Time Management

I think my biggest challenge in hiring a coach and diving head first into training has been time management. There are a lot of workouts and typically more than one a day. And sometimes you really shouldn’t just stack ’em all up and do them back to back.

I am a bit blessed with my job — I work a lot of hours, but not necessarily all during traditional times and I generally have a lot of flexibility. Granted, sometimes that means I am doing server or network ops tasks at 9 or 10 at night… but there’s great balance on the whole.

My wife also has a demanding professional job. And together have fairly busy social schedules (sometimes) and we are building a house this year. Our kids aren’t home, but we usually have something going on with them as well. And that little granddaughter…! All that leads up to me having to be very diligent to ensure I’m not stressed out (or grumbling) about the workouts.

Thankfully, after a few weeks into this, we got organized. Mrs. AdultOnsetAthlete and I now have a shared Google calendar. On that calendar goes all of our things that we should both be aware of. Each of our workout schedules, social stuff, family stuff, work trips, you name it. I then pull that calendar into my work calendar to see my whole life at a glance.

This is priceless when planning out each week’s worth of workouts!

I generally sit down each Sunday and plan out the upcoming week in the calendar. Having our mutual stuff all in one place helps ensure that I can still be sensitive to family events. Also helps ensure that we can work to combine our trips to the gym which is always a bonus 🙂 Without this level of planning each week I suspect I would not be doing nearly as well at getting in all the workouts and would probably be a lot more frantic too.

Also priceless is the ability to link a calendar feed from TrainingPeaks.com into my Google calendar. When doing my weekly planning I can just look at the Google calendar and see what is planned for the week all in one spot. As you do the workouts and log them to Training Peaks, it updates the calendar entries to reflect when you actually did the workout.

The image there is just a little snapshot of today and tomorrow. The stuff in blue at the top is what was pulled in from TrainingPeaks.com so I know to block time out for those throughout the day. Today, as an example, has several activities so I will do one before work, one over lunch, and the rest after work.

Some weeks change from day to day based on rehab and health so I have to remember to keep on top of things but generally I do a quick check at the end of the day to ensure I’m properly planning for tomorrow and that minimizes surprises.