Friday Tri: Getting Started

Make a reasonable commitment.

How much time are you going to devote to working out? Write it down in minutes. How many days a week are you going to do this? If you are moving from a couch potato, it is not reasonable to expect you will be able to do an hour of working out a day. Even walking or easy biking should be approached gently. 10 minutes the first day is plenty. 15 minutes the next day. Then 10 minutes again. Gradually go up, not increasing your speed until you have been doing an hour of exercise for at least a month. Then you can try to get faster, but only if you keep your exercise level at an hour and do not increase it.

Look for beginner’s classes at your local gym.

Ask someone at the desk for a recommendation. You don’t want to do Bodypump to begin with and many spin classes are for more advanced people, which you are not. You can find sometimes a Master’s swim team for beginners where you will get tips on improving your swimming. There are also great yoga classes and I love Pilates for beginners.

Find a guide to help you get started. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi!

A trainer is a great person to help you figure out how to use the equipment at the gym and what sorts of exercises you should be doing. If you can’t afford a trainer, maybe you can find a friend who would be willing to let you shadow him/her for a few weeks at the gym. Even better, if you find someone who is just a little better than you are and who would be willing to be your workout buddy. Then you will have someone to help show you the way and someone who can help make it funner to workout.

Reward yourself.

But don’t make the reward be something to eat, which will probably counteract your attempts to lose weight. You can reward yourself with money on a regular basis, like $1 for each hour of working out you do which you can spend on new clothes or if you workout at home in front of the TV, reward yourself with movies and TV shows you want to see.

Be accountable.

Make an achievable goal and keep track of your progress toward the goal. There are on-line communities set up to help you do this, some free, some not. But I am sometimes uncomfortable letting other people see my goals, even if I’m doing well. So I just keep a $1 lined paper notebook at my desk and write down a week’s worth of workouts on every page. I write down how long I worked out for, at what pace or how many calories I burned, and then I sometimes write notes about how I felt like “crappy,” “sick” or “great!” I like being able to look back sometimes and see how far I’ve come but I doubt anyone else would be able to figure out what my notebooks means.

Give yourself a budget.

You will need to spend some money to make it interesting and safe to keep working out. You will need to pay to get into a gym at the very least. Even if you are planning to walk (which is just fine for lots of people), you will want a place you can walk during the winter. Maybe you can go to the local mall. You can do it for a low cost, but you will probably still need some good shoes. If you have higher dreams like races, make sure that you budget them. At the beginning of every year, I try to set a budget for race fees and stick to it. We also try to stick to a budget for repairs on bikes and racing food, as well as an entertainment budget for going out to eat the night before a race or sometimes for lunch after a race. Don’t bankrupt yourself. Make goals that work with the resources you have.

Get the proper gear.

Once you have set a budget, you can go out shopping. Don’t spend all your budget on the first shopping trip. You will discover you need things along the way. But don’t nickel and dime yourself, either. Good running shoes cost money. Don’t but them at Payless or Walmart. Don’t try to get buy with a swimsuit that doesn’t fit you anymore. Don’t wear goggles that leak. You will hate your workouts if you try and then you will stop doing them.

Make realistic goals.

If you want to do a race, make sure that you set it far enough out that you can train for it. And if something happens and you get injured, have a back-up plan for another race that you could do as an alternative at a later date. Make goals that are completely depend on you and your persistence, not on other people or on wildly optimistic plans of the future. For example, a goal of finishing a race is reasonable. A goal of winning a race is not reasonable because you don’t know who else will be at the race. You can’t determine what other people will do, only what you will do. I often set a best-case scenario goal, a medium goal where things go well but not perfectly, and then a backup goal if everything goes badly but I still want to be proud of myself for trying.

Don’t give up.

If you don’t see the results you want to see, don’t just assume that the laws of the universe work for everyone else and not you. That’s just silly. We know the principles of improving your fitness and your weight. Stick with them, even when it seems like you’re not seeing results. If you need to get a different scale to help you see that even if you’re not losing weight, you’re changing your body composition, put that into the budget. Those scales are surprisingly accurate at showing changes, though not necessarily absolutely accurate. If you are working out, your fat % will go down even when your weight doesn’t. And if you want to lose weight, then don’t use exercise as an excuse to eat anything you want. Give yourself a small treat each day, but one you know has less than 100 calories like a mini candy bar, whatever works for you.

 Keep people around you who are cheering for you to succeed.

This is true in all parts of life, not just in triathlon training. I am not someone who likes to train with other people. I like solitary contemplation, but everyone needs people who are cheering. If you have someone in your life whose voice is in your mind when you are at your lowest and that voice tells you to quit, that is someone you need out of your life. Or you need them to change. If necessary, feel free to tell people appropriate comments to make like I've done on occasion with my husband and kids at Ironman. I tell them not to tell me to go faster, but to keep my pace and stay hydrated.