Running Your Race at a Different Pace

Sometimes I hear words that for whatever reason tend to resonate with me.  Often I will hear the same word repeated over and over again in conversations with different people.  When that happens I tend to spend a bit more time thinking about the word.  Today the word that I heard or thought of a number of times before I started writing this is "pace."  

Today is one of those days when the outside temperature was at 80 when I was having a cup of tea.  The weather forecaster said that was our low for the day.  My early plan was to spend time outside writing today but realized after a few moments that it was too hot to sit outside.  I also realized that I would need to adjust my pace for the day  

As a runner I find that I am often very focused on pace.  When I run I pay considerable attention to the pace at which I am running often making minor adjustments to either go faster or to  slow down.  Sometimes I see my pace and reconcile that with the way I feel.  At other times I become aware of my pace and I am surprised that I am either going  too slow or on rare occasions going too fast.  Almost always when I become aware of pace I make some sort of adjustment.  Rarely do I just accept the information.

I think that being a runner makes me more aware of pace than most people.  Runners have a an internal clock that tells us what we are doing and makes us acutely aware of how we are feeling.  I am not so sure that non-runners have this mechanism.  That is unfortunate as I find that a keen awareness of pace would serve everyone well.  I sometimes watch my friends and colleagues approaching burn out simply because they find themselves "running" too fast with the things they are doing.  Or I listen to friends that describe their planned activities which include far too many things that they are cramming in to their day.  I even wonder in amazement when I see parents that are running all over the place moving their children from one activity to the next while complaining that they are too busy.  I think that in all of these cases people are not very aware of their pace.  

When I was growing up we talked about summertime as a time of "easy living."  The pace was expected to be slower, the days lazier and the focus was on enjoying life.  Now we are trying to get the kids into a summer program that will improve their skills in one area or another, we take summer courses to enhance our own skills, and what we used to call summer driving is not to a vacation spot but rather it is from activity to activity.  I think we are just failing to pay attention to the pace.

I wonder what we would be doing today or this weekend if we were to view it from a lens of how we might feel about it ten years from now.  Would we make the same commitments?  Would we run around doing the things that are right now stressing us out?  Would we rather have taken the time to enjoy a lunch with a friend or coffee with a loved one just enjoying the sun or sitting in park?  

This weekend as we head into the holiday next week let's be more aware of our pace.  Perhaps you want to run the next half of your personal race a bit slower than the last one.  Or at least take a small piece of time to just slow down.  The weather across the country presents an excellent opportunity.  You will not be perceived as a slacker if you do nothing in the heat.  But call this a practice session to a slower pace.  Commit to slowing down this summer.  Life really is not a race and there is no prize given for being the person that finishes life first.  

This post is the shortest I have written in a while.  The reason is that I am watching my pace.   

Counting Counts

Photo Courtesy of Skidder from Flickr

I have realized lately that I have long been preoccupied with counting.  Perhaps this makes me not very different from most people as we live in a world where we count things for a variety of reasons.  In business we count things like revenue and profit.  Our sense is that the more you have (the higher the count) the better off you are.  On a personal level we have come to see the american obsession of counting our weight (here the less you have the better off you are) or counting our calories (trying to stay below 2,000 calories per day so that we can lower our overall weight).  My sense is that no matter your station in life you are involved in some sort of count.  

I think that counting is a wonderful thing.  It really does help us to keep track.  At sporting events we count the scoreboard.  Our hope is that our team has the higher score.  We count our consumption of certain substances (I am not functioning yet as I have only had one cup of coffee today), or we count the hours (just three more hours to go before this day ends).  We do spend a great deal of our time in some sort of count.

