In July 2011 I found myself as a guest at the team bus of one of the teams that had just completed the Tour de France in Paris. I had met a number of them in Cayman the previous December as the organiser of a team-building camp, so it was great to catch up and to congratulate them on a great team result that year.
One of the people I chatted with was the wife of one of the riders. The whole family had moved during the season to the team’s base in Girona, Spain. I asked her how she was enjoying it and she said “it is lovely, but would be even nicer if my husband would go for a walk with me along the Ramblas of an evening. I asked him once, but he just looked at me as if he was crazy!”.
This stuck with me. I later learned that, during the season, pro cyclists will ride their bikes for hours each day, but when not riding they do not stand (they sit or, preferably, like down) and they certainly do not walk anywhere.
Two of my sons were elite swimmers. In addition to getting to know and understand pro cyclists, I also learned from being around my sons how much their focus was on not one, but three things:
- Exercise
- Rest
- Nutrition
Each of these was consciously focussed upon and planned. As they consumed around 10,000 calories per day and worked out well over 25 hours per week, it is tough to imagine how any mortal can do that week in week out, month in month out, but elite athletes do and so they have to focus on eating and resting in order to be able to do it.
I love learning from elite performers at all levels and translating that into leadership from sports, the military, and from other spheres. One simple learning I hope you take from the cycling adage “if you are standing, sit down. If you are sitting, lie down” is to pay attention to when you need to rest and to how you rest.
One tiny closing thought. For much of my career, I would fly. I would fly a lot, mostly long haul. Why? In essence, it was always to meet people at the other end of the flight, often right away after landing. In the last decade or so more and more aircraft have some form of WiFi onboard, so people often spend their time working away playing catch up with emails and reports on their laptops. When this started I was self-aware enough to know that, for me, to work through the flight would largely defeat the purpose of the trip as I would not be rested at the other end. Instead, I would switch off my brain and rest. One day I was in the business class cabin on the direct flight back to Cayman and almost everyone apart from me was working away. Everyone bar one, and when I got up to use the bathroom I saw that they were on their iPad watching cartoons. I smiled, then, later on, chatted to them and we agreed about the importance of rest. That was the start of a great friendship!