Feeling Cross

At just under a month until race day, I am now run­ning longer dis­tances than I ever knew pos­si­ble. I am learn­ing first hand that pound­ing your feet on the pave­ment for hours at a time causes one to expe­ri­ence con­sid­er­able amounts of pain. Joints, mus­cles, bones — you name it and it’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle sore these days. I need to build strength and endurance to com­plete the marathon, but I can’t run every day. At some point the law of dimin­ish­ing returns kicks in and run­ning does more harm than good. So what to do?

In recent weeks I have taken up cross train­ing as a means for get­ting in shape for the marathon. I am now engag­ing in other forms of exer­cise on the days in between my sched­uled runs. This has helped me to build strength, flex­i­bil­ity and endurance, while also adding some fun activ­i­ties to my fit­ness reg­i­men. Bet­ter still, tak­ing a break from run­ning give my body time to heal Dur­ing the course of the week I now try to run 3 times, and on the alter­nate days I lift weights, cycle, and swim. Addi­tion­ally, because my shorter week­day runs are in the evening, I am try­ing to do some yoga in the morn­ing on my run­ning days to improve my flex­i­bil­ity, focus, and breath­ing. None of these activ­i­ties are run­ning, but all of them are mak­ing me a bet­ter runner.

It is no dif­fer­ent in other areas of life. For exam­ple, I work in the field of mar­ket­ing. I read mar­ket­ing books, blogs, and arti­cles, talk to other mar­ket­ing peo­ple, and solve mar­ket­ing prob­lems. I want to be great at what I do, and every day I work to get bet­ter. Still, if all I did was work in this area all day every day, my effec­tive­ness would dimin­ish over time. So from a pro­fes­sional per­spec­tive I have taken an inter­est in “cross train­ing” by study­ing physics, design, biol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, tech­nol­ogy, music, and numer­ous other things that are not mar­ket­ing. I don’t nec­es­sar­ily want to develop exper­tise in these ancil­lary domains of knowl­edge, but rather want to add per­spec­tive to my own world.

The idea is sim­ple. Study­ingth­ese other things in addi­tion to study­ing and prac­tic­ing mar­ket­ing, makes me a bet­ter mar­keter. It fuels my cre­ativ­ity. It strength­ens my mind and broad­ens my think­ing. The world is filled with com­pelling ideas. No mat­ter what you do with your days, there are always new chal­lenges out there. There are always new paths to explore, new ques­tions to con­sider, and new trea­sures to dis­cover. To run far­ther down the desired path of your life, try a lit­tle cross train­ing on some dif­fer­ent trails every once in a while.