As mountaineers and endurance athletes, we might think we're the healthiest people alive. But the truth is, so many of us focus on fitness at the expense of our health. You probably know athletes who are stressed, bloated, hating their bodies, sleep deprived, addicted to their diet trackers ... and just not loving the whole mountaineering training journey! Or maybe that person is you.

Well, on today's episode, we are going to set all that on fire and burn it up for good. I'm going to show you 10 healthy habits that helped me up-level my endurance training game. And they can help you too!

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Transcript

As mountaineers and endurance athletes, we might think we're the healthiest people in the world. But the truth is, so many of us focus on fitness at the expense of our health.

If you think about it, you probably know an athlete who is stressed out bloated, hating their body, sleep deprived, addicted to their diet tracker and just not loving the whole journey of being in training.

Or maybe that person is you?

Well, on today's episode, we are going to set all of that on fire. I'm going to share 10 healthy habits that helped me up-level my endurance training game, and they can help you too.

Is the universe calling?

So hello, it's Sarah, welcome to the program. I think it's so interesting that I'm recording this particular episode at the time I am.

If you're listening to this in the future, right now, it's May 2020. We are all dealing with a pandemic. Many of us are not able to do the workouts that we normally do. We're not able to go on the training hikes we think we should be going on and right now.

The whole premise of Expectation Hangover is that denied expectations are often the universe knocking. They're telling us maybe we're on the wrong path. And instead of trying to find new ways to get what we want, we need to pivot and get what we need.

So, in a fitness context, what this looks like… I think in the in the regular time, a lot of us are very obsessed with our fitness. We spend a lot of time thinking about it. And our health sometimes goes by the wayside. We often stop focusing on some of these other things we're going to talk about today that are important.

And really what the pandemic is doing is it's really knocking and telling us, “Hey, you can no longer do that to your body.” You're just gonna have such a happier mountaineering career if you can really become the whole package. Not just someone who is fit but someone who is also healthy.

Fitness is not health

A lot of times we equate being fit with being healthy, but it's just not true. As I described in the intro, there are so many different ways that fit people are unhealthy. So I think it's really important to pause. The great thing about the pandemic is it's forcing us all to pause, and just really talk about, beyond fitness, some of these other things that are really important in life.

And I would also put to you that it's impossible to be a fit person and reach your full potential in your sports if you are not healthy in all the other ways as well.

The way that this has looked for me … I started out as a mountaineer (this is obviously a mountaineering fitness podcast). And during my mountaineering life, I was a little younger. I was in my 30s, early 40s. And I think I was able to get away with not always being good to myself as far as sleep, as far as nutrition, as far as just wanting to live life and burn the candle on both ends.

And what I realize as I'm moving into my mid 40s, and also since I started ultra running, is that it's impossible and unsustainable to live that way. It really forced me to take a look at my health and my habits — and not just the obvious things like diet and nutrition, but ..

• Who's in my life?

• Who am I listening to?

• What am I saying yes to that I really want to say no to?

And it really just forced me to have my own back in all situations. Which has been amazing and transformative for my whole life and not just for my fitness career, although my fitness is better than it's ever been.

Health makes great quarantine training

So, without further discussion, let's dive into the 10 habits I really wants you to focus on during your training in addition to being fit.

And if you're in a place during quarantine, where it's hard to exercise where you can't go out and do the training hikes that you would like to be doing, this is where I want you to put your focus.

This is training. If you can dial this in, the fitness stuff gets a lot easier and you will do much better. So number one habit … this one is gonna be a groaner, because you've probably had it said to you so many times, but it's

1. Get enough sleep — 8 to 10 hours a night.

So important. And I post about this a lot on my Instagram, just because I hear so much from people who are not sleeping. Whenever they get into endurance training, which takes a lot of time, one of the areas where they kind of borrow time from is their sleep.

And so I'm always talking to people about this. I'm like, hey, the whole premise of endurance training is that you stress your body and strain it, and then you have to let it rest and repair. The rest and repair part is part of the process that you cannot skip.

And what it does when you rest and repair is you actually get a little bit stronger. Then you're ready to go out and do another workout, tear yourself up a little, rest and recover, get even stronger. You can see how that cycle builds and builds. That's the training effect.

If you just exercise all the time and don't allow for rest and repair, you're going to hit a wall. You're not going to be able to go further and you're gonna start going backwards. That's overtraining syndrome. Even before you get to the point of overtraining syndrome, you're gonna have plateaus in your performance, you're not gonna like the results.

