My goal of creating a YouTube series in the lead-up to my trip to Puerto Rico turned out to be a great exercise. Ideally I wanted to put out content once a week. I didn’t quite hit that mark, but I managed to produce 6 short videos, which I think was a long enough playlist to call it a success.
Producing the video series had a ton of side benefits. I reacquainted myself with a lot of technology that I hadn’t touched in a while, I found a new way to focus mentally on my training, and I taught myself the essentials for creating training videos. That last one is pretty key. It’s a pretty sensible theory to document the training you’re doing anyway, and create video from it, thereby being doubly productive in two things that are important to you (namely: training and creative output). It’s another thing altogether to do it in practice. At the end of the day, producing a video is producing a video. It takes planning, focus, execution and follow-up. So it’s not as simple as killing two birds with one stone; in fact, you have to do the work from both sides. So it’s more like…throwing one stone from each hand simultaneously at two separate birds.
Like so many other things, it just boils down to being efficient. Figuring out the steps needed to accomplish the task as smoothly as possible and learning what is superfluous and unnecessary.
Where I go from here with my video content is a bit of an open question. I definitely want to keep producing, but I don’t have a defined series to use as a framework, now that the Puerto Rico trip is over. I suppose I could do a Road to 70.3 series, but that’s a long way off and I think it would be a whole lot of repetitive content, which is what training for half/long course triathlon is. I’m not sure I could keep that interesting.
For now I’ll just cut videos when there’s something interesting going on. My latest is about a run I did in Maine; you can check it out here.
