An antidote to procrastination

In December I spoke at a conference called Important, Not Urgent. Friends and colleagues discussed ambitious goals, taking the first step, sticking with a plan, and enjoying life along the way. It was a good conversation. Plenty of people seemed to learn something about themselves.

The organizers asked me to talk about daily running in a session on sticking with things. It wasn't exactly a business strategy, but the organizers asked, and I told the story of my running year.

Listening to the other talks, I kept noticing how often procrastination came up. People wanted habits that would make them more effective, yet moved the same important tasks from one year's list to the next. Getting up early, finishing a dissertation or book, changing a habit: starting was hard, and keeping going seemed harder still.

After the conference, I thought: the 365 Challenge is brilliant training for beating procrastination. I can hardly imagine a better way to get rid of it. Once you've run for 180 or 300 days, complaints like "I can't make myself get up in the morning," "I can't lose weight," or "I can't find time to read" sound almost funny. You honestly can't see the problem anymore. Just do what needs doing.

The world seems full of perfectionist procrastinators. Better to do nothing than do it badly, they say. So they prepare to do everything brilliantly while doing nothing at all. Pointless perfectionism. Better to get something done, even clumsily. Regular running teaches you that. An imperfect workout beats a missed one. You learn to act instead of endlessly planning and putting things off.

After a year of running, procrastination is just a memory...

Wise advice I couldn't use

The end of the year is a time to look back and make plans.

I read running articles all the time and followed plenty of blogs. Eventually I noticed a catch. To write about running with any authority, you need experience. By the time you've got that experience, you've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner. So the people who know the most can be the hardest for a beginner to understand.

Someone who runs a 2:45 or 2:30 marathon, or faster, knows a thing or two about training. Their methods may be excellent. For a person who has never run 10 km, however, the explanation can feel like a survival guide to the moon. Correct, perhaps, but difficult to understand and impossible to apply yet.

Take the recommendation to schedule one or two rest days a week. That's right and important when you're running 80 to 120 km a week or more. Serious enthusiasts and professionals need the rest. But at 20 to 25 km a week, I think a rest day just breaks the rhythm. Your body already has time to recover, so an empty day adds nothing. Short workouts every other day don't even give it a chance to get tired: it adapts to the light workload and stops improving.

I'd read about running a negative split in a marathon. Absolutely right, when you can run a marathon faster than 5:30 per kilometer. But if you lack basic endurance, being told to push harder after 21 km sounds like dark humor. Almost mockery. Knowing about negative splits won't help when you've burned through your carbohydrate stores, hit the wall, and can barely run at all. How are you supposed to speed up? It took me four marathons to get even a shaky grip on pacing. Slow learner. Some lessons you have to learn with your feet.

Or take the golden rule of easy long runs. As a beginner, simply covering 10 km could be an all-out effort. My pulse was high, I did it infrequently, and progress was hard to see. Without understanding how to bridge that gap, it was easy to conclude that running wasn't working and give up.

By the end of the year, I understood my body very differently. Looking through old Nike, Garmin, and Strava records can make my hair stand on end. Given my pace and volume during that first challenge, how did I ever break four hours? It now looks like a small miracle.

With more experience, I could look back and make better sense of it. Then I could plan the next season and discuss those plans with the people closest to me.

Partners

If you share your life with someone, their feelings about running can make a big difference to yours. Support helps enormously. Arguments about all the time away, the endless running talk, and trips to races make things harder.

There's a joke that if a runner is still married, they're not training enough. Too far, I think. In that case, I'm happy to train too little.

My wife, Natalie, once wanted me to lose some weight. I promised I would, and at first she encouraged me. Then enthusiasm took over, and we began a series of tactical negotiations. Training affected the family schedule. Breakfast and dinner shifted around the run.

Eventually she softened. Seeing the changes in my body, she accepted the workouts as part of life. A person ought to have a hobby, and running was hardly the worst hobby I could have picked.

