When I started CTS in 2000, I knew I had a great idea: to use the Web, email and phone to remotely coach athletes across all walks of life and sports. But I had no business background. Up to that point, my resumé included Olympic competitor and coach, professional cyclist and coach of Lance Armstrong. I could tell you everything you needed to know about how to win the Tour de France, but a P&L statement was a mystery.

I knew how to spot talented athletes, but I needed to learn how to spot talented business people. It was tougher than I expected. Like many entrepreneurs, I got burned by some of my early employees, and I know for a fact that I burned out several good people, too.

Yet, a good business idea is a good business idea, and with Lance winning the Tour de France, CTS experienced rapid growth. From two coaches and a handful of athletes, we have expanded to 140 coaches working with nearly 3,000 athletes around the world. Today we coach racecar drivers, football and hockey players, runners, pro triathletes and, of course, cyclists. People now recognize me on the street, in airports and restaurants. In financial and awareness terms, I’ve become a success. I’ve made it.

During the growth phase of CTS, I married my wife, Paige, we had a second child and I dedicated myself to Lance’s quest to continue winning the Tour. I was practically MIA from my office and home for three months each spring and summer as I traveled with Lance. Looking back, I can see that this perfect storm of responsibilities was too much.

I gained 25 pounds of flab, started to display signs of hypertension and I ate like crap. I was more obsessed with Lance’s health than my own. The healthier and the stronger Lance looked, the worse I did. I have pictures from that time that make me look as if I aged 15 years between 1999 and 2002.

On average, I wasn’t a happy guy. Funny, no one told me success was going to feel like this. Here I was, part of one of the most amazing feel-good stories in sports history, and I was a grouch. My employees didn’t know whether I was walking into their office to congratulate them or fire them.

One source of my surliness was a yellow jersey from Lance’s second Tour de France that he signed "Damn, you’re getting old." The jersey hung in my office and I’d see those words every day: "You’re getting old." As a former pro athlete who’d raced in the Tour de France in 1986, those words were difficult to swallow.

The other issue weighing on my mind involved my father, a retired family physician who developed Alzheimer’s. Here was a medical man with a sharp mind and healthy habits who was laid low by an insidious disease. I remember thinking, "I can’t control whether or not I get Alzheimer’s, but I can control the quality of my life." That’s when I finally stopped to take a good hard look at my life and my health. I realized I had to do something, right then.

On Yer Bike!
Fortunately, I knew the steps to taking control of my life because I’d been helping Lance do it for years. Because of his involvement with his cancer foundation, his growing family and his intercontinental training and racing schedule, we had created a more holistic approach to his training. If we didn’t, he’d have burned out because of the overwhelming pressure of his obligations. We optimized his nutrition to minimize his low-energy and lethargic days. We monitored his moods carefully for signs of exhaustion and burnout, and because he wasn’t yet out of the woods with cancer, we were vigilant about tracking his health. His success on the bike relied on the thousands of miles he rode, but it also depended heavily on us taking control of every aspect of his time.

"I wasn’t a happy guy. Funny, no one told me success was going to feel like this."

I started paying attention to the same things I had Lance follow: nutrition, health, fitness, career and relationships. As a result, I finally started to feel like a success. I dedicated more time to family vacations and started seeing my doctor regularly for checkups. I scheduled time to ride my Specialized road bike, and I restructured my business to build a team I could trust. Life was, and still is, very good.

My transformation made me realize that the same concepts we use to produce champion athletes also work to guide driven people to live what I call a "high-performance" life. This is the level at which everything is going smoothly—you’re efficient and accomplishing more than most people thought possible. I recognized that the achievers, those who commit to goals in their careers and succeed, share the same mind-set as the athletes we train. And, like every successful athlete, they can fall into the trap of sacrificing everything around them for those goals.

Spencer Aronfeld, an attorney we work with in Florida, is a great case study. He had a flourishing law practice, a fast car, big house and a regular steak house and cigar habit. But his health was awful. He developed asthma, abdominal bleeding and hives, and he kept gaining weight. The final straw was when his wife took their two kids to Europe for the summer against his wishes.

Aronfeld called us to see about joining a tour we were running in France, and ended up becoming a serious recreational cyclist working with a coach. He lost weight, his doctor took him off several medications and he reconnected with his wife and kids. At the office, Aronfeld actually started to work less, but ended up getting more done because he now had more energy and greater focus.

Integration is a hard concept for most achievers to grasp, especially men. They’ve been so focused on their careers and providing for their families that they forget to take care of their own health and their relationships. They figure they can wait until they turn 55 before they have to pay attention to their health and family. Problem is, they turn 55 and they have a stroke or they’re diabetic, their kids hate them and their wives want nothing to do with them.

What I’ve come to understand is that single-minded focus on one area of life, be it an executive’s career or a pro athlete’s fitness, is detrimental to a person’s overall performance. The carnage you leave in your wake drags you down and keeps you from accomplishing all that you can. Instead, you’ll accomplish more in your career when your relationships, health, nutrition and fitness are a source of support, rather than a source of stress. The five essentials for a winning life (fitness, nutrition, health, relationships and career) are enmeshed in everything you do. If you’re weak in one area, you risk taking down the other four. But, if you’re strong in all five, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish.

Carmichael’s Tips for a Balanced Life

Fitness. Challenge yourself consistently. Exercise must be challenging for you to progress. I see many people go through the motions—doing the same exercises, at the same pace or resistance, for years. Your body adapts to stress, and when it adapts, you have to increase the load to continue moving forward. When people stagnate, that’s when they stop exercising.

Nutrition. Get rid of the clutter. After analyzing thousands of people’s diets, I keep finding one amazing theme: Many people are already eating good, nutritious food. The problem is that they pile worthless garbage on top of it (peppermint lattes, 500-calorie
muffins, gallon-size Cokes). If people stripped away the dietary clutter, they’d see that they don’t really have to make wholesale changes to what they eat; the good stuff may already be there. Cutting back on sodas and fancy coffee drinks can save a person 5 to 10 extra pounds each year.

Health. Be proactive. Make an appointment and talk with your doctor about being screened for life-threatening conditions such as breast cancer and hypertension. The medical system is patient-initiated. It’s set up to deal with you after you get sick, but early detection increases your chances of survival.

Relationships. Audit your relationships and cut out the deadweight. The most important relationships you have are with the people closest to you: your family, lifelong friends and supportive colleagues. These are the people who will be there for you—but you have to be there for them as well. That is why you have to stop supporting the relationships that drain your time and emotional energy and that deliver no value. It seems harsh, but I think it’s the ultimate form of respect. You choose to consolidate your energy so you can better support relationships that are the most meaningful to you.

Career. Recharge your batteries. There has to be a time in your day when you give your mind and body a chance to recuperate. Athletes perform at their best when I make them work hard and then make them recover, and the same holds true in the office. It’s not that you can’t sit at your desk and pound out reports dawn to dusk; it’s that you can enhance the quality of your work, the brilliance of your ideas and the depth of your creativity by taking time out of the day to rest. I treat work as an athlete in training. Training is about building your stamina through a cycle of intense and productive periods of work, followed by total recovery. Your productivity at work follows the same pattern. You can focus and accomplish a lot, but you need to take a total break from the chaos of your desk. Likewise, don’t think of the weekends and vacations as a luxury; the rest they offer is vital to the quality and volume you can produce at the office and your long-term contribution to your business.