Why not?

With love and respect to all of my non-running friends, there are some stock things that many of you tend to say to runners, and pretty much all of us have heard them many times. A couple of examples:

When someone finds out that I run a lot...
"Isn't that hard on your knees?"

When I explain I'm an ultrarunner and tell them how long my last race was...
"I don't even like to drive that far!"

For the record, no, running is not hard on your knees if you train properly - and I don't like to drive that far either. Also for the record, I don't really mind hearing these things over and over. I realize you're just making small-talk, and it would be foolish of me to expect everyone to come up with something new and original. I'm grateful you like me enough to want to engage in conversation about it at all!

Recently I identified a new one to add to the list, and this one got me to thinking (which is dangerous, and often leads to a blog post). This one had been slipping by me because it tends to vary with the seasons where I live, but I have heard some version of it many, many times:

"You don't run in this [heat | cold | rain | wind | whatever] do you?"

Why yes... yes I do. More importantly, why wouldn't I? - and more importantly still, why would you ask that, and have you ever thought about what asking it might reveal about you? Uh-oh. Now please believe me that where I go with this next is not intended as a personal or blanket condemnation of anyone. These are just some general thoughts about one possible problem that could (emphasize - could) underlie the asking of that kind of question. I think this might just be worth some introspection on the part of the people who ask it

Running as a sport is just one of a class of activities that share something very important in common. Other examples include dieting, general exercise for good health, developing just about any good habit, or training for pretty much any skill-based activity - in other words, it's a big class of activities. What they have in common is that while success is measured by the achievement of long-term goals it is built as the sum of small and in themselves relatively unimportant day-to-day decisions.

If your goal is to lose twenty pounds over the course of a year it doesn't matter all that much what you eat for lunch next Tuesday, or for dinner Friday night the week after that. It only matters what all of your meals together add up to over the course of the year. It matters what you do on average.

If your goal is to train for a marathon next fall it doesn't really matter if you missed your last training run because you got called in for the night shift at work and you were just too tired to drag yourself out to run that morning. It matters a very great deal that you complete most of your training runs.

We humans are not very good at this class of activity. We are quick to recognize the relative insignificance of each little decision and terrible at averaging over long periods of time. We are quick to give ourselves a pass on today because we see all of the remaining opportunities to do better in front of us and we're sure that we will do better tomorrow - or maybe the day after.

Added to that, we are very good at establishing what we do over medium periods of time as longer-term habits. Make the "not today" decision every day for just a few weeks and whatever you did instead of what you were supposed to do becomes your new habit (or your old habit reinforced). With each passing day that we reinforce the wrong habit the likelihood that we really will "do better tomorrow" becomes smaller.

What really sabotages everything though is something else that we're very good at: reasons. We find it trivially easy to justify each of those "not today" decisions because... reasons. Today is different from all of the other days somehow. It's too hot... or too cold... or too something else.  It's a special social function where everyone is expected to overeat. It's something. "I know this is bad," we tell ourselves, "but..." reasons. "I'll do better tomorrow."

Will you?

I combat these very human traits in me as I pursue my running goals by applying something I might call "transference." It's a mental trick done by using some really bad math. Let's say the importance to me of my long-term goal is a measurable quantity, and let's call that quantity  'x'.

(I know, I'm asking you to do algebra here - but stay with me).

Then let's say that the number of 'decisions' (workouts, meals, or whatever) between me and the accomplishment of my goal is 'y'.

("Aaaah! X's and y's both!" - I know, I know - don't panic.)

It follows then, that the importance of any one of those decisions (if all are equal) would be x divided by y (that is, x / y). For example, let's say my long-term goal is to complete a marathon and the training plan I will follow to prepare for it has 100 workouts. In this case, y = 100 and whatever my marathon might be worth to me, each workout in the training plan is worth 1/100th of that (x/100).

