Life is practice

Why not to be a "sometimes runner"

From my first product design class. This is practice.

One of my favorite Michelle Obama quotes, of many, is when she said that she tells her daughters all the time that “Life is practice. If you want to be known as a dependable person, you have to be dependable.” 

There’s a lot in there about running, too. I have never understood it when people say they “run sometimes”. If you run sometimes, like, when the weather’s perfect, or when you’re feeling fat, or when you’re feeling slim, you’re not a runner. You have externalized the motivations for running away from yourself and your practice and onto other things: the weather, your perception of your body, other people’s perceptions of your body, etc. It’s not about you and your motivations anymore; it’s about something or someone else’s, and that’s not practice; that’s performance. 

Sometimes running has three basic problems with it: physical, operational, and emotional. At the most obvious, physical level, running can hurt, and it hurts most when you stop and start at it. Injury awaits the sometimes runner. Gear is older than you think it is; your body’s in worse running shape than you imagined, etc. 

As an operational level, it must be really hard to get done all the things around running when you don’t have a routine for it. Like, you have to find your clothes and your shoes, put them on, deal with your hair, decide a route, go there, do the run, get back to your place or wherever you change, maybe shower?, change, deal with your hair, and go on with your day. Oof, without rails, that’s a lot to get through! No wonder you only run sometimes. 

If you want to be a photographer, take pictures. Even corny ones.

On an emotional level, when you run sometimes, the emotional hill to climb when you do go run never diminishes. You never commit to running in a way that makes the process, which can hurt, which requires a lot of logistics, any easier for yourself. So when people tell me they “run sometimes” that’s when I always try to help them figure out: do I want to be a runner, or do I not want to be? If you don’t want to be, that’s fine, that’s great; do something else. But if you do want to run, let’s talk more. 

Life is practice; if you want to be a runner, you have to run. I’m not talking about the frequency that you run; if you run two times per week, you’re a runner, in my opinion. If you run 6 or 7 times per week, you’re a runner. That’s the cadence of your practice, and it is valid as long as you support it. 

The worst thing you can do for any practice is to start and stop at it because then it and its benefits can never take root. The best thing you can do is to set a cadence and stick to it as much as possible for a term that’s meaningful to you. That’s how you become a runner; that’s how you become anything that’s meaningful to you. Once you’ve established that practice, you’ll never be the same person you were before, because now you’re embodying your own motivations. Now you’re answering to your practice. Now, you’re a runner.  

Go run.