So I'm very passionate about this. I'm always posting about this. And very often, I will get someone kind of cute that's like, “Well, I do all these amazing things. And I only sleep three hours a night. So neener.”

And I always imagine when they're posting that they are a maybe not doing some of the things we're doing with this mountaineering training. And also that maybe they're 19 years old, and someday they're gonna be 44 and think about this and be like, “Oh, my god, Sarah was right.”

But even if you're younger, you still need the sleep, you still need to allow your body to recover. You still need to make the training effect work for you. So if you can dial this in when you're young …

I know when you’re young, there are so many pressures to stay up late. I remember being in college and just loving the nightlife and wishing I could reverse my sleep cycle so I could sleep all day and be up all night. I was crazy. Now when I think about that, I'm like, “What was I thinking?” But it's true.

So a couple tips for getting a good night's sleep:

Number one, 8 to 10 hours is really ideal. At least eight. Some people really claim that they need less. But believe me, when you're in training, I encourage you to at least try getting a bit more and see how that feels for you. You might be surprised. You might realize that you've been a bit sleep deprived all this time.

Number two, I think it's really important to allow yourself to wake up naturally without an alarm. And why that is, is because as you're sleeping, your body's going through different sleep cycles. You go deeper, you go lighter, different things happen at different parts of the cycle.

And the cycles are different. They get deeper and deeper through the night. It's actually during the last couple sleep cycles of the night that your body releases the hormones that promote recovery and rebuilding of your tissues that you've damaged through training. So things like human growth hormone, testosterone, these all get released, in that really deep early morning sleep that you may notice yourself experiencing sometimes.

And if you interrupt that process by waking with an alarm, you're not getting as much of a dose of that.

This dose gets more and more important as you get older, because you actually make fewer hormones. So it's a great habit to start when you're young. It's crucial for those of you who are in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s who are trying to maintain your athletic performance. This is really important that you allow yourself to wake up naturally. No alarm.

So sleeping number one. Number two …

2. Let go of rigid diets

Diet hang-ups

I think as mountaineers — as endurance athletes in general — there's so much crappy diet advice pushed towards us. We're told that we should be on paleo, that we should be on keto, that we should be on … just name fad-diet-that's-supposed-to-improve-your-performance of the month.

And we're also told it's really, really crucially important what kind of food we eat. Like it has to be super clean. It has to be organic. It has to be this, it has to be that. So there's so much noise in our brains, I think, about our food and what we should be eating.

And another thing we get hung up on is fitness trackers. I don't want to hate on fitness trackers. I think they work for some people. I have a friend who's a bodybuilder, and I think she has logged into My Fitness Pal like 400 days in a row and checked all her food, and it works for her. But for a lot of us, it does become kind of an obsession, kind of a time waster, something to stress over, something to beat ourselves up over.

And I can totally relate to all of those. I am someone who, my whole life, I had a butt and boobs when I was 11. I always felt overweight. I always felt so different, so I started dieting and restricting food in middle school. And I noticed that it worked, so that pattern got reinforced. It's always been my go-to whenever anything's not working in my workouts — or in life — to tinker with my diet and try to be a perfectionist about it.

And it's a giant time waster. It doesn't honestly really work that well, for reasons we'll get into in another episode.

The best diets are simple

So letting go of rigid eating patterns, rigid diets, it's hard. But I want to put to you that the best diet that you could possibly eat is something that is simple and sustainable.

One of the reasons people go on these very strict diets, have results initially, and then aren't able to sustain them … it’s because it’s too much of a burden for your mind.

And if you think about it, you're already having to worry about training, worry about fitness. Why make the food part hard on top of it?

So what I want you to do instead is really write down all the rules that you might be following. Like, what do you think you have to do with your diet?

And then I want you to debunk all of those. If your rule is, “I can't eat a lot of carbs, because they'll make me fat,” talk about why you should eat a lot of carbs.

(And there's actually… if you're not sure what the answer is, hop on the internet. And look, there's actually, especially for endurance athletes, quite a few benefits from having a high carb diet.)

So go ahead and just go through all the rules you think you have to have and then debunk them. And then really sit in that place of spaciousness and freedom, and think about what you're going to do instead with your food.

So number two, letting go of rigid diets and eating rules. I think it's so important. Number three, this one might sound crazy. But one thing that's a game changer for a lot of endurance athletes is …

3. Eat enough.

If you've been someone who has always been worried about weight, and maybe you're doing this mountaineering journey in order to lose some weight, I think that's a great thing. It's a great motivator.

The hard part for you is going to be to accept the fact that whenever you're training hard, you have to eat more more than you normally would. And it's going to feel very difficult. And a lot of people don't do it.