If I say then that my marathon is worth 100 'importance points' (however I define those - like maybe "staying alive" gets one million importance points and everything else in my life scales down from there) that means that x in this example is also 100, and the importance to me of any one of my workouts is just a measly one importance point - because 100 / 100 = 1.

Kapish?

So far that describes the way things really are and it's completely correct math - but now let's bring in transference, the 'mathematical' sleight of hand that makes all the difference! This is very simple. I just ignore everything I said above and I work from this ludicrous equation instead:

x/y = x

Huh? Doesn't that mean that I'd claim (in my example, for example) that 100 / 100 = 100? Yup. I ignore the division. I treat each little decision as though it is just as important as the long-term goal. My workout isn't just one workout out of a hundred. It's the whole marathon. Lunch on Tuesday isn't just lunch on Tuesday. It's the whole twenty pounds.

Those things aren't true, of course, but believing that they are - and acting like I believe it - makes all of my 'reasons' for not doing the right thing seem pretty silly. On one side I've got "work was busy today and I'm a little tired," and on the other side I have my marathon. That makes it hard not to suck it up, lace up my shoes, and head out the door to run that piddly four miles or whatever is on my training schedule. It's less than an hour out of my life that I'd probably just spend vegging in front of the television anyway - and my marathon is at stake!

Goal transference short-circuits the 'reasons reflex' - and when 'reasons' aren't sabotaging me I build good habits instead of bad ones. After a while I don't feel right if I miss a run because running is what I do. I crave healthy food because that is what I eat. I don't see things like heat or cold or rain as problems because I've forced myself to learn how to deal with them (there are ways to deal with almost every apparent problem if you're motivated enough to figure them out). I don't see cooking healthy meals as a challenge anymore, because I've developed or found recipes I like, and my pantry is stocked with ingredients to make those things. I don't binge at every social function or meal eaten out - because every meal matters to me and I've figured out how to order healthy, take half of it home to eat later, or say "no thank you" without causing offense. In short, the things I claim I want to be doing are now the routines of my life.

Once that happens, I don't even have to try to track my average performance - because the average takes care of itself. I only misstep once in a while when something legitimately takes me out of my routine rather than failing almost all of the time because I've never really integrated what I'm supposed to be doing into my routine in the first place. This one little mental discipline rolls back the entire failure cascade we're all prone to.

This is why whenever anyone says to me something like, "You don't run in this heat, do you?" I feel genuinely puzzled. I look at them a bit strangely and I wonder why they would even ask such a question - and the first thing that pops into my mind in response is, "Well why not?"

I also can't help wondering if they just happen to be the (very normal) kind of person who is regularly frustrated by failure to accomplish their long-term goals, and I wish that I could tell them all this.

How do you develop this discipline in your life?

I can't give you a simple recipe for this, because it's still a mystery how it happened for me. Believe me, I've seen quite a few of my long-term plans go off the rails because I failed to do the day-to-day work required. Maybe I needed all those lessons in failure to bring me here. I can tell you from my experience with running that two attitudes have been keys:

1. Real desire.

I wanted my goals - my finish lines - with passion. I do not believe any sort of half-hearted 'it would be nice' kind of goal commitment can make this work. You have to be brutally honest and ask yourself, "Do I want this or don't I?" You have to be clear-eyed about the cost of answering "yes" - and if the honest answer is "no" then you should face that and probably not even start. Why set up another failure that is just going to make you feel terrible about yourself again? It's okay not to want things. Just be honest with yourself.

2. Faith in the process.

One training run won't make you feel like you're ready to take on a marathon. Neither will two...  or three... or ten. For my own goal of completing ultramarathons, one advisor told me it would take three to five years for me to develop a good base of fitness for them. You won't see immediate progress after each of your good decisions - but you have to believe that they are moving you in the right direction anyway, and that the small, positive effects are accumulating over time and will get you where you want to go if you stay the course.

It also helps to know how to measure your progress in a way that provides positive feedback.

If you read this far, I hope you found it helpful - and I wish you all success in pursuit of your own next goal.