Why Travel and Training Often Don't Mix
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at 9:46AM Traveling from Texas to San Jose, CA and back last weekend, I kept in mind what I have recentely learned about how the brain and body works while traveling. You may think you are just passively sitting there, whatching the world go by, but things are not quite what they seem.
When a task is new, your brain dedicates a lot of power to figuring out how to get it done. Kind of like learning to ride a bicycle, you get exhausted quickly and demonstrate a lot of ineffeciency. After you master a task, your brain has shifted the skills needed to execute it to a lower-intensity area of your noggin.
You can execute many routine, mastered tasks at once. Walk, chew gum, and sing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" all at the same time? Easy. But ask a friend to walk with you and then tell him he has 30 seconds to figure out 37 x 79 and watch what happens. Your friend will stop dead in his tracks, not even able to walk at the same time he's figuring out the math problem.
When challenged with something new, your brain shifts into overdrive, grabbing all resources available and also burning quite a lot of its only fuel; glycogen (carbs). Guess what happens when you're traveling? You're doing something new... all day long.
Drive the same route to work and you can daydream, text message, make phone calls, lots of stuff. Drive the same distance through a new town to find a store you've never been to before and you can't do anything else. This is actually how people get themselves into trouble - thinking they can still text message while driving. They get a message that says something very important, focus on that, lose focus on driving, and then plow into a phone pole.
When you drive, then fly, then drive an unfamiliar rental car, then try to make sense of a new hotel room and where to eat dinner, it's really no mystery why you are exhausted by the end of it all. Your brain has been working like a fiend all day trying to make sense of all the new stuff. And not only do you not feel like working out, you're more prone to making bad decisions. Studies show that people asked to do hard math questions were more likely to eat junk food afterwards than those that had to do easy ones. Their willpower was used up!
If you have had a long day on the road, don't be hard on yourself about not being able to work out as much as before. Let it go. If it's a long trip, you'll settle into a routine soon enough, your brain shifting all the new stuff to "habit land" and allowing you to train again. You also can pack healthy food and find gyms ahead of time. Now, the decisions are already made and your overtaxed brain doesn't have to sputter to a stop just to figure out what you usually do.