I think, they're not mountaineers, but if you look at other endurance athletes, particularly college age women who are participating in distance running, a lot of them are not eating enough. About a third of them are having trouble with their period or losing bone density at that young age. And that's really scary.

It just drives home, I think, how it's so important in our sport to make sure that we're eating enough. This is something I've talked about with my coach, who's worked with lots and lots of ultra runners and endurance athletes. And she talks about how it's important to eat enough, because if your body suspects there’s scarcity.. if it's thinking that it might starve even though your mind knows that you won't, your body doesn't know that, and what it will do is hold on to weight.

It'll actually create hormones that make you store more fat. And you can be exercising so hard, and your body is just holding on to that fat for dear life. It's also making you burn energy from other sources in order to keep that fat.

So it's so important that you feed yourself enough. Really nurture yourself, listen to your body, and eat when you're hungry. I think if you have weight loss goals, one thing that's really important to do is to make sure that you're eating enough before you start trying to cut back.

So, eating enough … it sounds crazy, but always make sure that you are fueling yourself for the things that you want to do for this mountaineering training.

4. Trust your body to know how it should look.

I know when I first started ultra running, I was immediately on the horn to the coach. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I just started doing all the workouts. I feel amazing. And I'm gaining weight. Like what the cheese balls does this mean?”

And she talked to me about all the different reasons that might be. But rather than list them here, one thing that it's important to accept is that everybody's body is going to react differently to exercise. And your body, whenever it's ready to climb the mountain, may not look how you're picturing it's going to look.

I think a lot of us buy into the marketing that mountain climbers have 6% body fat, they're tall, they're lean, and they're very, very thin. And honestly, when you get out there and start doing your sport, you're gonna see that it's just not true. There are people of all sizes that you will see climbing your mountain, whether it's a fourteener in Colorado, whether it's Mount Rainier, whether it's some high-altitude summit down in South America or over in Asia, all the bodies are there.

And I always think it's so fascinating and so awesome to see such body diversity out there. It's something that I think a lot of us don't imagine if we haven't done it yet. We're sitting at home, we're imagining all the people out there will be super skinny, super lean, and it's just not true.

Trusting your body can be scary

So to give you an example, right now, I'm doing my ultra running training. I'm doing my best to fuel enough. I'm doing really well following my program. And I don't know what the hell's going on with my body.

I'm 10 pounds heavier than when I started. I got a lot of muscle. But there are also things like my stomach is flatter, like my thighs don't rub together.

Everything is shifting around and being where it's supposed to be. And it's terrifying to just trust in that process and be like, “Hey, body, just do what you're gonna do. I'm gonna do the training, I'm gonna eat healthy and get lots of sleep, and you do what you're gonna do.”

And the things it's doing are scary to me, but I trust that it's all for the greater good. In September, if everything works out, I'm going to have to run 10,000 feet up in the mountains straight up. And I don't know that you can do that with no muscle on your butt.

So I'm just sitting here trying to trust the process and be like, “Body, whatever you do, I love you, and it's okay. So that's actually a really great place to be that takes a lot of noise and stress out of my brain.

5. Have your own back, no matter what

If you're deep into mountaineering training, or even if you're just getting started, you're probably realizing that this shit takes a lot of time.

It's demanding on your time, you have to balance one more thing. On top of work, kids, family, friends, trying to be a good human being, you now have to balance training time, which can be 10, 12, 15 hours a week, depending on what you're getting ready for.

And I know whenever I start ramping up my training, it immediately highlights all the things in my life I'm doing that really aren't serving me. The people I'm saying yes to going out to dinner with because I feel like I don't want to disappoint them by saying no.

Volunteer commitments … I actually last year slashed like a huge volunteer commitment, and I felt so horrible doing it. I debated for months and just suffered over whether I should quit this position with a volunteer organization that had a fair amount of responsibility. And I just came up with all the ways I was letting people down.

I finally bit the bullet and did it. And I can't tell you how different my life is. I was wish I had trusted myself earlier to just say, “You know, I know what's the most important thing for me. I know what I need. I know some ways that being in this position is not really moving me towards the goals I would have hoped I was moving toward.”

And bam, it was gone. And I just can't describe the sense of lightness to you. It's like everything in my universe shifted for the better.

So really look at what you're afraid to give up. It takes some courage sometimes to really get honest with yourself about people, about relationships, that really are no longer serving you. About goals you may have set, but your priorities have changed.

But I really want you to have the courage go into that place and just prune away — or burn away, if you like that metaphor better — all the stuff that is getting in the way, that's no longer serving you, that's not really in your highest excitement.

Just go in there and set the transforming fire on all those things that aren't serving you. Have your own back, no matter what, make the right decisions for yourself. Stop worrying about what other people think or the obligations that you feel like you have.

Like, obviously, you're going to have some obligations to work, to kids, to family. But really focus on the ones that are the most important.

6. Treat yourself to some foam rolling

A lot of you probably know what that is. But if you don't, it's actually a technique called myofascial release where you use a rigid foam roller to work out knots in your connective tissue tension in your muscles.

And for endurance training, I think it's indispensable. It doesn't have a ton of research behind it. So I was — you probably noticed I'm very much a science person — I was a little hesitant to warm up to it.

But whenever I was really struggling with tension in my hips, rehabilitating a sprained ankle — that whole leg had soreness and contractures and just nastiness in it that I could feel when I was running. And I decided to give it a try.

And now I am a convert. I love foam rolling. And I love to do my whole body, if not every day, at least every couple of days.

So definitely check it out. Give it a try. See if it totally transforms the way your body feels.

7. Feel uncomfortable feelings

A lot of us go through life thinking we should be happy all the time. And then when we're not happy — when we're angry, sad, frustrated, depressed, especially right now during quarantine — we really turn to behaviors that numb us.

So for some people, that might look like working more than normal. For some people, it could be gambling, it could be overeating. For me, it tends to be alcohol. I've written a lot on the blog about my struggles with alcohol. And in quarantine, this is something I've had to really go back to the drawing board and start working extra hard to manage my mind around.

But really, what it all comes down to, all of these numbing habits really stem from the fact that we're not willing to really be with all of our feelings — the good, the bad.

And if you think about it, that's kind of sad, because feelings are what make us human. If you were just happy as shit all the time, then feeling happy… would it be special? You'll just be like, “Yeah, I'm happy. Woot.” And having that contrast in life is so important. It allows us to live more deeply.

It also allows us to really see the things in our life that we need to maybe change. So if you always drink when you're with certain people, because they annoy you and you don't want to be around them, and drinking makes them tolerable. What if you just weren't around them? Maybe that's the universe knocking telling you these are people that you need to spend less time with.

I think being willing to feel feelings also makes it easier to eat a healthy diet, which is so important during training. To choose foods that maybe they don't give you a big dopamine hit, like refined carbohydrates tend to do, but they're healthy foods for you.

Eating things like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, salads, beans ... it's not as exciting. But if you're not emotionally eating, you're going to be able to make much better food choices.

8. Learn how to cook (Fast)

This completely changed my life as an athlete. I was really inspired to do this by Shalene Flanagan. She is the first woman in 40 years to win the New York City Marathon. And she has said that learning how to cook was one of the things that completely changed her running career. She doesn't believe that she would be where she is today if she wasn't cooking her own food and eating a super nutrient rich diet.

And I'm going to put in parentheses learning to cook fast. Because back before I learned to cook fast, I would occasionally make food at home. And I would get these recipes that had like 20 ingredients, so they took hours to make.

They were so time consuming. And I'm like, Wow, cooking sucks. I can't do this. I'd rather just live on frozen stuff I can pop in the microwave are toast with peanut butter.

And quarantine is such a great time to learn how to cook, to teach your kids how to cook, to experiment with new things. So if you're not someone who normally cooks, maybe this can be your quarantine project.

9. Find your community.

I think for a lot of us, when we decide to climb a mountain, it's hard because the other people in our life don't understand.

At best, they're kind of like, “Wow, that's cool. Like, I have no idea what you're doing.”

And at worst, they can be kind of sabotaging. Because sometimes, if you play a role in someone's life where they are used to you being passive, not making decisions, they're used to you failing, they're used to being the strong one who takes care of you… it can be very threatening when you step out of that role and start your mountaineering journey.

And then there's the training, which takes so much time. Unless you’re lucky enough to have lots of mountaineering friends, there's probably no one else you know who’s working out as hard as you are.

So I think one thing that's a game changer is really finding your community. And you can totally do this during the pandemic.

Where to find your people

There are lots of amazing mountaineering groups online. I know I'm part of Colorado Mountain Club. And while they're not leading hikes right now, they have a lot of online events. They're really trying to hold the community together.

And I daresay there are probably a lot of people participating that maybe I have never seen before. They aren't going on the hikes I go on. But I can see them now that we've taken things digital, which is kind of fun.

