Recently my sister completed the Loskop ultra-marathon after
months of gruelling training and grit determination. I know for one the hours
of dedication taken to reach such a tremendous feat. On occasion I would go for
an early morning jog for moral support but quite surprisingly learnt more about
the power of my mind than I had expected.
As with anything in life, when we start something new we
often head into it with much vigour. My first jog around the block was quite an
eventful one. My sister kept teasing that I wouldn’t be able to clear 5km in 30
minutes. Determined to prove her wrong I set about my quest, only to be stopped by
my pure exhaustion on the 3km mark.
Defeated and deflated I conceded that my fitness levels were
not what they were once before, but I was dead set on figuring out the science
of running and how a person were able to push their body through many
kilometres of tarmac.
If you’ve ever watched
the Comrade’s Marathon you’ll know the admiration you have for the guy who
crosses the line in under 6 hours. To put that into context that’s roughly 15km/h
non-stop for 6 hours. I couldn’t clear 3km in 15 minutes let alone run 15km in
one hour. But take note that we always benchmark ourselves against the best. We
don’t really pay attention to the other thousands of runners who complete the
same race just in a longer time.
When you run distance you not going start the race running
at a pace of 100 metre sprinter, I guarantee you that you won’t have any energy
left for the next 10km. Slow and steady wins the race.
These were the first lessons my sister taught me on our
first jogging expedition. We started small distances so I could gain my fitness
then slowly started progressing 1km at a time. I reached 5km within a month and
only managed 42 minutes, but it didn’t matter to me, I was proud of the fact
that I was able to complete the distance without being exhausted.
After a few months of doing it over and over again I decide
to get adventurous and try for distance longer than 5km. This is where you
learn the most about running. We would run an 8km route but I quickly noticed
that the route wasn’t so straight forward as the 5km one I had been training in.
The elevation you run on begins to change at certain points and you would need
to adjust for that.
You would have slightly inclined straights but you needed to
preserve your energy because there were long uphills requiring you to use your
thigh muscles more than your calves to power yourself forward. You'd reach the end of the uphill and would need
to slow yourself down so that you don’t overspend your energy and be able to
reach the finish line.
I remember when my sister got her race map and she began
planning for the race; she knew what she was going to be up against and planned
accordingly. In the weeks leading up to
the race she focused on the areas of her running she felt would be needed.
Take a good example of the public holidays we’ve just had
over the last 3 weeks. The lack of volumes together with the stop and start
motions made it extremely difficult to trade with not much direction. It gets
to a point when you feel frustrated and eventually force the trade.
Now imagine that scenario in a 50 km race, you hit the 25 km
mark and you just about feel fed up and decide the rest of the way you’ll just
run your heart and soul out and it’ll get you to the end. Unfortunately it will
be short lived. If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
Most of us start trading with the idea of finishing the
comrade’s marathon in gold medal positions. I’m sure most of you will agree
that would be a great achievement but in reality it’s not attainable. The game
of trading is not about how rich you get quickly but more so accumulating over
a longer period of time.
The truth is most traders never make it to the finish line,
they’ve either spent all their energy or they just couldn’t master the
realities of a changing market. If you want to make it to be a consistent
trader, you have to plan your race, know every bend and uphill you going to
face and lastly having the control to keep your mind in check because without
it that finish line just gets further and further away.
One last thing, when you imagine yourself as a trader,
instead of thinking of yourself as Usain Bolt dashing to the 100 metre finish
line, rather think of yourself as the great Comrade’s Marathon runner Alan Robb
who recently finished his 40th Comrade’s.
If you would like to contact me you can through my email at cadetrader@gmail.com or if you wish to
follow me on twitter and get the latest updates of news, interesting commentary
and general trends in the market, my twitter handle is @CadeTradeR if you
follow this link it’ll take you directly to my twitter timeline: https://twitter.com/CadeTradeR
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