As I have been thinking about this the idea of counting can have three very positive impacts on our behavior.  First, counting promotes discipline (think calorie counting), second, counting is motivational (just 5 more pushups to reach my goal today), and finally, counting is rhythmic, (it takes me about 15 minutes before I get into my groove).  We can harness these three attributes of counting to mold our existing behavior patterns and also to create new patterns.  What follows are my thoughts about how to best accomplish this:

Counting promotes discipline.  When we engage in a count we have a clear sense of what we want to achieve.  We set out with a clearly defined goal and our desire and intent is to achieve that goal.  Whether the goal is large or small is not important.  Once you set the goal to a specific count you want to achieve that number.  You gain a heightened sense of awareness of the count.  Counts of this type are best set in the form of weekly goals.  As an example perhaps you want to limit calories for the week.  This is much easier than perhaps daily calorie consumption as you have the whole week to achieve the number.  As you visit the count each day you can make behavior adjustments as necessary.  In this way a goal is viewed as far more likely to be achieved as you have seven chances to stay on course.

Counting is motivational.  Counts can motivate us.  In this example once you commit to achieving a specific count you become highly motivated to achieve the desired result.  I have been wearing a Nike FuelBand for a little over a month now.  The band tracks an algorithm created by Nike that measures Fuel achieved per day.  While a Fuel number in and of itself is meaningless, once you begin to wear the band you want to achieve the  daily Fuel goal you set.  My goal is 2,000 Fuel points per day.  As an example of how these points are tracked a three mile run for me is about 1,100 Fuel points.  In order to achieve my daily goal of 2,000 points I need to run as well as remain physically active throughout the day.  The fact that I am in pursuit of this goal keeps me mindful of my activities.  I stand as often as I can (I am writing this post while standing at my desk) and take the stairs and walk throughout the day to achieve the goal I set.  While there are days that I don’t achieve my goal, most days I am highly motivated to reach the goal of 2,000.  Since I started wearing the band my longest streak of reaching 2,000 points is 13 days in a row.  During that streak I recall one day when I needed to walk about half a mile at the end of the day to reach my goal.  Even though I was tired the half mile walk was motivating and I was really glad that I kept the streak alive.  Just as a point of reference the streak ended yesterday when I only achieved 1,100 points on my day off when I did not run or work and just sat around.  After suffering through that disappointment I am however back on track today having already achieved 1,881 points before 11:00am.

A count is rhythmic.  When I run I am aware that I run faster the longer I run.  In running language this is called a reverse split.  I keep a count of my pace every half mile.  No matter how slowly I run at the beginning of my run I know that the pace is going to get faster the longer I go.  In a five mile run I will typically improve by as much as one minute per mile.  I sense the rhythm of this as I feel the pace change.  I can hear my footsteps and become aware of the shift in cadence.  Throughout my runs I generally know when I am running even slightly faster or slightly slower than before.  This rhythm helps me to stay focused and on pace for the run.  The per mile split is the count that I can feel.

You might want to consider how you use counts in your day to day.  Perhaps your job requires you to make a certain number of calls per day or produce a certain quantity of something.  Maybe you set a reading goal of half a book every week which translates to so many pages read every day.  But whatever endeavors you are pursuing, know that counting really does count.  I set a goal for myself this year to learn a new language.  I have not yet assigned a count to that goal and it is lagging behind terribly.  This week I am assigning a count to that goal and I expect that the results are going to improve.  

One final thought.  Whatever you are counting you must be willing to share your count with your friends.  I use Facebook to post my counts.  Every run I post the results on FB.  Only a few of my family members, friends and colleagues even pay attention to those counts but I know that the few that do are there cheering me on.  Why not take a minute and post something that really matters on your FaceBook account today.  Post something that you are counting.  If we are already friends and I see your post you can COUNT on me cheering you on.  

By the way, I am counting one blog posting a week.  Right on target.

225 Pushups Per Week

Photo Courtesy of SheepGuardingLlama from Flickr

I have been working on a small experiment around achieving personal goals and making the goal a habit.  But before I share the technique, perhaps a back story is appropriate.  

