Crucial Tactic: Schedule Your Week in Advance
Mount Rainier National Park
Have you ever reached the end of a week and wondered where the time went? You thought you'd have so much time to do all of the chores on your todo list, get ahead on work, reserve some time to socialize with friends, get outside and explore the mountains, and oh, you were convinced you'd finally have time to start a meditation practice, too.
And then at the end of the week, you realize that somehow you only checked off two items on your list of chores while adding four more, you only barely kept up with work, you canceled a social engagement, only got outside three times, and meditation? Who the fuck has time for that?
The crucial tactic that can allow you to avoid this feeling of defeat at the end of the week, while circumventing other obstacles, is to think about the entire week as a single unit and then schedule your week in advance. In this article, I'll specifically discuss the Outside 365 practice, but this could apply to several different aspects of your life.
I find that when I plan my Outside 365 week in advance, it leads to at least three huge benefits:
I avoid overtraining
I plan ahead and work around major scheduling challenges
I block out time to make Outside 365 a priority
Let's dive into each one of these points.
Avoid Overtraining
Physical overtraining can cause several different types of negative consequences. It could be as simple as draining your battery so low that you don't have the motivation to get up and get out the door. It could be as simple as sore muscles from excessive use.
Or the consequences could be so much worse.
Overtraining can lead to overuse injuries that can completely derail your Outside 365 journey. It can also lead to chronic fatigue, which has derailed the careers of some of the world's top endurance athletes. Toeing the line of overtraining and pushing your body to the point of breakdown is not worth it, even for the goal of getting outside to connect with nature on a daily basis.
Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico
Avoiding overtraining begins by listening to the signals that your body sends you. To gather this feedback, ask yourself questions like, "how sore am I from the previous days' workouts?" "What type of soreness am I feeling right now?" Not all types of soreness are created equal. If you're experiencing mild muscle soreness from exertion, that's a completely different type of feedback than soreness from a joint or ligament. Mild muscle soreness might be acceptable, while intense soreness from your knee or hip probably isn't.
Other feedback cues can be more difficult to read. These often pertain to your energy and motivation levels. Do you jump out of bed with energy in the morning, or do you take an hour to motivate yourself to roll out of bed? Do you hit the trail as soon as possible and charge up the climbs, or are you plodding your way up the mountain? Do you feel drained of energy when you even think about social commitments, work, or going exploring? How are your emotions feeling—happy, depressed, or somewhere in between?
I know that personally, if I haven't been listening to the subtle cues or have been pushing too hard, I can hit mental and emotional burnout in a hurry. It seems like the end of every summer is always accompanied by at least one weekend where I can't motivate myself to get out for a big adventure in the mountains because I'm just too burned out after pushing hard to explore new trails and tackle big adventures for months on end.
To help head off these woes in advance, here's how I try to schedule my week to avoid overtraining.
During the average week, I plan to go hard on the weekend, with big efforts on both Saturday and Sunday. If I know I'm going to be going hard two days in a row, the following day has to be a 1-mile minimum rest day. It wouldn't hurt if Friday was a rest day, too.
But of course, I want to get out and ride during the week. Based on a tough weekend, it makes the most sense for Tuesday and Thursday to be hard days, and Wednesday to be a rest day.
My average week while working behind the computer during the peak summer season might end up looking something like this:
Saturday: 6-8 hour mountain bike ride
Sunday: 4-hour hike
Monday: 1-mile walk
Tuesday: 2-hour mountain bike ride
Wednesday: 1-mile walk
Thursday: 2-hour mountain bike ride
Friday: 45-minute standup paddleboard
Take note of a few important features of this schedule.
Even though I'm stacking two big back-to-back efforts on the weekend, I'm taking time off and doing a different sport the day before (Friday) and I just do my minimum on the day after (Monday). During the week, I keep moving and riding, but don't do huge efforts. If possible, I split the two mid-week rides with a rest day on Wednesday.
