We tend to think of habits from a negative standpoint, those little things we find ourselves doing seemingly without having made the conscious decision to do them – and in a nutshell, that’s the point: When we do something out of habit, we don’t consciously decide.

Instead, over a period of time, we have programmed our subconscious to perform the action more or less automatically. And this is where the power of habits lie for the endurance athlete.

In this post, a few examples of areas where developing good habits can be a very powerful force in improving your performances.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to take a day off when you’re in the middle of a big block of training? Or conversely, how hard it is to start training again after a week or off at the end of the season? Both are simply the result of a habit you’ve developed.

Endurance sport is about consistency. As a result, the habit of training at least a little every day is a good one. Even a 20-minute run on a day when you have very limited time is useful in keeping your training moving forward.

[Whether it’s necessary to schedule complete days off is a whole other blog post. Suffice to say, I’m not a fan.]

By training daily, it will seem unusual to miss a session. And your performances will benefit.

It’s a powerful habit.

I wake up at 5am every day & an hour or so later, I head out to do my training. Yup, that’s 7 days a week. And as long as I stick to my wake-up time, it’s very easy to do. Do I feel sleepy in the morning? Yes. Are my legs a bit sore? Often, yes. Does the thought that another hour in bed would be nice ever cross my mind? Yes, almost every day.

But I still get up. And within 5 minutes or so, I’m wide awake & into my morning routine – most of which is in the dark, so as not to wake the family. The reason that developing this habit has been so important is that if I don’t train at 6am, I will often be unable to do so later in the day.

It’s a powerful habit.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook will know that I have trying to lose weight down to what I consider my ideal training weight. And I’ve been achieving the results I expected.

My wife will likely tell you that I have awesome willpower. But in reality, I simply harness the power of habit along with a vision of what I want that is more powerful than the desire for the foods that aren’t helpful to my goals.

The joke has long been that “It’s unfair, Will just cuts back on the dairy & the weight falls off him!”

There’s a bit more to it, but essentially, I very quickly put in place a habit where I eat similar things for most meals & snacks, spend a week convincing myself that chocolate & soft drinks have no place in my nutrition plan, and then let the power of my new habits take over.

It’s a powerful habit.

In part 2 I’ll be writing about the power of habit within your training sessions themselves…