If you’re Facebook friends with me, you may have seen that I took part in an event known as the Fan Dance last Friday.
According to Wikipedia, “The Fan Dance is a 15-mile (24 km) load (35lbs) bearing march that takes place at the end of the first week of the Special Forces selection course. It is used as the first major indicator of whether a candidate has the physical and mental aptitude to complete the selection.
The candidates climb Pen y Fan’s west slope (facing Corn Du) and then descend on the far side, known as Jacob’s Ladder. The rest of the route follows the old Roman road before going back on itself for the return leg. Candidates are allowed 4 hours 10 minutes to complete the route regardless of weather.”
It’s a rather innocuous name for what it is.
It was rather hard, I’ll be honest.
If you want to read a description of how I found it, you can see that here –> www.facebook.com/joncwhall/posts/pfbid0QqTtdPQYJa5QA7nyU9HyYEY8QvpiyA3AnWeofw5aJrCQWt6LehEaXq1FnquePcnCl
As I said in that post, I picked up, or was reminded of, a few lessons that I’m going to share with you here.
The first came straight away.
It was a congested start with about 50 of us starting in the first group.
I was immediately a distance behind the pacer.
I roughly managed to maintain that distance until the walk along the ridge where they pulled ahead because my ankle wouldn’t let me jog.
And they pulled further and further ahead along the Roman Road which was a good few miles, for the same reason.
Much as I would’ve liked to, I was never going to catch them up.
Catching up involves not only bridging that gap in pace between falling behind and keeping up, but doing the same again to pull back the difference.
Catching up is hard in all areas of life.
And remembering that and doing what we can to “keep up”, when we could be falling further behind, is hugely beneficial.
If we’re gaining weight then, in order to lose it, we need to not only make the changes to stop gaining but do the same again to start losing it.
Maintaining our weight (or fitness or any other thing that might be important to us) is easier than having to lose what’s been gained.
The human brain is tempted, when things aren’t going perfectly to “write it off”.
To “start again next week”.
Thinking “s0d it” or “F’ it”.
But “keeping up” at that point will be so much easier overall than catching up later on will be.
When we think of it as “standing still” or “no progress” then it’s easy to get discouraged.
Think of it as “keeping up” to mean we won’t need to “catch up” (or “treading water” rather than “sinking”) and we’re more likely to make those better choices.
Much love,
Jon ‘My ankle is still pretty sore today’ Hall
P.S. Part of the reason our guys get such amazing results for a decade straight now (see verified success stories all over the internet) is we help them become ok with periods of periods of slower progress and a bit of “two steps forward, one step back”. Which, almost ironically, leads to much better results overall than “all or nothing”. Check www.myrise.co.uk/apply if you’re ready to let go of that!
——————————————————————-
RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