Mixing in different sports may be the most crucial tactic of all. Photo location: Sandpoint, Idaho
But what if I'm on a work trip and in full-on riding mode? That gets a bit more difficult. If I'm tackling 3-6 hour mountain bike rides day after day after day, I try to break my week and month apart into chunks. For instance, at the time of this writing, I just completed an intense 3-week media trip with huge goals of dozens of trails that needed to be documented. So, my normal rhythm consisted of riding 3 or 4 days straight, about 2-6 hours per day (dependent on the length of the trail). Then, I'd take a day off and do a 1-mile minimum, then do another 3-4 days straight. And then I'd repeat that schedule for 3-5 weeks straight.
After about 4 weeks of such a schedule, I started feeling both the physical and emotional signs of burnout, so I resolved to spend several days at my 1-mile minimum, and also mix in more hiking and paddling. Taking a few days off to recover then sets me up to dive back into more aggressive efforts soon, instead of digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole that I can't climb out of.
With a bit of forethought into what the week holds, it's easy to schedule enough rest to keep your body moving forward and the adventures rolling on!
Plan Ahead to Avoid Major Scheduling Challenges
Fitting in a mile on a long travel day outside of Taos, New Mexico
While my number one priority when planning my week ahead is to avoid overtraining and burnout, I also employ this tactic to avoid major scheduling challenges. The most time-intensive scheduling challenges can vary dramatically from person to person, but for me, they most often take the forms of:
Intense travel plans, ex. international flight
Work commitments, ex. project deadline
Social commitments, ex. party or social event
If I know that I have one of these big scheduling challenges coming down the pipeline, I try to do a few different things:
I try to schedule my 1-mile minimum days on the days where I have time-intensive obligations, like an international flight. This might mean shifting my big efforts to the day before or the day after in the weekly example schedule shared above.
I plan when on the challenging days I'll complete my Outside 365 goal instead of leaving it up to chance. Oftentimes, the best time to ensure the mile gets done is to knock it out in the morning, even if I have to wake up at 2am to get it in before a flight. Or if I'm traveling halfway around the planet and my travel might take over a full day, I might try to schedule a long enough layover that I can pop out of the airport, walk a couple of miles, then pop back in to make the next leg of my flight.
If I have social commitments, such as visiting family over a holiday, I try to communicate when I'm going to accomplish my Outside 365 goal. It might say something like, "hey, I know we're not planning to have Thanksgiving Dinner until 4pm. I'm going to sneak out for a road bike ride in the morning, but I'll be back by noon to help with meal prep."
Above all, I commit to accomplishing Outside 365 no matter what the obstacle. I don't give a shit if my extended family might look at me strange for going for a walk in a snowstorm on Christmas day—I do it anyway.
Block Out Time to Make Outside 365 a Priority
Red River, New Mexico
When it comes to scheduling challenges, looking at your week ahead, and trying to figure out when to accomplish your Outside 365 goal, the true power move is to block out time to make Outside 365 the priority. Instead of working Outside 365 around the things in your schedule (like in the example above), you build your schedule around your planned adventure time.
What does this look like in practice?
During my normal workweek, every single Saturday is an adventure day. Every single one. If I get a social invitation on a Saturday that doesn't involve going on an adventure in the mountains, the answer is "no." My number one priority is adventure and immersing myself in nature, and while I do place value on socializing and community, if that socializing distracts from my number one priority, then it doesn't make the cut.
There are a few ways to deal with conflicting values and obligations. One is to combine socializing with adventure by investing in friends who are game to join you on your normal hikes or mountain bike rides. Another way is to reserve a few time blocks during the week, like Sunday afternoons or Thursday evenings, for social events.
But the true superpower is using your ability to say "no."
Have a weekend rock climbing trip planned, and someone invites you to their graduation party? Say "no."
Have a vacation scheduled, and your boss wants you to get a last-minute project done? Say "no."
Basically, does anything come up that might interfere with your planned adventure? You can always say "no" to it.
Saying "no" and making your adventure time the number one priority of your week, your month, and your life is the true power move that will help you succeed at the Outside 365 lifestyle. When you begin to re-frame your vision of the world with adventure first and everything else second, your life will completely transform.
And it all starts by scheduling your week in advance.
Even More Crucial Tactics
Check out the other installments in the Crucial Tactics series here:
