WAYNE'S WORDS
JULY 2006
TOPIC: DIRECT CONSEQUENCES

CONSEQUENCE > noun 1. a result or effect

There's a website I've been using to help me lose some of my extra weight. A friend of mine had lost about 50 lbs. by using the methods on this website. On myfooddiary.com, the concept is quite simple. It's addition and subtraction. The website has 60,000 entries for food. You plug in what you ate that day, and it tells you how many calories you took in. You also plug in what you did in terms of activities that day. Running, swimming, biking, but also washing the car, shopping, fishing and (blush) sex. Then it's a simple matter of taking in fewer calories that you burn off in order to lose weight.

I like it because it gives you charts and graphs and tells you at that level of caloric deficit you'll weigh this much in a month. I also like it because I can eat anything I want. But, what I like the most is it shows me the direct correlation between my eating, my activities, and my weight gain or weight loss. I can't blame anyone else if I don't lose weight, it's ALL my fault. If I eat too much, or exercise too little, the consequence is I don't lose any weight.

Now, I see a problem in our general society with consequences. A lot of people just don't think through what might happen if they do something bad to themselves. We've even gotten to the point that you have to put up a sign like this in the workplace. I don't know about you, but I learned when I was like a year old that falling wasn't a good thing to do. People too often don't take into account that what they do now, will have a direct consequence later. There IS a direct relationship. If you eat too much and don't exercise you'll end up not being able to walk up three flights of stairs. If you smoke or drink too much you'll affect the quality of your health.

Too often we hear about people blaming their problems and downfalls on others. It usually boils down to these folks making poor choices in important decisions in their life. Instead of taking responsibility for their bad choices they what to blame others. They don't understand or want to even be aware of the consequences of their actions.

I think endurance athletes have a better handle on consequences. First of all, we're all very aware of our bodies, our weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and VO2 max. We know and record what we eat and what we do. We've learned that if we do something bad to our bodies, our efficiently running engines won't perform the way we want. We have also learned that what we do in training has a DIRECT effect on how well we preform in a race. If we slack off in our bike training, we'll feel the consequence of that action when we're trying to hammer the hills of Innsbrook. If we eat a bunch of crap and gain some weight we'll feel slow as we lumber through our runs. I also think we're all good at not blaming anyone or anything else about our poor performance. When you talk to athletes, they justify how they performed, either good or bad, by what they had done prior to the event. We could blame the weather, our bike, our running shoes or someone bumping us on the swim, but we usually don't. We're accountable for what we brought to the race and how well we performed.

By understanding direct consequences, being aware of what I did here, had this affect there, I can learn from those mistakes, make a correction and hopefully not make those mistakes again. Consequences and understanding them is just like most things in life, it's hard to do, it takes a lot of effort and sometimes you just don't care about what might happen. But, if you're aware of what you do and understand what will happen and are accountable for what you did, you'll not only be a better athlete, but also a much better person.

Until Next Time
Train Smart, Live Right
Wayne
whuckshold@yahoo.com