120K steps. On night shift.

The week I ran a marathon's worth of distance, I was at camp on night shift.

117.5 km. 122,589 steps. Half of those steps logged on a treadmill in a camp room before 5 PM, while my coworkers were still asleep.

The week before that, I was in Cancun on an off-block. Took the family. Swam three times in the ocean and ran twice. 57.2 km. 66,651 steps. Half the volume of a camp week.

Most people would guess that backward.

I work a 28-day rotation. Seven days on, seven off, seven nights on, five off. Every shift is 12 hours. Days run 06:30 to 18:30. Nights run 18:30 to 06:30. The site is a SAGD facility outside Cold Lake. Home is Red Deer, about a four-hour drive south.

Half the calendar I'm at camp. The other half I'm home.

Most people who hear that schedule wince. They think the shift work is the obstacle and the off-blocks are the relief. They have it the wrong way around.

Look at where the kilometres get logged in a normal month:

Day shift is the quiet block. I'm at camp for 12 hours of work plus the bus ride plus a meal plus sleep, and the camp gym slot is short. Fifteen minutes if I'm tired. An hour if I'm not.

Off blocks are the obvious ones. Home. No commute. Full kitchen. Long run Saturday, long ride Sunday, two heavy lifts in between. That part isn't surprising.

The window most people miss is night shift. I can't sleep past 2 PM on nights anyway. So the window from 2–4 PM is two unbroken hours before the bus to site. No meetings. No errands. No kid bedtimes. Just the treadmill in the camp room and the watch.

That's where the 19.3 km / 1:47:54 / avg HR 149 session lives. Camp room, May 1. I started running at 03:13 in the afternoon during a night shift block. It was the last long run before my marathon taper.

That session does not exist on a 9-to-5.

A friend with a normal office job has 60 to 90 minutes a day, every day. Total weekly time is similar to mine. But the shape is different.

His weeks are seven slivers. Mine are batched. Long runs go where they need to go — Saturday morning, or a 2 PM weekday during a night block. Long rides get four hours instead of ninety squeezed minutes. Heavy lift sessions get full warm-ups instead of compressed drop-sets after dinner.

A triathlon training plan is shaped like my rotation. It's not shaped like a 9-to-5. Anyone who's tried to fit an Ironman build around kid bedtimes and a Tuesday commute knows what I mean.

The schedule that looks harder is the one that's actually closer to the plan.

Same rotation pays the bills too.

Base salary is six figures. On top of that there's a $3/hr night-shift premium and roughly $25,000/yr in camp allowance. The site provides the food and the room. There's no commute. There are no after-work dinners because there's no after-work — there's a bus and a bunk.

Spending stays flat while income runs hot. The surplus goes into TFSA and RRSP contributions on autopilot, and into race entries when they come up.

The same schedule that generates the long-run window funds the gear, the registration, and the retirement account. Two compounding curves on the same calendar.

I'm not a financial advisor. I'm a guy with a spreadsheet and a Honda Fit with no air conditioning.

This only works when the rotation runs as scheduled.

I have a night-shift overtime week locked in Jun 17–24 that wipes out Off Block 1 in June. Then a day-shift overtime week Jul 15–21 that does the same thing in July. Each one of those costs me my biggest training batch of the cycle.

When the schedule breaks, the training breaks with it. The rotation isn't magic. It's leverage when it shows up and a problem when it doesn't.

I'll write the dark companion piece to this one in August, after I've lived through both OT weeks. For now, this is the version that works.

This isn't a defense of shift work. The schedule is hard. It eats weekends and birthdays and most of December.

But the people who treat camp rotation as the obstacle to triathlon training have the math backwards. The rotation is the engine. 122,589 steps in a camp week isn't a miracle. It's what the shape of the week makes possible when you stop fighting it.

The 9-to-5 lifer trying to fit Z2 sessions around the dishwasher and bedtime stories is on the harder schedule. Not me.

Next week: the monthly report. Every dollar in, every kilometre run, every hour slept. June by the numbers.

Hit reply: what's the actual shape of your training week?

— Kiegan