Seems Icarian to write a blog post on “succeeding at (forming a habit of) jogging” after only two weeks. But I think I’ve cracked it. Running finally feels good. I think I can keep it up from here. I’d like to write about it at what seems to be the transition point, rather than when the habit is established and I can safely claim success.
I’ve tried running before. In 2014, I ran without any guidance, was miserable, thus ran irregularly, using up willpower on each run. In 2023 I tried starting c25k, a schedule for getting non-runners to be able to run a 5K within 9 weeks. Similar results.
This year I told ChatGPT how the previous attempts had gone, and it prescribed something different: one hard run a week, and two easy ones. And it drilled down on how to tell what hard and easy were. Not by heart rate, which I had used as a proxy before, but by ability to carry out a conversation mid-jog, which turned out to track exertion much more accurately for me.
I am now three hard runs and five easy runs in, and today the easy run (2.5 miles) clicked. I was clearly neither trying too hard nor avoiding trying. I had enough mental energy free to think about interesting things. And I thought, if two out of three runs is going to be like this, I can do it.
motivation
Because my slows and starts are determined by subjective exertion, and I’ve historically loved lying to myself about how hard things were, I don’t think I could have gotten to this eighth run without two pressures.
The first is that I want to have three more kids, and my cardiovascular endurance clearly is not good enough for me to be the primary caretaker of multiple children. I’ve spent many days feeling winded by my rambunctious baby (now ten months old) after not all that much physical effort – taking her on a brief walk, going up and down the stairs with her to do a chore one-handed.
I don’t want to play on defense with my energy. I’ve tried testosterone, I semiregularly take Ritalin, but it was time to somehow do the thing everyone knows works really well, which is exercise. I came to the above conclusion at the end of January, at a weekend-long annual reflection and goal-setting event organized by some acquaintances.
The problem was how to make myself do it. I brainstormed several goals and methods, feeling helpless. I felt like I’d tried a lot before, and failed every time, because I hate exercise so badly. I gingerly wrote down, as a goal, “I’d like to run a 5K by the end of the year.” Surely that was modest enough. Surely I could achieve that. But in fact I didn’t feel sure.
When the event organizers invited us to take one step for each of our main goals, I opened up a list of 5Ks near me, looking for a suitable run. The runs were organized chronologically, so the first ones I saw were happening soonish – March or May, not December. This book on procrastination and blocking suggests going slower or faster than your natural inclination if you find yourself stuck on a task. I thought, why not March? Seven weeks was tight to run a 5K – I vaguely recalled the c25k schedule took about that long – but it suddenly seemed obvious that having a tight deadline was going to work better than one that was too slack. So I signed up.
The second pressure is that – well. I found this run by opening up a list of 5Ks in my city. The link for the March running event went to this other website, runsignup. This event was a set of five runs of different lengths. I clicked the 5 mile option. There was a 5 in it and it was the shortest one, so that must be the one I wanted. I went through with checkout.
When my partner (whom I invited to join me) noticed it, I kind of freaked out. I had put myself on a tight schedule on purpose, but not that tight. But there weren’t obvious alternatives at a time and location I liked, and I kind of enjoyed being freaked out. If I worked really hard and didn’t let myself wiggle out of training, I was going to be in the bottom decile or quartile of participants. This was very motivating! It was going to be so hard I had to find out what would happen if I tried. I wanted to go to the moon.
Immediately after locking myself in to this race and feeling the delicious urgency and panic kick in, I felt stupid. Why hadn’t I just signed up for a run to force myself into shape before? The “5K” is literally in the name c25k. I should just have signed up for a 5K years ago.
I didn’t, because… I didn’t think I could do it. Week 1 of the c25k schedule felt shockingly, brutally hard to me, so I thought I must be at some exceptional level of lack of fitness that the creator hadn’t accounted for. (I still this might be true.) And because it was so miserable, I hadn’t trusted myself to stick to the schedule either.
But I bet it would have worked. I could have given myself a more generous timeline. I just wasn’t thinking clearly. This seems like enough of a big mistake that this post is in my mistakes folder.
what it was like
I’m alternating between jogging and walking, slowly increasing mileage.
