Athlete Agenda

**What is an athlete?**

Disciplined, curious, inquisitive, striving, excited, full of endorphins, happy, sad, exhausted, invigorated...

An athlete is you!

The athlete agenda is made for people that want to get back in touch with moving their bodies the way it makes sense to them.

There’s a big part of our culture that encourages crowd sourcing and googling and asking everyone else we know for advice.

How should I do this? How should I train? How many days should I train? When should I train? What should I eat? What should I wear? What is the right gear? Should I do this in the morning or the evening? If I drink a spoonful of this or eat a tablespoon of that will my life change?

If you feel just a little bit not confident in knowing what your needs are, then of course you’re going to look to everyone else for advice... and that keeps you operating on everyone else's agenda.

We are a very image driven culture as well. Our Instagrams are carefully curated and we show our best selves online. That might lead us to believe that everybody else has the answers. Surely everybody else has it figured out and what they show is the real them.

If I asked the Internet "what I should eat a teaspoon of every day to change my life?" and the Internet says cashews but I know that I’m allergic to nuts then that information is not very valuable to me.

As I worked on the Athlete Agenda I wanted to create a place that you could dig deep and declare what you know about yourself.

You already know a lot of the challenges that you face and you know what some of your goals are. If it’s just you and this book - it’s not even the computer - it’s just a book -  if you and this book can spend a few minutes together each day in a way that nobody else has to see,

If you can be honest with yourself and excited with yourself in this book because you know that you’re the only one that has to see it then maybe you can uncover what will really help you unleash your inner athlete.

I have tried plans and plans over the years and I have worked with all kinds of professionals. I’ve taken clinics. I’ve practiced. I’ve completed in some of the most intense sports events on the planet.

Some of them went really well and some of them went pretty poorly. When I really started to see changes and growth in the way that I was looking for them was when I stopped listening to absolutely everybody else other than myself and I started listening and thinking about what I was doing and what actually happened during the day.

Of COURSE there is technique you can learn. At some point, though, what everyone else shows you has to become yours. YOU have to become yours.

I’m a professional paddler so I talk a lot in terms of paddling. My catch, or the way my paddle hits the water, really started to get more “beneficial” to my paddling when I stopped and wrote down and thought about how I did it on a day that it went well. It also helped when I recorded feelings on days it didn't go so well. 

I got better when I stopped asking a bunch of people to give me 15 tweaks to a 100 step process and I started really paying attention to what was working and what wasn’t and I wrote it down. I wrote it down in a place that I could see it and I could act on it

Is this agenda magic? Is it going to transform you into a sub 10 minute mile runner or an Iron Man in a day? No. The Athlete Agenda isn’t magic. You are.

You have the drive and the talent and the interest to do something for yourself. If you didn’t you wouldn’t of even started looking at this book.

But I guess if you want to talk about magic... the Athlete Agenda is a little magical. It can be like the door at the back of the closet in Narnia. It can be like platform 9 3/4 in  Harry Potter. It’s really just a conduit or a prompt or a way for you to unearth what is inside you and get it out and organize it so that you can see it. So you can see it just like all of the advice that you search so hard on the Internet to find

There’s a really good chance that that advice that you seek is inside you - you just haven’t written it down so you can’t read it like you can read an article in the newspaper.

Just because you read something on a fancy or popular website does not mean it is any more true or meaningful than what you write down yourself.  Especially when it comes to being an athlete.

The Athlete Agenda will let you get it out and get it down where you can read it day after day and remind yourself that you do have what you need inside of you to be what you want to be.

You might have a goal of running a 5K or half marathon or marathon or paddling the graveyard race at the Carolina cup.

Or you might know that you wanna go on a cycling tour of Europe or hike part of the Appalachian Trail. Or you might just wanna make sure that you get outside and walk for 30 minutes every day.

Deep down we are all athletes because we are all programmed to want to move our bodies. Moving our bodies makes so many things so much better.

And our core in our history we were hunter gatherers. We were always on the move. And now we are not. And that means that we are losing the things that we gain from movement. We are losing ourselves.

I call it a daily practice, working on my own agenda, because it does take practice. It does take some time set aside. And it does get a little easier and it does get to be something that I really look forward to doing every day. And that’s what practice is.  I don’t necessarily think that practice makes perfect but practice for sure makes doing everything easier. What practice really does is helps me get the result I want, which, in turn, motivates me to keep going.  If the result you’re looking for is 20 minutes of walking a day - practice can help you get there. If the result that you’re looking for is completing the Carolina Cup - daily practice will help you get there.

I called this the Athlete Agenda because you’re the athlete and the agenda is yours. There’s so many outside agendas. Capitalism. Getting kids to school. Taking care of parents. Cooking dinner. Work. Work. Work. Work. But as people we get to have own agenda too. And there’s not really anywhere else that we can write that down in a kind of guided way. I definitely didn’t call it a planner because it’s not a planner. It’s an agenda.

It’s your agenda and it’s a chance for you to reclaim and on and reflect on your unique agenda.

I can’t think of a better time to be doing that.