What I've learned from running 10,000 kilometersOct 12, 2022

I recently passed my 10,000th kilometer running. Along the way, I’ve noticed that it’s an unexpectedly philosophical activity. Here’s what running has taught me so far:

Process blinders

Training is mostly guessing and experimentation. Scientific principles can help guide things, but you ultimately don’t control if or when your body adapts to training, nor whether that will translate to desired outcomes. If you hang your happiness wholly on outcomes (“run X:XX in my October marathon”), you tend to be stubborn in your pursuits and unknowingly accumulate risks that lead to injury or burnout.

It’s more durable to find meaning from the process instead of the outcome. The process of training is the mundane day-to-day: 400s on a crisp sunny day, feeling constantly dully sore, or being unexcited about today’s easy run. If you can find something meaningful in these ordinary moments and cherish it,¹ you’ll build an appreciation for the activities that drive the outcomes you want. This helps you put in the work when you’d rather not, creating the consistency that decisively affects your goals.

Put simply, take care of the process and the outcome will take care of itself.

Stack bricks

Meaningful outcomes require consistent execution over time, which means you need patience to see investments come to fruition. This can be difficult - training is principally an act of faith,² so you’ll always have doubts that what you’re doing will get you where you want to go. Embracing process over outcomes is one approach to wrestle this doubt. Reframing the process itself as the goal means you avoid conditional gratification and bring daily wins under your control. Doing this isn’t a mere parlor trick, it’s a deeper realization that the outcome is probably less meaningful than you think and the process moreso.³

Another approach is to increase your minimum unit of time. Instead of looking for outcomes in hours or days, force yourself to think in terms of months and years.⁴ This helps in several ways. First, a compounding process begins slowly and yields the majority of gains later, so you need to keep the ball rolling long enough to reach exponential growth. Fitness is a compounding process since being more fit allows you to handle more training, which makes you more fit. Second, training requires productive experimentation to figure out what works for you, and good experiments that produce actionable insights take time.

Naval puts this best:

You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of [patience].

Default uninjured

A typical failure mode that interrupts compounding fitness is to injure yourself in stubborn pursuit of an outcome. Most runners ramp their training load too aggressively out of impatience or to hit a personal best in their next race. They’re by default, going to get injured. What we don’t realize that the next race doesn’t matter, nor the one after that — what matters is being able to run. When you get an injury that takes you out for months, these truths become self-evident.

To realize your potential, it’s better to be default uninjured by progressing sustainably with a cautious eye to avoid ruin. This means dialling back your progression to a rate you could handle even on your worst weeks. It means changing your mindset from glorifying heroic willpower to rolling with the punches and keeping the ball rolling.⁵ This kind of austerity is difficult. It requires more discipline than gutting it out and it means your immediate progress will slow down.

But, having realized that the process is the goal, we want to keep on running. The next week, next month, next year, and the next decade. We want to play the infinite game.

Everything is training

In order to play a game well, you need to know what knobs you can turn and what affects your score. A crucial realization is that the game of training is the game of life.

Our bodies experience the world as a black box that triggers internal responses when we interact with it. Because of this, it can’t differentiate between unproductive life stress and productive training stress. Since the body can only adapt to a maximum total dose of stress, any life stress reduces the capacity to respond to training stress. Put simply, everything is training, but not all training is productive.

The corollary is that there are knobs we can turn other than training. How we eat, rest, and play are equally as important. For example, sitting might be the new smoking, and even significant exercise might not counteract the negative effects of lots of sitting. Mid-day walks have helped my mental and physical performance tremendously.

This kind of advice has reached meme-dom. Less obvious is play: having high-quality, fulfilling leisure (i.e. not doomscrolling on Twitter/YouTube) is the equivalent of recovering on steroids. The problem is that it’s hard to have a good time. Especially because we intuitively feel that it should be easy to have fun, so if we’re struggling, we must be doing something wrong.

Accept that it takes work, comes with regrets, and make the time to cultivate high-quality leisure as a necessary part of realizing your potential.

This too shall pass

The outcome of your next race doesn’t matter, nor the one after that. Similarly, neither does your next run, nor the run after that. Every workout is a minuscule drop in the bucket of your fitness, and a drop-a-day is all you get. While this means the best workout you ever did doesn’t matter, it also applies to your worst workout. No single thing matters - meaningful outcomes arise from the accumulation of minute work over long periods of time.

Certain events feel decisive when experienced locally, like their ripples will make-or-break our lives. We realize they aren’t so when we live to tell the tale and gain the clairvoyance of hindsight. All roads lead to Rome, and by keeping the ball rolling, staying in the game, and being default uninjured, we eventually find the trail that gets us there.

The end of the beginning

There are two ways to progress faster: do more or reflect more on what you do. Insights about yourself and the world around you lie everywhere, but are only gleaned when you take the time to see the generalities that connect the space between the lines. You may have learned these lessons another way, but for me, they manifested most during my journey running.

See you at 20,000.