I tried to bring her fully into the running community, without much success. She runs a little and likes the health stats on her watch. Running together is difficult because our paces are so different. We can go out at roughly the same time, but follow different routes and cover different distances. Sharing our discoveries and achievements afterward works beautifully. That brings us closer.

She puts up with the shelf of running clothes, shoes that cost as much as a phone, and a drawer full of vitamins. I'm grateful. I really do think I'm lucky.

If I had to make the case for running at home, here's what I'd say:

Exercise deserves a place in our lives. Running is at least as reasonable as a gym membership and doesn't have to take more time.

Runners who train regularly get sick less often.

I keep discovering places we can visit together later.

I prefer the shape running gives me to the shape I got from watching TV.

Less money and attention go toward drinking, smoking, and other unhelpful habits.

Your partner gets to be proud of your running achievements too.

There's always, always something to talk about.

Nietzsche had a wonderful idea: the purpose of marriage is conversation. Not children, a shared household, sex, happiness, care, or accumulating property. Conversation. I like that distinction. Make caring for each other the central purpose and you risk slipping into a parent-and-child relationship. Conversation means exchanging ideas and knowledge, learning to compromise, and growing as two people.

Running keeps that conversation going. It gives us one more subject we never seem to exhaust.

Natalie is watching me write this chapter about her. Later we'll probably discuss all of it: running, books, future trips, and what this year has brought us.

One percent better

Things changed for British cycling when Dave Brailsford took charge. He wasn't famous as a champion rider, but became famous for his approach to performance. The story starts with a team that had won little and struggled for prestige. Some sponsors were supposedly reluctant even to be associated with it.

Brailsford came up with a brilliant idea and put it into practice: marginal gains, small improvements that add up. His principle was simple: improve every aspect of cycling by 1%, and those tiny gains will combine into a substantial improvement.

They looked at every detail: food, daily routines, mattresses, tire weight, saddle shape, massage products. Little problems they'd always put up with became chances to improve. Movements, habits, equipment: look closely, make something a little better, repeat.

The results went well beyond the national team. Bradley Wiggins, riding for Team Sky, became the first British winner of the Tour de France, cycling's most prestigious race. Brailsford led that team too. The first British winner. Ever.

You and I probably won't be entering the Tour de France anytime soon. The idea is still useful.

Unfortunately, it works the other way too. Small problems add up. A faulty bolt, a sloppy weld, a temperature reading a few degrees off: put enough of them together and you've got a rocket that fails, a car that breaks down, or a dead phone. The mistakes start making each other worse.

A burger and fries instead of a salad. Skipping a workout for an evening with a beer. Do it once and your life won't change. Keep doing it for years, and those small choices add up to a big difference.

Losing 20 kg or running a marathon isn't one magical event on one glorious day. It's all the little efforts you made along the way, adding up. Shoes, sleep, varied training: it all matters.

Start getting into running and the sheer volume of advice makes your head spin. Every runner, me included, thinks they're an expert and is ready to help. Websites, blogs, coaches: advice everywhere. Which tips work? Hard to say, but I think almost all of them do. I've read a lot and tried plenty. Most of the advice is either obvious or very useful.

Imagine that: the advice works if you follow it! There's just so much of it that nobody listens.

Yes, you need good shoes, good technique, healthy food, varied workouts, changes in training load, breathing, gear, and more. So many things to work on that you don't know where to begin. You want to tackle the important stuff first and leave the rest for later. You need priorities. So what matters most?

All of it! You don't have to perfect one thing before moving on to the next. Perfection is impossible, so improve everything a little, even by 1%, and keep going. What matters is making those small improvements regularly. They'll add up, and the results will follow.

Perhaps that's why the 365 Challenge appealed to me so much. Regular exercise. Small daily improvements. Lots and lots of little victories. Little, yes. But every day. That's what leads to enormous personal change.

Read running books in that spirit, too. Keep looking for ideas that can help you improve.

Listen to all the running advice, or nearly all of it, and try things for yourself. If something gives you even a 1% improvement, it's worth having. Over time, the results can be extraordinary. Or at least, they'll mean a lot to you.