Patience

Years ago, I happened to find myself on a farm tour with a group of students I was co-leading on a trip. The farmer was showing us through various rows of vegetables. We came upon a few rows of beets that were looking pretty small. He looked at them a bit disappointingly and said, “These are growing slower than expected. But s*** takes time.”

“S*** takes time.” The simplicity and delivery of the line stuck with me because things indeed do take time. This is true in sport and especially true in endurance sport. It takes time to build the endurance base. It takes time to develop speed. Building strength and durability also takes us time.

And all of that is great. We live in a world where immediacy is often valued. Quick results. Fast progress. Getting things done quicker. Endurance sports aren’t having any of that. It takes a lot of time to build aerobic base, lots of relatively slow activity. But that creates a valuable infrastructure of mitochondria and capillaries upon which you can build speed and intensity.

From there, we can continue to build both speed and endurance. One of the fun things about sport is that there are always things we can be working on and developing. We can become more efficient technically. We can get stronger. We can always improve.

So, give yourself a goal to look forward to. That long term goal. Maybe it’s a race. Maybe it’s a running route you’ve had your eye on for years. Give yourself intermediate goals to work towards too, but recognize that "Shit takes time.” It’s why we must embrace the process of training. But the reward is out there.