and had to take a couple of days off to recuperate. You can see the problem : my 45 minutes done once a day every day, gets done every day and is now simply a matter of daily habit and discipline – while the longer version leaves me feeling as though iv’e run a half marathon and that I deserve a few days off.

In the companion post to this one I bemoaned the whole idea of New Year’s resolutions vs actual plans : such resolutions are almost always based on a brief flush of enthusiasm and wishful thinking fueled by the excesses of Christmas. In most cases they never get very far – in fact I would hazard a guess that most resulted in one wheezingly painful run or hopeful gym visit and have now been forgotten about until next time around…..

In days long gone I used to go the gym and train every other day or nearabouts and the first thing I learned, once I had made the move from exercise machines to free weights, was to get in there, get warmed up, do the work that I had planned, go for a swim as a warm down, then eat and then walk home. It worked mainly because I enjoyed it and I could see the rapid progress that the discipline and consistency was giving me, A slightly later lesson was that it didn’t pay to ‘go hard’ only when I was feeling good but then treat myself to an easy ride the next day as a kind of reward : just plan the session, do the work and leave.

It will be rough out there today because it’s still a wet one although the wind has thankfully abated – the great thing is that I can wait for the ideal moment to get out there as long as I do actually get out and do it. I’m halfway to making it an established pattern of daily life and equally about halfway to removing extraneous sugar from my diet completely : i’m not going to start crowing about until three months of actually doing it are in the bag – after that it will be time to make a new plan.

Best wishes Y’awl

Edit. I can hear, in my mind, the obvious questions : what about spontaneity and equally, what about progress ?, Well, if today, for example, i’m feeling a bit chipper, then what I will do with my walking based exercise is to have at it a bit harder on the steeper uphill sections and use my stick less – just as I have been advised to do. Secondly, I will know that next week i’m probably ready to change things up a little – in fact that’s what has just happened so next week i’m progressing to two sessions per day and that becomes my plan for the week. Knowing that I have that in mind it then becomes (hopefully) my new daily pattern and discipline.

The other sides of this – the parts that I haven’t covered in this post – are dealt with while i’m using the free thinking time I get while i’m walking : i’m not fussing with minor jobs and while i’m walking i’m specifically not sat in front of the computer often creating myself even more mental stimulus to then have to deal with. Equally during today’s increase in pace it helped me make a decision/plan/intention for what to do about diet next week : my overall plan is to reduce to zero the amount of extraneous sugar that I consume thus next week i’m going to have a go at not ‘treating’ myself to something sweet when we go out for coffee. Once again the discipline of knowing that the end point is zero helps me make the actual decision today – just before the start of a new training week.