Last year while training for a marathon I broke my foot.  The broken foot took running out of my fitness equation for months and I was looking for something else that I could do to at least stay in some form of being in shape.  In my search I came across an idea about doing 100 pushups per day.  Having never reached such a goal I decided that this might be an appropriate fitness goal for me.  I reached that goal last August and remember telling a work colleague about how proud I was about being able to do 100 pushups in 5 sets.  Shortly after I reached the goal (I ultimately achieved 107 pushups) I stopped doing pushups as a part of my fitness regimen.  As the months have rolled by quickly since last August I have had various challenges to keeping my fitness regimen.  When I was able to add distance running back in my routine I found myself experiencing various foot problems related to the break.  I would stop and start always ending with pain or minor injury.  Finally, in frustration, I took time to reevaluate my situation.  I first had to come to grips with the painful reality that I am not as young as I once was but also that the foot injury was a direct result of not taking things in moderation.  My break was as a direct result of over training, and putting on too many miles far too quickly.  I was also running too fast for my level of fitness always pushing harder with little appropriate rest.  A month or so ago I finally got it.  I recognized that I really needed to add moderation, pace, and rest to my schedule.  While this likely makes a great deal of sense to most people it is not the process I have followed traditionally.  I felt that getting fit was about running harder, pushing further and not stopping.  I know differently now.

In order to get back to comfortably running distance I set myself on a path to running just 15 miles per week while making sure that I ran 5 times each week.  For a regular runner 15 miles per week over 5 runs is not very much running.  Of course this is really just 3 miles per day.  The point however was not the number of miles per day but rather getting to a place where I could know that I would consistently run 5 days per week.  I recognized that over time the miles would add up but while getting back to 5 days per week I would allow my foot to adjust to the frequency of running and recovery.  At the same time I was recreating the running habit for me.  

One of the challenges I have usually faced when I run regularly is that I don’t feel that I have time for any exercise beyond running.  This means for me that the running causes me to lose muscle as well as fat.  This year I wanted to make sure that as I got my running pace back that I would also get my strength back to the level where it was last summer.  I really wanted to get back to 100 pushups per day.  Suddenly an idea came to me that really is an interpretation of something I heard from another runner (credit to Laurel Youse).  She said “no matter how slow or how far you run you are lapping everyone else that is not running at all.”  I trust that I have faithfully translated Laurel’s quote but it caused me to realize something.  In order to convert my desire to build strength and muscle in addition to aerobic fitness I needed to develop a new habit.  My running 5 days per week is part of my running habit but I did not have a strength habit.  Laurel’s quote also reminded me that it did not matter how small you start.  

Just over a month ago I set out to do 40 pushups in a week.  I recall telling that story while giving a presentation recently.  During a break a man walked up to me and said “you were really joking about 40 pushups per week right?”  He went on to say “you really can do more than 40 pushups in a week right?”  My response to him was of course I could do more than 40 pushups in a week but that prior to setting that goal I was not doing 40 pushups per week.  I also asked him how many pushups he was doing each week.  His response was zero.  right then I realized that I was on to something.  My 40 pushups per week were actually lapping his zero pushups per week.  Since I set my 40 pushups per week goal a little over a month ago I have consistently been doing a growing number of pushups each week.  Last week I successfully accomplished 210 pushups while maintaining my distance running schedule.  The goal for this week is 225 pushups which means just 32 pushups per day with one day requiring 33 pushups assuming that I do this every day (which has been my habit these past few weeks).

Here is why this has worked for me.  First, I started small with a goal that I knew I could easily achieve while establishing the habit.  Next, I increased the number weekly using last week’s performance as my guage.  If the number felt too easy I increased the weekly goal.  Finally, I worried less about the total than I did about the habit.  The key has been in establishing a habit of daily activity to achieve a new goal.

So here is the question.  Do you have something you have been putting off?  Perhaps my plan will help.  Set a goal today that you want to reach.  Make the goal so small that you would be hard pressed to actually fail but still spread the goal out over the course of a week.  Don’t exceed your goal that first week or for a while as you build your new habit.  You will be amazed by what happens.  

I want to hear your comments and I want to know your goals.  Next I will write about how you can track your goals and perhaps how you might use public accountability to keep you focused (think Facebook).