Resistance Training

You have to lean in when the work gets hard.

The first time I thought about this concept was in high school track. I ran cross country in high school and, while I wasn't winning any races in 6A, I was decent and I worked hard at it. I clocked a handful of sub-5-minute miles and sub-17-minute 5k's. Little brag on younger me.

High school boys 6A cross-country in Alabama in the late 90's was more competitive than you might think and we were cranking out pretty difficult workouts on a regular basis. One of everyone's least favorite workouts was 400-meter repeats. On our team, we would do a couple of miles easy to warm up, 12 400s at a sub-:60 pace, and then a couple of miles to cool down. Just to put this in perspective, a 57-second 400 is 3:48 mile pace. And we would do 12 of those. Feels crazy when I think about it now.

The easy thing (well, "easy" for a fit 17-year-old) was to go out and run 2 or 3 fast 400's. After 4 you're pretty smoked. After 5, you're not only physically smoked, but you are also realizing that you aren't even halfway done yet. 

That's when your brain starts to do funny things. It starts to wander to all the things it would rather be doing: eating chicken nuggets, or playing video games, or just sleeping. It starts to feed you all the reasons for you to stop. What's the point of all these 400's anyway? Your legs are kind of hurting.

I remember the first time I pushed back on that feeling. It was a 400-meter repeat workout and I was really in a hole around the 5th one. I almost visualized my brain becoming "unhooked" from the present moment, disconnecting me from where I was and what I was doing. I remember struggling really hard to hook my brain back into what I was doing, where I was. To not escape my discomfort. 

There was a lot of resistance. It was like trying to hook two things together that each had powerful bands pulling them in different directions. The mental act of holding those two things together, the uncomfortable moment and my focus, was much more difficult than the actual running.

But I started to notice that, when I could successfully do this, I got way more out of the work I was putting in. My body could actually learn the lessons about being faster and stronger and having more endurance which was the intention of those workouts.

This transferred to a bunch of other areas of my life as well. Intentionality and focus are, unsurprisingly, universally helpful practices. When I was learning music and how to play an instrument, staying engaged through the parts that were uncomfortable yielded the most progress. Focusing on a pattern or a passage that gave me trouble was much more productive than playing the handful of things I was already comfortable with.

Same with academics, or work, or relationships, or anything. Staying focused and present during the most uncomfortable parts has always yielded the most growth.

It is the ultimate resistance training.

(Featured art is "Sprint" by MelaniPykeArt)