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Balancing life: Tips and tricks

Balancing life can be tricky, and more difficult when you have multiple tasks to achieve each day. As a student athlete everything revolves around training and education. Being a full time student already, my day is packed with classes and then training. I am far from perfect on being able to balance my life to the best of my ability, but I’ve come a long way. Over the years, I have sacrificed so much social time with friends, to make time for training and homework. I made a conscious decision to foucs on my training and making sure that I was getting my school work done on time.

Once I graduated high school and started my undergraduate degree, I started having more time to hang out with friends outside of classes. Over the year, a couple of my friends and I get together before a big exam to study and also hangout with eachother over the weekend.

I asked a couple of my teammates for the upcoming season what they did to balance their everday lives with training, school, and being social. In resonse,they gave me a couple of their tips that they use in order to balance everything.

Tip 1:

Sienna Leger Redel

Be flexible

I find that by allowing myself to not get super worked up with a missed workout, especially during finals, I can focus on different tasks that will ultimately have a better overall impact on my fitness and education. I’ve been trying to find ways to group different tasks together in order to successfully multitask throughout my day. For the past year or so, I have started doubling up my studying hours with classmates with my hangout sessions. A racer who won the Soldier Hollow Pro-XCT, Nicola Rohrbach, was one of the most flexible racers I have ever met. The morning of the race, having not been on the course once, just asks for oats on the go. He ate it cold sitting on the tailgate of our truck a couple of hours before his race.

Tip 2:

Rylan Schadegg

Age 20

Junior in college and a student at the firefighting academy

“Life’s like a jar”

“The first thing you need to decide is what is your primary focus, school, work, or cycling. From there you need to organize your day, so you can accomplish your primary goal every day. Then keep going down the list with priorities 2,3,4 etc. Big rocks in the jar first then smaller rocks, then sand”

Tip 3:

Gabe Noorda

Age 16

Junior in high school

Stay productive.

“I try to stay as productive as possible during school to have the least amount of homework. During the season, I always ride right when I get home from school, so you can get a ride in before sunset. Then I will do homework and/or spend time with my family. During the season, the weekend is usually the only time I can hang out with friends”

Tip 4:

Sienna Leger Redel

Prioritize your days and weeks

Personally, I use and create a bullet journal to stay on top of all my tasks during the season and especially once I go back to school, so I can remember what to do when. I put my training, assignments, hangout sessions and/or study sessions in there. By putting everything down on paper, I can make sure that I am getting everything done without having to worry about remembering the smaller tasks that I need to accomplish after class and training.

Tip 5:

Brennon Peterson

Age 17

Senior in high school

Be goal oriented

“It really depends on what your goals are. If you are shooting for big goals, it’s necessary that you make sacrifices. For me, I take my racing seriously, so I am willing to make sacrifices, like not hanging out with friends as much. Personally, school and training always come before anything else. There are some days where I go to school all day, come home, ride and then do my homework for the remainder of the night”

Tip 6

Elly Peterson

Age 15

Sophomore in high school

Prioritize your day

“I usually go home after school and hang out with friends or watch movies, ride my bike and then do homework once I’m done with my ride”

Tip 7

Mila Leger Redel

Age 17

Junior in high school

Stay out of drama

“Stay out of other people’s drama. When focused on other people’s drama around you, you are causing a system of negative thoughts to surround you which can lead to having more negative thoughts about everyone else and possibly yourself when you need to be focused on training or school work”

“Stay from negative people. They have a problem for every solution” ~ Einstein

Tip 8

Sienna Leger Redel

Enjoy each task

Being able to enjoy each separate task you have to do, you are able to fully enjoy the whole aspect of being in the moment and enjoying the tasks at hand. When you can fully enjoy every task, you are able to fully appreciate what you are able to accomplish during each day.

Tip 9

Sienna Leger Redel

Set goals

By setting goals that follow your priorities, it makes it that much easier to follow the path you want to set towards during each season. This tip is both important for the level of motivation you have towards the race season. By doing this in all aspects of your life it can make it so you are more focused on the tasks you want to accomplish each week.

Tip 10

Sienna Leger Redel

Prepare the night before

Pack your stuff up the night before

to reduce stress the morning. Over the fall I would have early collegiate practices where I would have to leave my house at 7 or 8 in the morning. I would pack up my cycling stuff the night before so I didn't forget anything while rushing out of the house.

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