Running

“No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.”

— Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I think it’s important to have something outside of work that you take at least as seriously as your job. I think it’s irrelevant what that something is.

At the beginning of this year I set myself a goal to run 5k in under 20 minutes. While this is something that thousands of people (annoyingly, including both my younger brothers) do each day, to me it felt like a stretch goal. At the beginning of the year, I was generally satisfied if I ran a 5k in under 25 minutes. I’m not really a runner and I never have been. Some of the worst memories I have from school are about running laps of the rugby pitches — I couldn’t think of anything worse at the time than a timed 1k run. Also, I was terrible at it.

I found running tedious at first but after a few weeks I began to enjoy heading out for a run and I even saw my 5k times improve. Then I discovered my local Parkrun and things took a dramatic turn for the better. Parkrun is amazing. Every Saturday morning at 9am approximately 250 people show up at my local park and thanks to a selfless group of volunteers they get to take part in a timed 5k run. It’s not a race, unless you want it to be (read: it’s a race).

I’ve done nearly 20 Parkruns now and they have really helped me get closer to reaching my goal. My PB stands at 20:30 but about two months ago I realised that I had stopped making progress and I decided to analyse why that might be.

Pretty quickly I figured out my main problem. I wasn’t training in the right way. I was showing up consistently for Parkruns on Saturday mornings sure, but during the week my training was not at all targeted to my goal. I was doing some cross training but not specific running workouts. So I decided to get some help. Asking around, I found out about a website called Train as One — an online running coach. You tell it your goal and it tracks your workouts and designs a training program for you. It’s generally been a mixture of long runs and short, intense sessions.

This coming Saturday is my last Parkrun of 2018 and so my final shot at hitting my stretch goal for 2018. I’m nervous about it. I’m excited about it. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t hit my goal. Which is a great thing — because it means I care.

The reason I think it’s important to have something like this outside of work is because it forces you to be disciplined with your time. It gives some structure to each week. The most important thing though is that it takes up some headspace and gives you something to focus on outside of your work. I find it means that when I do come back to thinking about work I’m fresh and can more easily focus on the tasks I need to get done. And it hopefully also means that I don’t bore too many friends with work chat (although it’s an open question whether running chat is more or less interesting).

If you’re finding that you’re constantly in your own head about work, try setting yourself a goal that is completely unrelated to what you do in your job. Try and be specific about the goal. Tell someone what your goal is so you feel committed to it — and then get after it. Good luck.