Getting things done in short bursts
Dallas played soccer and basketball as his usual sports in high school and never ran long distance races. When he decided to run track for a couple of years, his longest race was the 800. H says he had sprinter’s legs and sprinter’s body type so he never ran long distances, although he tried several times.
Ten years ago he signed up for a 10K race. On race day the temperature was 27 degrees, and he didn’t have the right gear. He hadn’t trained properly for a trail race. He only trained on paved running trails. He came in about 30 seconds before the time cap, and he was the second to last person. He realized that his mindset is not that of an ultramarathon runner. Even when life is a marathon, he chooses to run it in short sprints and then take the necessary rest. So it’s not that he doesn’t like to run, it’s just that his mindset for running is a different style.
He does crossfit and says he would rather run 400 meters or 800 meters and then do pull ups or burpees or something with a barbell or box jumps and then run some more and repeat than do a long distance run.
His 10K trail race was the result of his practice of setting 90-day challenge goals for himself. He makes sure the goals he sets are true challenges, often things he’s never done before. Sometimes it can be a race, sometimes a crossfit competition. The lesson he learned from his 10K trail race is that it’s good to research the course so you can prepare for the conditions.
Dallas says he’s never experienced the runner’s high. He heard about the legend and the reports made him eager to experience it. But, as many runners discover, a runner’s high is often elusive and many never experience it.
Nine years ago Dallas was diagnosed with depression and severe anxiety disorder. His therapist told him something that he found amazing and that he shares with a lot of people, he said: ”Congratulations, you have a tremendous imagination. The problem is that your imagination is geared to the wrong outcomes.” He still works to keep his imagination headed in the right direction.
Dallas says that the key to success is managing your energy and managing your mindset. He talks about lactic threshold training. When your body reaches the point of lactic acidosis, lactic acid builds up in your muscle fibers and literally floods the muscles. And an intriguing thing that can happen is that you can train your lactic threshold so that it can push beyond that.
He remembers learning that interval running is a good way to burn calories, especially if you’re training to get your heart rate up. So he keeps going to a local gym a couple of days a week to do interval cardio training and it’s like warming up for a couple of minutes and increasing the speed every minute to strive for a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10.
Dallas’ approach to life is to break hard things down into a series of smaller steps. He tells the story of John F. Kennedy when he said that at the end of the decade he was going to put a man on the moon. And for that they had to start preparing with small steps. Each Apollo mission had a particular mission to achieve the dream at the end of the decade. So he does a work backwards mentality, and it’s something he does with his coaching clients as well. They set a goal or a place they want to be in the future and they plan small objectives to achieve their goal. He asks himself, what do I have to do each quarter physically, spiritually, professionally to get there?
Dallas believes that an important lesson to consider is that we are competing only with ourselves and we are trying to be better than we used to be before. When he is having a bad moment or bad thoughts he focuses on creating a new mental space. He asks himself where he can go in his memory and find a place where he can just stay focused on the imagination. He doesn’t let all the negative things that are in his own brain overwhelm him.
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