Road Warrior Training

As I write this, I know I have eight hours, one more airport and one more flight to go before I get home. Home…it seems like a foreign concept after staying in five different cities over eight days.

This amount of travel can be quite disorientating. Moving around so much, you start to feel disconnected from your life. Zipping across the continent – first west, then east, then south – with the time zone changes affects your sleep cycles. As well, business travel is busy, you try to pack as much as possible in while you are there for the short time. Flying is not fast, it is a time sucker.

So how do you train when travelling? You lower your expectations and do what you can. In the last eight days I only got in four cardio sessions (three runs and one bike sit), one heavy and two dynamic weight training sessions and one morning yoga session. I did find a climbing wall and a willing partner and burned an hour moving vertical at a gym in Ogden, Utah. (Thanks Tim!)

This obviously does not add up to my usual level of activity or intensity but it is better than nothing at all. Fortunately, I am trying to gain weight, because adding insult to injury my diet was…well horrible. All complaining aside, I can say that running in the humid + 22 Celsius heat of Orlando, Florida after coming from the dry cruel cold -22 Celsius was a very nice change. Plus, with the fast time zone and temperature changes, my body had no time to acclimatize to its new surroundings; I sweated way more on my run today prior to my flight than I have in any of the most
intense cardio session I have had during the last month at home. So road warrior training isn’t all that bad.