If you’re anything like me, you probably have the occasional weekend where your social calendar gets the best of you and all health and fitness related goals get completely derailed for 2-3 days. This happened to me last weekend – I had a wedding on both Friday and Saturday night, which led to a couple of missed workouts and a sluggish Sunday/Monday. While there is nothing wrong with this (and is likely spent having a ton of fun), managing the return to your normal routines properly can go a long way in preventing a 2-3 day “vacation” from pushing you off course for a week or longer.

After another 6 months of training, this year’s first official race is only 2 weeks away – the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. A race that is well regarded among the most famous triathlons in the world, I was lucky enough to get picked in this year’s lottery to have an opportunity to run this race, which only 30-50% of people who sign up get to do. Part of the draw of this race is a few of the unique features that make it a little different from others – the distance is a bit further than an Olympic distance triathlon with a few twists:

At the end of 2022, after finishing my Ironman training and racing, I stumbled on a book called Born to Run. A book with a lot of stories and ideas about people who run crazy distances (much longer than a marathon), specifically on how to stay injury free while doing such crazy events. This sparked an intense interest for me because I’ve had my fair share of running related issues in the past – ranging from injuries that kept me from running for weeks at a time in 2021 and a wide variety of pain and minor injuries leading up to the Ironman. Fortunately, nothing that kept me out of training or prevented me from racing, but I certainly could have been healthier throughout the year.

If you are consistently training over the course of multiple years, it is inevitable that you will eventually deal with some kind of illness that throws you out of your normal daily/weekly routine. The main issue that immediately comes up is: How should I adjust my training based on being sick? This can be a difficult situation to deal with for several reasons – you don’t want to slow down the progress you have been making, give up on the routines/habits that you’ve built, or even just because you prefer to train and don’t want to take days off.

One of the most common things that I see and hear when it comes to nutrition and diets is the desire of many to reduce, avoid, or eliminate carbs from their diet. There are certainly people out there that believe that a low carb diet is best for performance (whether athletically or otherwise), but the majority of the time that I hear this sentiment, it is related to an effort to lose weight.

Whether you’re trying to decrease, increase, or maintain your current weight, actually keeping track of your weight can prove more difficult than most would think. Fortunately, the sometimes wild variances that you may see on the scale between weigh-ins have a logical background and, therefore, can be mostly avoided if done correctly.

Over the years I have done a lot of traveling for work, ranging from as much as 80-100% travel for a full year to going on sporadic trips 1-2 times per quarter and everything in between. A good portion of this travel was well before I started to take my health and fitness seriously, so I have seen both how destructive travel can be for your nutrition and/or fitness goals – but this also means that I have found that the negative impacts of travel can be largely mitigated by taking a handful of actions while you are on the road.

When it comes to an exercise program, there are a lot of different factors to consider – programming, adherence, exercise choice, effort level, recovery, and many more. But when it comes to success within a given exercise program, many studies have shown that the number one factor that determines the success of any program is consistency. It turns out that just showing up more often than not tends to be the most important factor for success in the long term. In a lot of ways this is great news – showing up is the easiest thing to do, at least in theory. Unfortunately, when it comes to your day-to-day life, sometimes “just” showing up may seem like one of the most difficult things to do with everything that you probably have going on. Since this is something that I am constantly working on improving, here are a handful of tips and tricks that I have found helpful over the years.

Throughout the 4x4x48 Challenge last weekend, I made sure to take as many notes and track as much of my activity as I could so that I could reflect on all of the aspects of this challenge. One thing that is for sure, this was a lot more than just a physical challenge, I was arguably tested more mentally and emotionally then physically. Looking back through my plan for the challenge, there were several things that I got right and other that I got wrong:

This weekend, I will be taking on 4x4x48 Goggins Challenge. A yearly challenge put on by David Goggins, I will be running 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 consecutive hours starting on Friday night at 6pm and finishing on Sunday afternoon. The structure of the challenge is to challenge yourself both physically through running 48 miles in 48 hours and also mentally from the discomfort of never having more than ~3 hours between runs. Being short on sleep will surely become a factor towards the end of the challenge. Below is the schedule that I will be following for the weekend:

One of the most underrated tools for improvement in both athletic performance as well as just day to day health and wellness is sleep. It is likely that sleep is the single most important activity to improve regardless of the outcome you are striving towards. Getting the right amount of sleep (generally considered to be 7-9 hours per night) is associated with regulation and repair of nearly every system in the body. When it comes to athletic performance, sleep is when a significant portion of your recovery and growth occurs. Without adequate sleep, you generally shouldn’t expect to be fully recovering from your workouts, which means that will also not capture the full benefit of the work you are putting in.

One of the most impactful tools that I have learned over the years is Zone 2 training – both for the physical benefits but also the psychological that can come with it. Adding zone 2 cardio into your training is not particularly intuitive, which is the most likely reason that it isn’t a part of your current program.