On Demand

A couple of winters ago, a storm came in faster than the forecast said it would.

The school called mid-morning. They were closing early. By the time my wife went to get in the car, the driveway was already past what she could get out of. Our daughter was a mile and a half away, and the roads weren’t going to clear in time.

So she put on boots and ran.

She ran to the school, picked our daughter up, and carried her the mile and a half home in her arms.

I think about this a lot. Not because it was heroic, although it was. Because of what it revealed about what she’d been quietly building for years without ever calling it that.

My wife trains every day. But she doesn’t think about it the way I do. She doesn’t talk about capacity or callusing or preparing for life. She trains because she loves it, because it makes her feel good, and because she wants to be healthy and strong and in shape. That’s the whole story for her, and it’s enough.

And then a day came where she needed strength and endurance and toughness in a way that had nothing to do with the gym. And it was just there. On demand. She didn’t have to summon it or rise to the occasion. She didn’t have to dig. She just did the thing the moment required, because her body and mind had been prepared for it by years of work she’d done for entirely different reasons.

That’s the part I keep coming back to.

You don’t have to frame your training the way I frame mine. You don’t have to think of it as preparation. You don’t have to call it anything. The work does what the work does regardless of what you call it. The capacity you build is available when you need it, even for things you never expected would be required of you.

I write about training as preparation because that’s how I think about it, and because I think there’s something useful in being deliberate about what you’re building and why. But I don’t want to overstate the case. Loads of people wouldn’t describe themselves or their training that way. They just show up. They do the work. They love it, or they’re used to it, or it’s just part of who they are now. And when life asks them for something, the answer is already there.

My wife carried our daughter home through a snowstorm because she’d been training for years. Not for that moment. But it turned out to be the same thing.