If you’ve read my previous experiment, where I tracked every minute of my life for 5 months, you may have noticed that I enjoy methodically ‘torture’ myself to optimize my time and way of life. Hah! Just kidding — I experimented with different techniques on myself because I needed to know how best to distribute time and energy for my career goals. Right now, it’s getting my PhD. Doing a PhD is always a marathon, not a sprint.
This time, I tried and was able to sustain the habit of running every single day.
Early in 2019, recovering from a rather immature heartbreak, I went on a fitness kick and started taking classes at Orangetheory Fitness. It offered a great foundation for my subsequent fitness training and was a kickstart to my journey of becoming a “fitness person.” Sustaining additional habits to improve my physical health hadn’t been the easiest thing for me — I would start, proceed at full speed, halt, restart, stop, and re-start again. Luckily, encouraged by the newbie gains over the few months I’d trained, I carried on and signed up for a 5K race, my very first race of any distance.
I was excited to take on new challenges, but I was not a runner. My biggest athletic achievement was a neighborhood swimming championship when I was a third-grader. The problem with my previous fitness endeavor was the constant strain I imposed on my willpower. I incessantly told myself that “I’d do it” and blamed myself whenever I missed a workout (honestly, not that big of a deal.) It came to a point where I was stressing out so much that my willpower essentially broke down.
Our willpower is a limited resource. It depletes without replenishment.
And I hoped starting running could be a way for me to correct how I had abused my willpower.
I am not a personal trainer or running coach by any means, but in short, I ran every single day (varying mileage and supplementing with strength training to avoid overtraining & injury) from January 2019 to now in 2020, substracting a few months in quarantine.
Despite the rather gloomy 2020, you should be glad to know that I completed not only that 5K I signed up for, but also an 8K and a 10K. Because of the quarantine in effect earlier this year, I wasn’t able to complete my very first half-marathon scheduled in May, but I am resuming training now to complete that (on my own with safe distancing!!!) by the end of this year.
They say after a few weeks of running, I would begin to experience the true runner’s high from the triggering of the endocannabinoid system and the unleashing of feel-good brain chemistry on the road.
While this is awesome and true, the best part of running for me was that it helped me not only improve my willpower but also become better at living my life to the fullest.
Don’t believe me? Here are 5 ways it did, summarized in 5 life lessons.
1. No auto-pilot for success
All these years surviving the Chinese education system made me quite an expert on auto-pilot. My daily schedule was predetermined down to the minutes during my time at boarding school with little time left for my endeavors. Later during college and now graduate school, I’ve learned to only focus on the big picture, never stopping from the busyness and letting time fly. My life had been reactive because I let life happen to me.
Taking up running, not surprisingly, disrupted my rather predictable routines. With my mileage varying from day to day, I was forced to pay attention, change things up, and make the runs happen. During those days, a lot of the “little things” — getting running gear ready the night before, making the meal before running not too heavy but still nutritious, stretching — all are necessary components to setting myself up for success in running. I could no longer rely on automatic routines to avoid exercising and improving my little-to-none willpower by pushing myself out of my comfort zone.
Staying out of auto-pilot in my training those months helped me build a slower but more conscious and mindful way of going about life. This extra time created space for me to reflect, refocus, and take back control of how I distribute my energy. For running, I was able to narrow down what I liked, what I wished could be different, and how my body was progressing during the training. Then I tweaked my activities and optimized for the future. By taking back that control, I can truly enjoy what I enjoy and what is good for me. I am happier.
All of that I would not be able to do if I just let the days go by.
I should stress that there is absolutely nothing wrong with going autopilot — it prevents us from collapsing under the pressure to hyperfocus on every little decision.
What should not happen is letting those routines dictate how we live.
This leads to my next point:
2. The mighty power of planning and thinking it through
Like me, you might also be into researching productivity and living life in the most meaningful way possible, maybe overdosing on YouTube productivity videos in the process. As many may have mentioned, if we don’t do the work that must be done before actions can happen, our efficiency suffers. Planning — PROPER planning, helps us function better.
Starting the training for 5K, I was overwhelmed. I felt I bit off more than I could chew, and was too intimidated to just start moving. The more inaction I engaged in, the more intimidated I became, and the more frustrated I became because I wasn’t able to move forward in a positive direction.
As the 5K race date loomed, though, I bit the bullet, worked off of a couch-to-5K plan, and DIY-ed a daily running plan for myself (consult a professional if you were to do this though.) Once I began working through the plan, I finally developed the confidence to navigate this hectic journey — because I’ve got a map.
The same can be applied to our days in general. When we put in the effort to planning out the structures of our projects or days beforehand, we can reasonably increase the effectiveness of our execution later on. Planning and thinking it through takes doubts and intimidation out of the equation. We can move towards our goals or progress with determination and confidence knowing that a) we thought everything through, and b) we are taking the most efficient and appropriate actions.
3. Can’t stop, won’t stop when things get tough
Life, as many of us have experienced so far, is messy. Being at home for months left me behind in my wet-lab experiments and dissertation progress. I felt, and still am feeling like all motivation is lost. But thanks to running, I was poised to persist.
