In a world where “fitting it all in” is already an extreme sport, pro triathlete and med student Matthew Marquardt, 28, takes it to the next level. Without being high-strung about it. Maybe you’ve seen him on Instagram speed packing a non-precious lunch to take to the hospital (PB&J!), building complicated Lego projects before a world championship race, raising money for cancer research, or you’ve seen him break the tape and set a new course record at Ironman South Africa this year.
Or you’ve gotten a peek inside his med student life at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He plans to become a surgeon specializing in head and neck cancers, and has already published research in the field (here’s one paper in Oral Oncology, if you want to look it up). But before that happens, there’s the Ironman World Championship in Kona this weekend.
And Marquardt’s results so far this year are generating a lot of excitement ahead of the big race. If he’s got time to train (about 25 hours a week), you’ve got time to train. He’s clear that time and mental capacity are finite resources, and he’s thoughtful and strategic about how he manages both—without optimizing the joy out.
In this interview, we got the surprisingly ordinary extraordinary athlete to reveal how he manages his time, his mind, and his life: It comes down to a few things, and one is hyper-focusing on the main priorities in life, and then making those work. And then if you have time for other things, you allow those when you’re able. For me, my priorities are med school, training, and my close relationships.
There’s a very practical side to that—with training, you can’t push something off to the next day. If you miss a workout today, there’s no making it up the next, because the next day you already have something else scheduled. So every day starts with looking at what are the mandatory things I have to get done.
When do I need to be in the hospital, what are my scheduled meetings and rotations, what are the workouts that I have, and how am I going to fit those in? Generally, that means doing one workout before I go in and one workout after. It also means being intentional about spending time with people.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