The same thing for meetup groups. I've seen a lot of my hiking meetups are holding [Zoom] happy hours. People are getting together and talking, planning trips for the after-time … or maybe this summer if things loosen up a bit.

So don't be afraid to get out there and really meet your people. Even right now. I think it's so much fun. It's something you can do. It's a great way, if you're feeling a little bit isolated during quarantine, to break through that.

Where do you look? I'll put a link to a blog post in the show notes with some of my best suggestions. Some of those will be more relevant than others right now during quarantine. But some of them might be very relevant, and they'll give you a starting place.

And I think once you find one place, you can just ask people, and they will definitely have other ideas of where you can meet like-minded people.

And it's possible that once we all get out of quarantine, your mountaineering, training, and hiking, life will just be so much more rich, because you've had the time to really focus on establishing new relationships, finding communities. It'll be so much fun.

And then finally, lucky last …

10. have fun

What happens sometimes is we decide we're going to climb a mountain. Oh my gosh, we have a goal! It's so cool.

And then, as the reality kind of sets in, all of our baggage starts like dumping on top of us, and it starts to feel very heavy.

We realize that getting in shape for this is not going to be easy, and that some of our friends don't understand or approve. It can feel lonely and like it's taking a lot of time away from other things. We have to reconfigure our whole life.

And maybe stuff from our past comes up. I know when I was going to high-altitude mountaineering school, it just brought up all the restrictive eating patterns and hatred of my body that I felt back in high school and college. I had never felt that way as an adult. But just being in that community and hearing some of the messages from some of the people, that was hard.

Another thing to think about: this training thing takes like four to six months minimum. It's not something that happens overnight. It's something that in order to be successful, you have to stick with for a long time.

And I think that there are people who kind of gut it out. They're very determined. They're like, come hell or high water, I'm gonna climb this mountain. They finally get to the top, but it's at such a terrible cost, because they really do not enjoy the journey at all.

She who has the most fun always wins

And you can contrast that with people who really have fun training. They find the right people that make them feel good and have a good time going out for training hikes with them.

They really enjoy learning to cook and the whole process of getting to know yourself better. So they really appreciate the parts where you get rid of all the people and commitments that are no longer serving you.

They just come out of this experience so much healthier and happier, and it doesn't even matter at that point if they get to the top or not. They've just had such an amazing journey that there's tons that they're gonna take from this.

Training for climbs that might not happen

And I think this is especially important in quarantine, because we don't know what's going to happen. I have two 50-mile races scheduled. One’s in August, and one’s in September. And I look at them and I'm like, Is the August one gonna go off, because in September we'll have a second wave of coronavirus? And then I'm like, No probably August won't go off because we'll still be under quarantine, and then September will work.

And honestly, maybe neither of them might work out. I don't know.

But we're all in situations like that right now. And it's so important, so extra important, to just really enjoy the journey. To have a really good “why” for why you're doing all this crap and really know that it's going to be worth it.

If you can do that now, you can do that forever. It's a skill that you can take with you for all the trips of your life. Hopefully there will be many. And it's something that no one can take away from you, and that the Coronavirus can't take away from you.

So, always go out there having fun.

If it won’t be fun, just say no

It's okay to say no to things that you don't think will be fun. I think that's a really important part of having your own back.

And I had an example of this. Last year, I had some friends who were doing Denali. They're like, “Hey Sarah, come on. Do it with us. It's gonna be so much fun.”

And when I thought about it, I knew it would be good for my career and good for making money and good for many things. But I just wasn't… I would be doing it from a place of scarcity, a place of hustling and scrambling. And not from a place of excitement, like, Holy shit. I'm gonna do Denali. That's so cool.

Which I think in order to do something that big, you've really got to be coming from a place of joy, excitement, and thinking this is going to be the coolest thing you've ever done. Because it's so much training. It's a lot to get through.

So, yeah, I said no to that. And I think that was actually a good decision. And it's totally possible I'll say yes to it sometime in the future. Right at that time was just not my time, and that's totally okay too.

Conclusion

So guys, I really hope this has been helpful. We've gone over 10 healthy habits that can really up level your training, your fitness.

You really need all of these things in order to reach your peak potential. It's not just about the fitness, it's about becoming the whole package.

Because when you're climbing a mountain, as we've talked about, you have to become a totally different person. And if you just go to the gym and lift, and then go for a training hike, it's not going to do it. There's so much more that needs to go into it.

So hopefully this has given you a glimpse of what the big picture can look like. And I've really enjoyed talking to you this week. If you have ideas for topics you want to hear about on the pod, definitely get in touch. And I will talk to you next week. Take care.