As a nineteen year old, a man I highly revered once asked me, “How do you eat an elephant?” - I pondered this question for a whole two milliseconds before rather excitedly blurting out, “With a knife and fork!”. To this day, I still hold on to the fact that my answer was completely and totally correct, but I confess, I may have missed the meaning of the question as it was purposed. Upon some reflection, and being told that I was an idiot, I realized what he was asking; How do you conquer huge tasks? Let’s revisit the elephant analogy. If you were to eat an elephant, it would be completely impossible to take one massive bite and be done with it. It’s simply too much, and if you were to engorge yourself to that extent, you would surely die of elephantiasis! See what I did there? So how do we approach this mammoth’s hairless cousin? The answer is, “one bite at a time.”
It makes logical sense doesn’t it? Taking a large task, and shrinking it into small, manageable pieces? So why don’t we do this with training? Too often, I see people complaining about how they aren’t getting where they want to be through their training and I see them running around like a chicken whose head has been cut off. These complaints range from his or her weight being lifted, physical appearance, or even the current skills he or she is working on. It’s important to know, that trying to make everything better at once, instantaneously, will never work. But today, let’s look even smaller than our long term goals. How do we break up big workouts, that look scary, and kick our asses? The answer to this question is mental partitioning.
For our example today, let’s use the workout named after a legendary American hero, Murph. For those of you who don’t know what that workout is, it is as follows:
While wearing a 20lb weight vest:
Run 1 mile
100 pull- ups
200 push-ups
300 squats
Run 1 mile
Now, even looking at that, my heart races, out of excitement, and because of the known agony this workout brings. If we let the emotions of such a large task get into our heads, it will crush us. In essence, if you think about this workout as a whole, you’re already at a disadvantage. Here’s a better strategy. Make every task in this workout it’s own goal, and only think about what you’re doing at the time. 100 pull-ups, how about focus on each set of ten? Same thing with the push-ups and squats. Maybe we even break it into two at a time. In fact, I tend to count my reps like I would count bars of music (1-2, 2-2, 3-2, 4-2, 5-2). Counting in the manner not only keeps me organized, so I don’t lose count, but it breaks what could be a daunting set of ten pushups halfway through murph, into five easy sets of two. Now, to be clear, it doesn’t mean I’m resting between every two reps(unless I’m gassed), but it does mean that I’m only thinking about two at one time. Which keeps me focused, and relaxed.
Here’s the key point. This mindset can be applied to anything. Partitioning work is, in itself, the easiest way to be successful. If you’ve got a paper to write, and you’re thinking about the research, the writing, your thesis, and the rubric all at once, you’re screwed. Start small, create a thesis, research your thesis, build your paper, and then make sure you have hit every detail on your rubric. Small adjustments, are easy, and no one has ever run a marathon by just doing the 26th mile.
