Directors Commentary -My Love Hate Relationship With My Rowing Machine

I have a love-hate relationship with my indoor rowing machine. I love it because I can stare at the monitor and precisely track my pace stroke by stroke and watch the metres tick down. And then at the end, the utter feeling of exhaustion – almost falling off the seat, but knowing I’ve just got a PB. And then the hate – the monotony, the dread of the pain I know is coming, and the days when my body simply says no thanks and packs a sad.

 

 

My nature tends to be go hard – and then blow up. I struggle to pace myself at the beginning and then come home strong. But my best times are usually when I do take it easy at the beginning. The steady pace seems to do it. Forget about the monitor – just put on some music or a podcast and switch off. Instead of trying to smash a PB every time I am better to row some longer distances, cruise – and build a base. Thanks, Arthur Lydiard.

I find property similar. We often get very caught up with monitoring what is happening with the market, What are the latest quarterly results? Is the market up or down? Which suburbs? What have interest rates done – What are they doing? Will they go up? What is legislation doing – How will it impact demand? I know I do it.

A training programme that revolves around trying to improve a PB every day will ultimately fail. The body can’t handle the stress – it has no time to recover and the mind just gives up because of the intensity. Property is no different. Anxiously tracking every marker and event will drain you and ultimately lock you up mentally.

The best thing you can do with property is to quietly accumulate it and never sell it. Get your name on a title and keep it there. Spend a lot of time ignoring your property. Buy it, buy more, without it pushing you beyond limits, and then just ignore it – don’t get caught up with the metrics. If you are investing for the long term, what happens with interest rates today will be irrelevant down the track. What will be relevant is whether you bought property. With running and rowing and most similar sports the success comes from hundreds of hours of steady paced training sessions that lay the foundation for the exciting, lactic acid generating races.

Property is about years of quiet accumulation of titles. Then one day in a couple of decades someone will turn around and say wow – you’ve done well. You’ll just smile knowing how hard you worked to generate that luck.