A Simple Challenge For My Hikers

In this episode, I talk about a simple challenge that can be an excellent thing for any hiker who always seems to be 'on the go' in their day-to-day lives.

​Episode Transcript:

[0:00] Right. Hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. So today I am going to share with you a simple challenge that I would like you to try sometime over the next seven days.

[0:11] Now, when it comes down to it, everyone's life is stressful. The lucky few people who don't have a huge amount of stress in their life, you are very lucky. But in all honesty, most of us have quite a bit of stress in our life. Most of us have quite a bit going on. And on top of that, a lot of us, even if we do have plenty of relaxation time and we get to the end of the day, we'll put our feet up, we chill out, a lot of our relaxation time these days is on screens. We're on a laptop, watching a show or watching TV, listening to a podcast, whatever it may be. And this stuff is good, but the overarching thing is a lot of us, we never really switch off. In the morning, we're running around at work, we're on computer, at night, we're watching TV, and then we go to bed, and we never really switch off. We never really get a huge amount of time just for our brains. And yes, when we're hiking, a lot of people use our hiking as an escape, as exactly this thing where we can switch off, we can enjoy ourself in this and that. But again, not all of us are lucky enough to be able to get out and hike every single week. And this sort of constant state of just going from thing to thing to thing and never really switching off, it can honestly be exhausted.

[1:20] So, on that front, if any of this is sounding familiar for you, today I want to share with you a really simple challenge I want you to play around with. Now, this challenge, it's not about training. It's not about hiking, but it's about switching off and relaxing, which sometimes can be a bit of a challenge in itself. But if you can do it, it can be so, so, so valuable.

[1:43] Now, this was inspired by, this is a challenge, I didn't come up with this challenge. It was something I saw years and years ago, which just popped into my head recently. And I was actually back in the COVID lockdowns, way back when, whenever that was. And a gym that I follow, you know, they were with their athletes when everyone was closed down, they couldn't go to the gym. They were getting all their members to do these weekly challenges around different sort of things they were getting. And they got people doing running challenges and different exercise challenges and this and that. And then one week they put up a really, really interesting one. And this is exactly what they put up. And it comes directly from that.

[2:15] What I would like you to do is sometime in the next week, in the next seven days, so set yourself a deadline because if you don't, you'll never end up doing it.

[2:24] When you have, let's say, 30 minutes or so to spare, at the start of a day, at the end of a day, on a weekend, whatever it may be, I want you to find somewhere that's quiet and somewhere where you may not be disturbed. Now, I know for some people, if you've got young kids or whatever it may be, that just in self may just be absolutely impossible, but try your best. Somewhere quiet, somewhere you won't be disturbed. And if you live into someone, just say, hey, I'm going to disappear for 30 minutes. Please don't come in or whatever it may be. What I want you to do is get your phone. I want you to put her on airplane mode. Or whatever it may be, something so you're not going to get noises, not going to get messages, not going to get distracted. I want you to open up your clock and set a timer.

[3:05] Then essentially what I want you to do is I want you to sit. You can sit on the floor, sit on a bed, sit on a chair, whatever is most comfortable for you.

[3:14] Sit with your eyes closed and just do it for as long as you can. That's it. You don't have to do any specific breathing techniques. This isn't like specifically meditation or deep breathing or anything like that. But essentially what I want you to do is just sit there with your eyes closed for as long as you can. Now, this may sound a bit simple, but I promise you, if you're the type of person who was sounding pretty familiar before, where you kind of jump in between things and you go in between tasks, we never really get a time to switch off. This in itself can sometimes be a bit confronting because you might be okay for 60 seconds. You might be okay for a couple of minutes and then up to three or four minutes, you're like, oh my gosh, I'm jumping out of my skin. I'm so restless. I've got to do something or whatever it may be. And if that's you, that may be a sign where you actually may want to fit in something like this into your week regularly. Alternatively, if you can do this and you do 30 minutes, you're like, oh, that was a piece of cake. Then, you know, maybe this isn't something you need to do regularly. But either way, it's a really, really interesting challenge just to see how

[4:16] it feels, just to see how you respond, just to see how it all goes. And it can actually highlight for a lot of people something that may be worthwhile working on. Because when we come back to the training and hiking context.

[4:30] Relaxation, the ability to switch off, the ability to decompress, the ability to calm down, it plays a big role in our recovery. Our recovery from training, our recovery from hiking, our ability to have energy going into our sessions and all of that. So if you needed to justify this and saying, I need to justify spending all this time doing nothing. Well, it can have a direct effect on whatever's going on.

[4:51] Not only helping your stress for family, for socializing, for work and all of that, whatever it is. So that's my challenge for you. Sometime in the next seven days, I would like you to give this a go. Take half an hour, close your eyes in a place you don't disturb, time it and just see where you land. You may be very, very interesting about how it all plays out. So with that being said, I'm going to leave it with that. I hope you can give this a go. I hope it's a bit eye-opening for a few people who may need this type of thing, and hopefully it helps a few people. So with that being said, thanks for listening. Hope you've enjoyed it, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye.

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