Every December, during that week between Christmas and New Years when the present feels delicately suspended between the past and the future and time seems to briefly slow, I sit with my training journal and reflect. It’s a fun and useful exercise in reliving the highs and lows of the year, ferreting out both positive and negative patterns and analyzing some basic metrics.
One tally from 2023 that really stood out was the goose egg count: there were 100 days of doing nothing. With a very physically demanding job, it isn’t as if all of the zeros represented sedentary, office chair-to-couch scenarios; however, the truth was unavoidable: for 27% of the year, I had made no effort toward improving myself as an athlete.
Rest days are important, particularly as we age, and especially from the mechanical loading of running, but an honest assessment of my mindset illuminated the fact that my excuses for doing nothing—too sleepy to get up early and train before work, too exhausted to train after work, too busy, too middle-aged—had become more numerous than the myriad ancillary activities I could have been engaging in as a beneficial adjunct to actual running: strength training, stretching, mobility, self-massage and cross training.
With a milestone birthday no longer on a distant horizon and a rekindled desire to, at least temporarily, transition back from casual adventure running to frequent competitive racing fanning the cooling embers of dampened motivation, I knew I needed to make one simple yet significant change. That change can be summed up: something is better than nothing. The foundational process goal to my 50th year would be to never let a day go by without doing something—anything—in the name of forward fitness progress.
This five-word mantra—succinct enough to fit on a string-and-tag tea bag steeping diurnally in my subconscious—has made all the difference.
On workdays when I don’t rally for a morning run and “feel” too hosed to train in the evening, I force myself out the door with a retrofitted to the everyday aid station philosophy: avoid sitting down at all costs—a quick snack, a quick shower (my work is grimy) and I’m gone. What I have discovered is that the “feeling” of insurmountable fatigue is almost always more psychological than physical. There are exceptions but the majority of the time I warm up to the task at foot.
When the thought of adding to an already full day of time on feet with a run is as unpalatable as that umpteenth race day gel, I head to the gym. Sure, this is still technically more upright time, however the staccato versus continuous rhythms of strength work often present as more approachable to tired legs. And the benefits of regular strength training have become undeniable in a scant several months. I feel more durable now than a decade ago.
If all motivations fail, or I truly require a rest day from either a mental or physical standpoint, I sacrifice some couch time for a prehab activity. Not surprisingly, this has been the most profoundly positive adjustment. It has guaranteed that at least, once or twice per week, the body work that most runners so easily dismiss to our detriment – stretching, mobility and self-massage – gets incorporated into the routine.
One useful conceptualization of habit formation is that it requires approximately three weeks to create a habit and three months to transform that habit into a permanent lifestyle change. Regardless of individual variation in time required to affect lasting change, the point is that it does not occur easily or overnight, and falling into the ruts of old ways early in the process is a recipe for being bounced whole body off the commitment wagon on the wash-boarded road of temptation.
My moment of truth arrived on an exhausted late-January evening. It was lights out time after a busy day that I had let get away from me and a true goose egg was being laid. Crawling into bed 30 minutes later, after a relaxing stretching session, I felt strangely empowered. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
In a line from the song “Maybe That’s Something,” Sheryl Crow proclaims that “making miracles is hard work… most people give up before they happen.” It’s common to think of training in terms of some magical key workouts that, executed perfectly, are going to miraculously lead to breakthrough performance. Maybe. Without the consistency of doing the little things, however, even when life gets overwhelmingly busy and tiring, the overall value of important sessions is greatly diminished.
Peak performances, elusive as surface water in the desert, can appear a psychophysiological miracle, but they are not mysteriously sourced from some singular oasis of higher power. They are the product of countless, seemingly insignificant efforts – often mundane or uninspired – that were tempting to skip in a moment of weakness, added up over time to transform a mirage of possibility into reality.
Whether my simple change yields significant results as I head into a new decade remains to be seen. Already though, I feel a renewed vigor for everything in life, not just training, on a much more consistent basis. Heading deeper into cautious veteran territory, the prowess of my twenties remains tangible.
And that’s something.