Chinese New Year 2016 – Starting Over

(If you’re keeping up with my Power Principle posts, I encourage you to read this one along with my post on that site called “Son, the universe doesn’t give a shit about you.”)

I’ve been dreading writing this post. This is my formal admission to myself that 2015, while set to be the first full year of the 364-day Challenge, was a failure.  Not the most exciting post in the world, but I have to go through the mental inventory of how shitty a year last year was.  This is going to suck.

Let’s get started by being really specific: I failed big-time.  The universe was not conspiring in my favor, nor should I have expected it to.

My 2015 objective, around which the entire 364-day Challenge and correlated ‘The Power Principle‘ sites were built, was to run a series of races culminating in the December 2015 running of the Busselton, Western Australia, IronMan triathlon.  The 364-day challenge was meant to capture all aspects of my journey toward running the race itself, while the Power Principle site was meant to capture all the lessons I was learning from the experience, written specifically for my 5-year-old son to read when he’s old enough to appreciate what I have to pass on to him.

My training was substandard, to put it mildly.  Some days were good, but others were sloppy.  My habit of telling myself, “That’s ok I can do better tomorrow and make up for what I didn’t do today” DID NOT WORK!  Failing to give 100% one day can’t be made up for by doing 110% the next.  The slippages just keep piling up.  The next thing I knew I was falling back on that self-deluding practice of thinking I could just “start over” the following Monday.

As for my writing, I wrote a handful of posts, but to say I was undisciplined in doing so would be the understatement of the century.  My procrastination on one day would flow over into the next until it got to the point where I was making excuses for myself.  “That’s ok because no one but me is reading this anyway.  No one is going to miss one post.”  But I missed the post, and I knew I did.  And it hurt.  Add to this my unwillingness to deal with my fear of starting my own websites and resulting over reliance on website design “experts” hired from eLance, and the mediocrity was overwhelming.

For someone as disciplined as I am in my day-to-day professional life, my hideous lack of discipline as it relates to the 364-day Challenge and Power Principle projects is shocking and embarrassing.

To summarize, the list of screw-ups is both long and distinguished:

1. Not having a concrete plan in place to manage my training, coaching, and nutrition
2. Not following the substandard plan I DID have
3. Failing to pay attention to my body, resulting in pushing myself through injuries which resulted in extensive down-time for recovery
4. Not setting up accountability triggers to help myself keep the habits I’d developed, and continue developing new habits necessary for the achievement of my goals
5. Not enlisting the support of others – particularly that of my wife – in my process; my belief that I could do everything myself was a severely limiting belief I failed to exorcise
6. I failed to internalize the lessons learned from my coach.

And so here I am, beginning again.  Today being day one of Chinese New Year, I figure it’s as good a time as any to start fresh, and commit heart and soul to sticking this out.

In my case, success requires learning from past mistakes and doing the right things differently.  What will that look like?

1. Converting the relationship I have with my coach from a pro-bono set up to a paid coaching engagement.  It’ gonna hurt but I need this to trigger the right level of accountability
2. Investing the time necessary to build a comprehensive training and nutrition plan, confirming that plan with an expert, and setting up the triggers necessary to reward sticking with the plan
3. Getting my health properly looked after.  I’ve found a great chiropractor for my back – a lingering problem that caused me all sorts of pre- and post-race grief last year
4. Getting my wife on board.  Her support is critical, so I’ll have to build the habit of early-morning training to address my half-hearted attempts last year to do most of my training between 5am and 7am
5. Get serious about reflecting on lessons learned.  Do this by writing in my blogs 3 to 5 days per week to make sure lessons and insights aren’t lost

So here we are – day 1.  Monday February 8th 2016 (day 1 of the Year of the Monkey).  Getting started today with the following:

• TapOut XT “Cross Core Combat” training for my core strength and stamina (DONE!)
• 750m in the pool (focusing on form and breathing in the pool) (DONE!)
• Set up schedule with my coach for next session together (DONE!)
• First blog post of the year (DONE!)

So far so good.  Let’s get a move on.