Before our world got interesting, life already gets in the way of things now and then. What I’ve learned pushing myself to run every day is that roadblocks naturally happen — they exist not because they hate us and want us to fail, but because like everything around us, they just exist as a part of life. Not everything is recruited to work against me, not everything is personal. All I need to do when various events throw me off track is to get back up, dust myself off, adapt my strategies to the new reality, and resume. Striving to do everything perfectly in one go does not get me, you, or anyone, anywhere.
Case in point: I got sick in March. I was bedridden and couldn’t exercise or carry out my running plan for weeks. Then, the quarantine happened. I complained to my friends profusely. During one of those whining sessions, one of my high school friends kept quiet the entire time and at the end asked in a nonchalant, slightly mocking manner: “You say you are losing sleep over this, but will it still matter 5 years from now?”
Mindblown.
You, my dear readers, don’t need me, a much less experienced person at life, to tell you that you shouldn’t beat yourself up for the tiny mishaps and tough situations constituting our human experience (missing out on runs in my case.) In a project, a career path, or an education with clear delineation of end goals, any grind forward is good grind. If you are forced on a tangent, adapt your strategies, accept it as a learning experience for handling discomfort (AKA be chill about it,) and don’t stop. Thinking about life as an ultra-marathon replenishes my willpower as I keep going, because every step matters, literally and metaphorically.
4. Your strength is always underestimated (even by you)
I know, I know. I’m a broken record.
But it doesn’t matter how many people have told you this, I’m going to say it to you again: This year has been difficult for a lot of us, but you are much stronger than you think.
A little bit about how I’m doing during the pandemic: I feel stagnant. I feel like I was hit in the gut with the massive setbacks in time. I was disappointed because this year was far from my expectations. As I watched precious time slip by, I was barely holding on from slipping into a depressive episode. Coming out of quarantine, I feel incredibly lucky but am still haunted by the months of wondering how I was going to make it through. Even now, more often than before, I feel uninspired and discouraged, because everyone is brittle and powerless facing the forces of nature.
Maybe you feel the same.
But as I reminisced about the ultra-long running streak I held, I was amazed to find that regardless of how shitty I feel, I am stronger than the person that I was a year ago. I am grateful for the privilege to move and breathe freely. I was amazed I was able to run every single day. Then, I was in awe of my body at the end of the 5K that I finished what seemed to be at the time an impossible feat. Now I casually run 3 miles as part of my running routine. I was blown away yet again when I completed my 8K with energy to spare. Now my eyes are on doing the same with the half-marathon. I was impressed with my body’s ability to accomplish things I never thought to be plausible. Now I KNOW I can do it, I just need to believe in myself that I CAN do it. It is not always the case, but when it comes to the relationships between you and your strength, everything is mental.
This is not just about running or any physical feats. The ups and downs of our days are responsible for sculpting us into the strong and resilient people we are. We might think we are stagnant, but we never are. We are getting stronger every single day by just putting one foot in front of the other.
5. Habits: reward cycle FTW
In recent months, one book has taken the Productivity Tube by storm — Atomic Habits by James Clear. I promptly hopped on the bandwagon and read through that book. And boy, was I in for a treat. Among the myriad of incredibly useful and insightful concepts compiled in the book, his mention of the habit loop got me intrigued.
The notion that habit can be sub-divided into different steps in a “system” teachable to our brains was popularized first by authors Charles Duhigg and Nir Eyal. The loop goes like this:
The presence of a cue triggers a craving.
The craving prompts a response.
The response leads to a reward that scratches the itch.
We enjoy the reward.
We further associated the reward with the aforementioned cue.
A habit forms if we reinforce the feedback loop.
Before I got my hands on Clear’s fascinating read and subsequently Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, I had been, fortunately, unconsciously cultivating my reward system as I got deeper into daily running.
I picked my cues to be the 1–2h time window every day after work with my running gear well laid out in view the moment I stepped into my apartment. Then, I would repeat to myself: “Now I have the time and the gear, I will go outside and run. After the run, I will feel great and treat myself with a smoothie that I never have the time to make in the mornings.” This way, I teach my brain about the great reward that is a smoothie after running. The more I repeat the cycle, the more I (or my brain) unconsciously associate a great smoothie with a refreshing run outside.
A lot of us, including myself, fall into the habit of forcing ourselves into “habits” that should be good for us but are never properly introduced as something to enjoy. The fact that we have to force ourselves dooms those items of actions as things we should not enjoy, hence making them unsustainable. By teaching our brains to enjoy the process of forming the habits we want to form or achieving the things we want to achieve, life can be a little more enjoyable.
Now, I am not trying to convince you to go out and run every single day just to bring a sense of renewal, novelty, or inspiration back into your life. It is important to know from my experience, however, that any attempt at living our lives to a fuller extent comes with consistent actions. Moving upwards towards a better you is all about setting a destination and taking one step at a time to get there. Once you get there, set a new destination and repeat. But what all of us should strive to enjoy and learn from is the process of getting “there,” not the destinations themselves.
With a great workflow of getting to one metaphorical destination to the next, the world is your oyster.
How you would get there specifically, in my opinion, would depend on self-experimentation. Only you can find out what you can do to achieve maximal benefits.
So instead of striving to achieve just goals, would you join me in this journey of forming habits and improving our living one experiment at a time?