Run 1 was brutal. I did 1.5 miles, 13'46 minutes per mile. I went all out. Maximum willpower, jogging until I felt like the exertion was actually bad for me. This tendency had caused conflict with my husband in the past – he thought I was being lazy. I often was lazy, but other times I was genuinely concerned for my health. It was hard for him to tell which was which, especially when I was slow by his standards all the time. This point usually hits around a heart rate of 165, although sometimes as low as 150. I’ve become firm about respecting this internal boundary. Maybe ideal training lies past this point sometimes. But sorry! Not going to do it! My heart rate sometimes does go up to 172 endorsedly, to be clear, it’s the subjective feeling of “oh shit I don’t know if this is all right” I’m tracking.
Runs 2 and 3 were meant to be easy, but I couldn’t make them easy even though I was trying. I would walk when things felt hard, and then jog when I recovered, and… this still added up to things being pretty hard. My minutes per mile were 17'42 and 16'22, much slower than the13'46 of the first run, but it felt 80-90% as difficult. Heart rate looked similar. I was stymied by this.
Run 4, two miles at full effort, was 14'34. Worse than run 1. This was partially due to being a little hungry – four hours after lunch.
Runs 5 and 6, two and three miles respectively, were 16'55 and 15'30. They didn’t feel easy either.
Run 7 was 2.5 miles at full effort. I figured run 1 had been good because it was short and I had been at my most motivated, and run 4 was more representative. I set a goal of 14'00. I ran in good condition, two hours after a full meal, and hit 13'48. This was when it hit me how much meal timing impacted my performance.
Run 8, today, was 2.5 miles at easy. 14'58. You can see the beginner gains over runs 1-7, but those weren’t that motivating for me. The flip at run 8, where the easy run actually felt easy, was much more impactful. When I was running not-hard, it actually felt not-hard instead of ‘still hard, but slower’. When I resumed jogging after a walking break, it was without the “okayyy. here we go again” micro-tension. When I wasn’t monitoring road safety and sanity-checking my heart rate, I was daydreaming and thinking about interesting stuff.
pesky agonizing pain
Dynomight has written a post on running that now seems to be describing a similar experience. But it did not convince me to run.
For some reason, people don’t tell you an important fact: That horrible feeling almost completely disappears within a few weeks of training. Your cardiovascular system develops quickly. Instead, you run until your legs get tired — an infinitely more pleasurable experience. The secret of all those “crazy people” on the street is that they aren’t suffering (or at least, not much).
…
But even this is misleading. It suggests you need to “break through” to the second stage, and only then running becomes easy. It suggests you must summon ultimate willpower for a few weeks in order to level up.
No! You don’t need ultimate willpower, even at the beginning. That’s the second thing people don’t tell you: You don’t need to suffer to get through to the second stage. You just need consistency.
…
- In each session, jog as long as you feel like it. When this gets hard, stop jogging and walk.
When I fell off the c25k schedule because it felt hard, I “failed” in the direction of comfortable jogs at the “week 2.5 of c25k” intensity, and I ran at that intensity for months without ever feeling like the next level was comfortable. I never leveled up.
I think, if you are as unfit and lazy as I am, it is better to just push through the pesky agonizing pain. If I’d known it would only last 2 weeks, I would have done this years ago. Specifically, my prescription to my past self would be:
- Sign up for a 5K, 6-10 weeks out.
- Ignore the c25k schedule. Only one in every three runs should be Like That.
- Run every other day, starting at 1.5 miles. Try to take the other two out of three runs easy, but accept that ‘easy’ will be confusing and still feel bad if I’m jogging at all. Because right now there’s no gray area where I’m running at all and things feel easy.
Other tips:
- One hack that made running much nicer is setting aside the first 6 minutes to running around the block to warm up, so I can come back home (or loop back to the car, if I’m on a trail) and dump my coat inside.
- I feel very averse to cold. In e.g. Seattle autumns, I’d start out wearing two sweaters/jackets, take them off as I warmed up, and tie them around my waist. This wasn’t great. Warming up first and dropping the coat makes the rest of the run much, much nicer. I mention this because I think people reading this with personal interest may have a similar problem, since low fitness ⇐> low metabolic rate ⇐> feeling cold easily.
- I invested more in gear this time. I’d previously done a minimum of “running shoes” and “sports bra”. My feet get uncomfortably hot – I took my shoes and socks off to cool them on the pavement once or twice every run – so after more consultation with ChatGPT, I bought ultralight socks, which feel maybe 30% better than my thin cotton socks. I bought two shirts, although I seem to be not using them very much. I bought pants, which I do.