A few weeks into my quest for a Boston qualifying time, I've become fascinated with the very concept itself: time. Some of our daily decisions are more obviously a matter of minutes and seconds: I choose to drive instead of walk the fifteen miles to work; I choose to send an email because carrier pigeons have gone out of fashion. I choose to not write my weekly blog post because I am performing the very important task of online shopping.
Yes, these are clearly questions concerning time. Yet the universe also asks us to make decisions that are less obviously, but no less profoundly, a choice of what we do with our twenty-four precious daily hours. In these first few weeks of unicorn chasing, I've become acutely aware of where my hours are going - or more specifically, how I have spent more than two decades passively wasting them.
This fixation was born just before my training, when I started to plan how I would factor long runs into my travel-heavy line of work. Do morning workouts combined with hitting the highway by 6:45am each day automatically uncobble by yellow brick road to success? No, but only if I can crush one double-crossing devil: the snooze button. When the alarm cruelly invades my slumber with its shrill, taunting laughter, the snooze button coos like a siren. "Come with me," it whispers, "back to Yankee Stadium, you're about to hit the game-winner!" It's not until you've heard this line repeated every five minutes for half an hour that you realize you've struck out - Snooze is a fraud. He doesn't care about you or your chimerical baseball career. All he wants is to trap you in a hypnoidal purgatory, where you are neither convinced you should wake up nor settled enough to cuddle back into the deep, wistful slumber you so desire. If it has gotten this far, Snooze wins, and man loses.
So, I ask myself, how do I defeat him from the start, and keep this very real threat away from my pursuit? One of the first steps in chasing your unicorn: seek out the advice of others who've caught theirs.
Among the several athletically well-endowed people I get to work with is a 25-year-old Ironman named Josh. Josh trained for and completed his Ironman during his first year of working the same job I currently hold - who better to turn to for advice?
As soon as we sat down together for a wisdom spoon-feeding session, before I mentioned any of my qualms or questions, Josh spoke: "The first thing I decided to do was stop using snooze. It's a complete waste of ten minutes. If you go to bed early enough, you won't have any problems. Stop wasting time on facebook." Well then.
Josh went on to talk about his more novel strategies - including waking up to eat an energy gel at 4am, then going back to sleep for 30 minutes to digest before a 2 hour bike ride - but the snooze stuck with me most. How hard could it me? Go to bed early (by avoiding TV/internet pit falls and cooking meals ahead of time), have your workout clothes laid out, sleep the amount you want, then wake up and go. Boom.
So I did it. And you know, it wasn't that hard to adopt. Why? Because when that alarm goes off, I get to make a choice: do I want five more minutes of sleep today, or do I want to run the Boston Marathon? Sometimes I might very well answer the former - I am no idyllic model - but most days, that choice may as well not have a first option.
Drill #2: Where in your life will you stop passively wasting time?
This week, pick a day and keep track of how you spend each five minute chunk.
-Staring into the fridge in search of lunch: 5 minutes
-Selecting the day's outfit: 10 minutes
-Buying slippers online when you should be posting your blog: ...maybe that's just me
Reflect on your list and find a combination of tweaks that saves you 30 minutes per day. That's enough for a brisk walk, reading a couple chapters in a book, making pancakes for your roommate (read: brownie points), or whatever else you "don't have enough time" to do. [By the way, this is never, ever an excuse. We all have the same emount of time, and someone else who is busier than you accomplishes more because he/she makes good decisions about what to spend time on.]
Friends, do not squander time. That is the stuff life is made of.
