House Building 101: Build a Foundation
Why we want to live in the penthouse but aren’t willing to build a strong foundation!
By Garrett de Jong
Legendary marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge is like a fine wine, he seems to improve with age (not long ago breaking 2hours for the marathon). Yet so many of us feel like we’re deteriorating, getting stiffer, wearing out often despite our efforts to mitigate these changes. If you’re a runner (or not!) you probably have goals. You may be struggling with these goals. They are probably outcome goals (achieving ‘things’). You may feel like they are slowly slipping away. Maybe you even feel this way despite trying harder!
I work with a lot of athletes, runners and humans want to achieve lofty goals but aren’t willing to delay gratification, be patient and work on the foundation. (Sound familiar?!)
Some runners try to run fast without enough base mileage. We often fail to see the need to build a foundation before running fast. Often we can get away with it as a novice. Novice athletes can be compared to a new tube of toothpaste, you can press anywhere and get your desired results. Veteran tubes of toothpaste need specific strategies to get their toothbrush results. It makes total sense that a novice runner who wants to run fast will ‘try’ to run fast and thus be rewarded from doing so. Unfortunately because we get these results early on from ‘trying harder/running faster’, we are conditioned to associate running fast with trying harder. In reality they probably just needed to do any sort of running (i.e. push anywhere on the tube of toothpaste) to improve.
This cognitive dissonance often leads us to undervaluing the unsexy, less hard, fundamental foundational base work. It’s a weird paradox that doing the easy unsexy work is often harder than doing the hard work 🤯.
We often fail to see the need to build a foundation before running fast.
I often talk about performance as a pyramid. The tip is your specific goal (run a marathon), many coaches will say that the foundation for that is base mileage. But there’s a foundation for that foundation which is athleticism. And there’s a foundation for athleticism which is general human movement. And finally there’s a foundation for that which is being a generally healthy human (in all aspects! Who cares how fast you can run if your life sucks! And I’ll argue that having a sucky life isn’t conducive for running fast. However this doesn’t mean not struggling, because the struggle is what gives it meaning!)
I will propose 2 reasons why we so often skip building a foundation. (There’s probably many)
- Primitive Ego – as Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman said “everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, nobody wants to lift heavy ass weights” – this applies here but another way to look at it would be to say everybody wants to lift heavy weights but nobody wants to do the lighter weights needed to get them there! This would either lead to injury, plateaus (failure), or quitting altogether. Additionally our identities are wrapped with our ego. I need to do the hard thing because that’s WHO I AM. So when ideally we would simply take a step back from our sport to work on our foundation, we can’t because we would struggle with an identity crisis!
- Especially today it is so easy to compare yourself to anyone in the world. No longer are we satisfied and proud of being the faster runner in our village because our village now includes the millions of people on instagram or Facebook.
- Modern Lifestyle – Our primitive ancestors probably evolved to never need to work on the thing we call ‘base training’ or ‘building a foundation’. From a human movement perspective, they most likely had all the daily movement requirements part of their lives. They didn’t need to do yoga or stretch their hip flexors because life included all that stuff. Modern humans have out sourced the need to be a good human mover and made our lives incredibly convenient. Unfortunately this is coming at a price. We are now trying to counter years of poor movement diets.
If you’re struggling with improving the way you move, whether that’s in a sport or simply day to day activities, I challenge you to reflect on your foundation. What’s missing? Is your ego or environment/lifestyle getting in the way? What you need is probably more obvious and easier to address than you think. Readjust your goals, work on your foundation, put in the work, the effort is enough, and be patient!
Hope you enjoyed reading this. Please share with anyone who may benefit from a little more work on their foundation. Lastly, I would love your feedback or comments, and if you need some help working on your foundation feel free to email me at [email protected].
Cheers,
Garrett
