Do you know the definition of insanity?
It’s doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results…or at least I think that’s how the lie goes.
Leave it to a culture obsessed with instant reward to equate patience with literal mental illness.
Sure, repetition—or better yet, monotony—can make even the best of us go crazy, but to become a better a runner, it’s a requirement to endure.
This is why you’ll hear a popular yet counterintuitive truth from the running community that says you should “run slow to run fast”. Explaining that phrase in detail and defending its accuracy would take thousands of words, but to put it simply, running a lot makes you faster, and in order to run a lot, you have to run slow.
Whenever you tell new runners about this truth, the usual response is one of…bewilderment. Why? Because they all think running is done at one pace. In their mind, it’s going all-out as long as you can until you eventually succumb to the pain.
Endurance running requires different training though. No long-distance runner trains at their race speed each time they hit the road. In fact, the majority of running done by even Olympic level athletes is ran at “easy” pace, a.k.a, the speed you can run without mouth-breathing at all.
The biggest endurance gains you achieve, especially as a newer runner, come from the slow adaptations your body makes from running a lot. The problem is, you can’t recover fast enough from intense sessions to consistently run the volume needed for those adaptations.
Those bouts of extreme intensity are unsustainable over the long term. That’s why we have to get boring, and run slow.
The Danger of the In-Between
Similarly to the sport of running, everyday endurance is built on the foundation of monotony. To improve, we have to make the small, boring decisions consistently instead of letting the desire for more tear us apart.
The truth is, even our good goals made with good intentions will smother us if we’re too focused on the final result.
Everyone wants to finish that stressful work project with time to spare for example. We all want to clear our blemishes and not be obese. And we’d all want to be loved again after making a mistake that got us cancelled.
But what happens when we hit a setback or don’t see improvement in those scenarios?
We’re stuck dealing with the in-between.
When your boss asks for good updates you know you can’t provide, when you see the same imperfections in the mirror each morning for weeks, or when you see your name dragged through the mud even months later, despair is the normal reaction.
We’re human. We get frustrated. We hate seeing genuine effort squandered.
We crave that final payoff because any other outcome is unfair. But here’s the thing about running marathons: it doesn’t matter how far you think you’ve run.
The finish line is the end. And the only thing you know for certain is that you’ll be running a long time.
Attacking the Mundane
So what do we do when we’re stuck here?
When our emotions react to apparent signs of failure, how should we react?
The answer is to go insane.
Not in a literal sense, of course, but in the sense that our culture describes. We force ourselves to do the same thing over and over again and expect those different results.
Good runners know how to bury their desire for race day outcomes and instead become passionate about the boring work in front of them. They find reward in the act of doing, not just in their achievements.
Similarly, the only way to build your endurance is to attack the mundane present. Forget that desire to fix everything all at once, and just focus on something small right now.
- If you want to lose weight for example, focus on today’s calorie goal.
- If you have a paper to write, knock out a 30-minute writing session.
- And if you want to be more social, say “hi” to one new person each day.
Yes, that all sounds so simple, but sometimes, we need a break from the bigger picture.
You don’t need mountains of motivation to overcome huge challenges after all. You just need a routine to keep chipping away.
Endurance is about suffering small reminders of failure until there is no failure anymore. And if being “crazy” helps you do that, why on earth would you want to be sane?
-Drew
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Marathon Mentality 5: A Race Ran Faithfully
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