Look Before You Leap, Stop Staring

It's always good to see what you're getting yourself into before you get yourself into a situation.  When you go up to a mountain river and go rock hopping, it's usually a good idea to look at where you're jumping and notice the important details such as distance, direction, how wet the rock is, and if there's a path in your mind that works.  It's not a good idea to study every minute detail of your next step, and then take that step.  The reason behind that is that since you are taking so much time with every step, you really aren't progressing at all.  You're being left behind by those that take a quick scan and push through... in fact, you're probably left behind by those that aren't even looking ahead and just jumping.  Obviously, if given enough time, you'll make it to the end, but sometimes, time is not in our favor.

I enjoy making plans.  I enjoy perfecting my plans so that I could be efficient and effective... however, if I keep spending all my time on the plans... I'm never going to get anywhere.  So I run.  I have a half-baked plan that I thought up of, and adjust it as I continue to run.  My dream is to become a professional runner, and in order to do that, I need to get faster and need to become stronger.  Obviously, my plan needs to be good, but if I don't run, then I'll be starting behind.  After my 100 mile run at the Pistol Ultra, I realized a couple things I needed to add.  The most important thing being the consistency.  Due to my coaching, my running hasn't really been consistent, but since the season was over, I was able to put more time into running, and therefore had a boost right before my race, which had positive results.

Now, I need to bring my base up and continue with what I already am doing, and train under my aerobic threshold.  Other than that, I'll tweak what I do here and there, but it'll all be about the same.  More miles means stronger legs, stronger legs means less recovery needed.  Less recovery needed means that I can be a monster.

Whether it's a business plan, running plan, lesson plan... or any other plans, the most important things is to get the main things down.  Planning for every minute detail is too much when you can make things better.  When writing an essay in middle school, teachers used to always ask for a rough draft.  Why?  Because they want us to think about it and put it down on paper.  After taking a break, or writing it down the first time, you can look at it again and make what you have down even more effective.  That's the same reason Apple always puts out their new iOS and currently, we're at iOS 7.0.4, which means that the first version wasn't good enough so they made it better a couple more times.

It's also pretty funny how we all get to tasks we don't enjoy doing.  We spend more time 'not wanting to do it' compared to what it would've taken to actually do it.  For example, I spend a good five minutes not wanting to do one set of push ups, while instead, I could have just done the push ups in a couple of minutes and saved that extra five that I spent 'not wanting to'.

Stop wasting time and do something useful.