You’re already living to standards

A client came to me wanting his third Ironman, and he wanted a personal best. He had finished two already. He knew the distance, knew what it took to complete it, and knew he did not want a day of suffering this time round. He wanted to go fast and be proud of it.

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The plan was easy, as was the race entry... the hard part was taking ownership of what was sitting underneath it all.

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He was not recovering. He would train hard and then give his body nothing to absorb the work. Late nights. The television on in the background because the rest of the house was still up. Food ordered because it was the quick option after a long day. The training went in. Very little came back the other way.

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The goal was not his problem. The goal was hiding his problem. A personal best is a fine thing to want. But he had aimed at a faster time while quietly running the engine down, and a fast time asks more of the engine, not less. The PB was sitting on top of a missing standard. Just like no exercise regime cancels out a bad diet, no plan fixes a missing standard.

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So we did not touch the goal. We fixed the standard. Recovery became non-negotiable. The pockets of the day that had gone to his phone and the half-watched television went to preparing the next day instead. Kit laid out the night before became the standard. Nutrition prep became a standard. An earlier night more often than not became a standard. The mornings opened up, some for mobility work, some for an extra hour of sleep. Within a few weeks there was more energy going into the actual training. His mental health improved because the days were less cluttered and less rushed. The personal best looked after itself in the end, because the thing holding it up was finally there.

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I have come to think most people do not have a goal problem. They have a standards problem wearing a goal’s clothes.

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It is worth being fair to goals, because they do real work. A goal is a specific outcome on a specific date. Finish the race. Hit the number. Break the time. The research on this is settled: a clear, hard target focuses your attention, lifts your effort, and keeps you going through the dull stretches. For a motivated person in a stable patch of life, a goal is a strong engine.

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But a goal comes with terms and conditions, and you do not read them until life decides to enforce them. The goal assumes the date holds. It assumes your energy holds. It assumes the months between here and there look roughly like the version you imagined when you signed up. Then you have a child, or you take on more at work, or you get ill, and the date that once felt motivating becomes a source of needless pressure. A goal also ends. You cross the line and there is a drop. The thing you organised your months around has gone, and you are standing there asking what now.

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A standard does none of that, because a standard is a different kind of thing. A standard is a rule you set yourself about how you live, held daily or weekly, whether or not you feel like it on the day. Mine are plain. Move without pain, so I can pick up my daughter and walk my dogs. Stay aerobically fit enough to run for two hours when I want to, especially somewhere new I am keen to see on foot. Keep enough on the bike to ride for three hours and do my turns on the front of the group. None of those finish. I am never going to reach a morning where I stop wanting to move without pain, or stop wanting to ride my bike. The standards serve me for as long as I am here to hold them.

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That is why I let the goals go when life got busy. Peaking for one day, at one event, is needless pressure when your energy is already being drawn down by work and family and everything that does not give you a choice. The reserve has to be there for the parts of life that are not optional. Pouring what is left towards a far-off target stops making sense. Holding a few smart standards does make sense, because over time a good standard gives energy back rather than taking it.

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A standard you set yourself is allowed to move. The daily training might be a twenty-minute walk one morning and a four-hour ride the next. What does not move is the adherence. The week you let it slide is the week you learn the standard was never really yours. You took it from someone else, and a borrowed standard never survives a hard week.

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The fair objection to all of this is that standards without goals leave you with no direction. That you will stay busy and go nowhere, treading water with nothing to aim at. I understand the worry. I think it is wrong, but I understand where it comes from.

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A standard is not the absence of direction. It is direction held daily, rather than pinned to a date. The client was no longer aiming at a finish line. He was building a body that recovers. That is a direction. It just happens to be one that never runs out. My own standards point somewhere very specific: a life I can keep living the way I want to, well into the years most people quietly hand it over. There is no treading water in that. A standard compounds. The twenty-minute walk becomes the long ride. The base grows under you. You are getting somewhere. You are just not betting the whole thing on a single day the world is free to cancel.

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Now the honest bit. You are already living to standards. You just did not choose most of them.

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The hour on your phone before bed is a standard. It is the reason your sleep stays poor, night after night. The fast food every few days is a standard, holding your health roughly where it sits. Turning up to a job you resent is a standard too, one that keeps the resentment topped up. None of these are goals. Nobody set out to achieve them. They are the rules you are living by, by default, because you never stopped to choose them.

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We are all living to a standard. The only question worth asking is whether you are proud of the ones you have and if they’re supporting you where you want to go.