In our high-speed instant-gratification oriented culture, it’s hard to fathom how long it takes to get REALLY good at something. While I’m not fully an advocate of the 10,000 hour rule, I do think that it puts into perspective the amount of time needed to make truly big gains to your performance. If you train for 1,000 hours/year (3 hours/day), it will take you ten years to get to 10,000 hours. In the same vein, if you train for 10 hours/week for three months, you’ve done 120 hours. That’s juuuust about 1% of what it takes to see ALL the gains.
Your current job is a pretty good analogy to this time course. You might be pretty good at it, but how long did it take for you to get there? Chances are that after three (480 hours) or six (960 hours) months you were just ok, but after a couple years (3840 hours) you were pretty proud of your abilities.
When working with athletes, things get really exciting for me around 1000-2000 hours of good training. This is between two to four years in, when athletes start realizing they’ve changed in fundamental ways. They’re able to run at their old race pace with their mouths closed. They’re able to SMASH people who used to beat them. They’re able to handle their old epic adventure days as just another Sunday.
Some athletes understand this time course, some don’t. Many also don’t understand the key part of this: In order to train for a long time, training must be sustainable. This means that you can’t skip work, piss off your husband, underfuel, or take any other number of shortcuts to getting in those hours. “Good training” is sustainable training.
You have to build a system in your world where you can get in your hours of practice each week without it causing undue stress on your life outside of training. This doesn’t mean that only pro athletes can train well, it means you need to take steps and learn skills to be able to fit training in with your life. You might need to spend less time on social media, communicate better with your spouse, or develop better sleep hygiene. All of these things are skills you can use to build yourself more time to train without increasing stress. For many athletes, training is the framework that they use to make their whole life more organized and lower stress.
Importantly, the opposite is equally true: If your training is unsustainable, you won’t make big gains! If you can only handle your training process for three months, whether for physical, psychological, or lifestyle reasons, then you aren’t going to make much progress. We see athletes cram like this all the time. They train unsustainably for three months for their summer or winter race, and then it takes at least three months (if not six to nine months) to get healthy and back to wanting to actually train. If you’re past 25 years old, three months of hard training followed by three months off will almost certainly result in decreasing performance over time.
