Life Lessons Running is Teaching Me

I have always thought that physical activity is one of the most genuine means to get to know oneself deeply. The more the exertion is intense and uncomfortable, the more one starts to ask questions like “what the hell am I doing here?” “when does this end?” “ I can’t take it anymore”. The more such questions arise, the more opportunities for us to find our own answer.

Often, finding the answer involves a level of depth that goes well beyond the mere physical act, and one perhaps gets to discover some aspects of their character that were previously unknown. These are not light stuff: they have the power to gradually reshape an identity, and transform how one approaches life in all of its facets.

These questions may popup while lifting weights, training for a competition, or simply getting in the habit of walking a bit more. For me, this is happening thanks to long distance running, and in this post I will share some of the lessons running is teaching me.

The importance of long term planning

When I signed up for my first marathon I knew I was making a big step, one I had never done before. Although I signed up for a race some time in the future, what I was really committing to was a thorough, organised and intense training plan that spanned throughout several months.

The moment I received the confirmation email I had a weird and almost enlightening moment, as if I had found a purpose I hadn’t had in a long time. I knew that I would run the Marathon as an ambassador of the Diabetes Liga, representing people with type 1 diabetes like me, and that immediately put a great sense of responsibility on me. I immediately figured that for this whole thing to work, I would have to be disciplined, to workout smartly, to tame the Ego that wants me to push more when it is not safe to do so, to organise my schedule in order to improve my fitness without compromising the other important areas of my life.

I had to get granular: take the long term goal, scale it down to the month, the week, the day. Have a clear plan of action that minimises the guess work. Assign a specific purpose to each small action and to each day, and remind yourself how that aligns with the big goal.

It didn’t take long for me to notice that the same degree of intention and thoroughness in planning I was putting in my running started to leak to the way I worked at the office, or the way I went about other commitments in my personal life. My calendar became populated with small daily things that were functional to bigger things somewhere in the future, each of them being one piece of the domino with the power to compound the momentum.

The importance of falling in love with the process

Once all the pieces are intentionally been put on the calendar, you just have to fall in love with the process. Crossing a finish line or delivering something important feels great, but what about all the unseen frustrations, the boredom, the “I don’t want to do this now” moments that populate the path to success?

That is where one really builds character, and I used to be really weak at building character through hurdles. The good news is that I have improved! I started to setup some “auto-traps” that would make it inevitable for me to do what’s needed even when every cell in my organism pushes against it.

Auto-traps are small hacks that force you towards an action. For instance, if I have a long run and it is cold and rainy, I make sure my run gear is ready at the side of my bed. The moment I wake up I just put everything on and: from that moment, choosing not to run is an intentional step back. The same applies to office work: when I foresee a “boring” task, I setup a blocker for all the distracting websites and apps on my devices for a block of four hours. Once the block starts, I know in the next four hours I have no chance to seek some dopamine hit in some news or streaming platform. The only possible thing I can do is to sit down and do the work.

I could be tired, sick, lazy or unmotivated, but these auto-traps leave no room for alternative. They force you to see the task as the necessary step forward toward whatever long term goal you have, and they resurface and reinforce its meaning. Doing what you planned to do becomes easier because you now remember what’s the purpose behind it. In other words, you’re falling in love with the process, instead of just staring at the goal.

The importance of a slow run

The process is also made of those moments where you feel like you could push a lot harder, but it is actually safer to tame the excitement and slow down a bit. Once you have your big goal in mind, it is easy to just jump on it and “get to work”, rushing through the steps to get to the end and cheer on the results.

At work, this translates in defining a project and skipping the initial steps to set up the various milestones and deliverables. In sports, this could be running much faster than your body is capable of, or lifting a weight that you cannot yet control well. The outcome? You deliver a messed up project at work, and you injure yourself.

