We have had fantastic weather this autumn – clear days, light winds, cool mornings, sunny days – it reminds me a lot of Canada in the fall (the Canadian word for autumn) when the air was so crisp and clear that if you stood on a mountain top you felt you could touch the sun. It feels almost a waste to spend the month of April training strength four times a week, doing my physiotherapy exercises seven days a week, and just gradually creeping up my aerobic activity, but I am glad I did. I am feeling way stronger than on my return from Tasmania and my painful hip has all but resolved.
It’s really easy to fall into the trap of training and somehow forget that all the training is meant to support performance. Gym numbers, even for a person like me who has been training for decades, creep up, outdoor performance is much harder to massage towards improvement because it involves more than just moving heavy things around. Proprioception, skill acquisition and retention, body control, flexibility, strength, power, endurance, mind control, these all influence actual performance. And, of course, learning is reinforced by failure. No-one gets any better at anything if they don’t risk failure. Failure in the gym can be either avoided or controlled. Failure in the natural world is much less malleable. Kayaks flip, climbers fall off, mountain bikes crash. But what is this one life for if not to find out what you can do when you try?
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