I struggled with rushing through things a lot, until my running coaches highlighted to me that the reason I suffered knee pain in the past was because I was running too fast and too often. What was essential, they said, was to run a lot more and a lot longer at an “easy pace”, that pace that when someone sees you they think “is he even running??”. Even more, I should introduce some run-walk intervals in my training.

That was hard to accept at first, because at times I felt like my body was well capable of pushing a lot harder, and my Ego was still complaining that the pace displayed on my watch was too slow.

But then, week after week not only did I witness my total weekly distance increase. My pace went up too! How is it possible that walking and running slower is making me run faster and longer? That is not magic, it is the mere consequence of a body that is able to slow down when it is necessary to be slow, and is then able to perform at its peak when it is required to be fast.

This somehow reshaped my mental attitude toward all things in life. I feel much more patient, and the urge to “get there” that used to constitute one of the building blocks of my character is now fading into oblivion.

Make mistakes, audit them, find the fix

As mentioned, I used to suffer from all kind of running injuries, the classic ones that every runner is supposed to meet at some point because they’re just “part of the game”. I also used to constantly fall short on many work things because I either worked shallowly (i.e.: “I don’t want to to do this”) or because I did not see purpose on what I was doing.

Then I started to take notes, to ruthlessly audit myself every day. And soon after I started to see mistakes as the most information rich thing in the universe.

I saw that my knee pain originated from a week of where my running form was not on point, or where I slept less than usual, or where I tried to push the boundaries a bit too much past what was scheduled.

I was also exposed to other mental weaknesses of mines, that were holding me back: I was complaining a lot with colleagues and friends about how I wanted to be doing something else, something “more exciting”, something that “meant something”. Spotting this pattern in my journal entries revealed a side of me that was keen to complaints and not keen to sit down and recognise the meaning and the value in the “boring stuff”.

These weaknesses were causing me to under deliver at work and under perform at running. I could not see how running a slower mile, when my body needed to run slower, could make me stronger. Nor could I see how the “boring stuff” I was doing was supposed to push me towards the “exciting stuff’.

All the mistakes and wrongs that originated from this approach were a goldmine of information for me, because the self-audits exposed the areas where I needed to work the most. Once I saw that, it gradually became more evident that every action was a chance to reinforce a different identity. “How you do anything is how you do everything” became a loud and recurrent mantra in my head. This small sentence turned the slow runs and runs in the cold and the rain into enjoyable workouts, and flipped the “boring stuff” at work into a golden chance to train mental endurance. I don’t like it? I forget that I don’t like it and just do it. When running, I shift my focus from the cold to smiling to people on the streets. When at work, I forget about the boredom and find one little aspect of the task that is enjoyable.

I stop repeating the self-defeating mistake of sticking to an old identity. I audit my behaviour and see how I can fix it. This process is reinforcing my confidence that I am becoming a person that is able to endure when the excitement wanes, and that can get to work under non-ideal conditions.

You are not capable of doing “just a bit more”, until you are

Accepting a slower mile, a slow walk during a run session, a less exciting work task or one that feels “boring” are all precious occasions for us to put ourselves into non ideal conditions, get through the thing and come on the other side stronger. They give us small wins to cherish, small positive reinforcements we can stack on each other and compound over time.

True, this slow run will not win me a marathon, but it will get me there safely and probably able to run it faster.

True, this boring thing at work will not cause awe in the organisation, but it is my chance to do the work and master the skill that will eventually make me better at what I do.

It is all about reframing what’s in front of you and see it as your golden opportunity to reshape your mind, to forge your new identity. A victory does not have to be anything grandiose. Sometimes a victory is not doing “just a bit more” much as it is being able to do “just a bit less”, because slowing down often do put us in the best conditions to endure the long run.

Small win after small win, slow run after slow run, boring task after boring task, you’ll approach the finish line with a big smile. All the months of training, of taking notes and correcting mistakes, of mastering the process and playing the game to be “in it for the long run” will pay back eventually.

And you’ll find that, indeed, you are capable of “just a bit more”.