Remember: it's supposed to be fun

An improbable story about how a bandmate helped my running practice

Expanding on last week’s theme of focus, here’s the other side of the hill: when focus isn’t useful. This is me passing on something that had to be told to me. 

When I was in my twenties, I played in bands. I was the bandleader for several of them, one of them called Rifle.* I was…intense. Like, very intense. Like, we practiced our set for a full calendar year before I would book us a show. And then, in 2007, our first show was at Pianos** on New York’s Lower East Side, to a packed house. Because I had the connects to get us shows, but I was too much of a perfectionist to let us play out until we basically sounded like we were in a recording studio. 

It took a lot to be in a band with me, and I appreciate so much my bandmates and what they taught me about friendship, collaboration, and the destructive power of irrationally high standards. My standards were so high that at one point during that year of practicing, the lead guitarist, a guy named Mike Machinist (shout out to you, Mike, wherever you are!) looked across our practice space on the 10th floor of Manhattan’s Music Building and said to me “Remember: it’s supposed to be fun.” and I just stared at him. “Most bands don’t practice like this,” he continued. “Making music is rare; most people don’t do it; remember, it’s supposed to be fun. That’s why we’re here.” 

“Most bands don’t practice like this?” I asked him back in a wondering tone. 

“Nah,” he laughed while the other guys chimed in: 

“No way!” 

“Every Saturday, 2pm on the dot, for like 3 hours?! Nope, not a chance!” They were incredulous that I didn’t realize how demanding I was.

After that, I tried to loosen up. I tried to remember that yes, this was supposed to be fun. And guess what: it became more fun. I’d always enjoyed making music; it was a dream of mine, but I had let my perfectionism take over a big reason to do it in the first place, and I had pressurized all the people around me by letting those high standards dominate my approach to the activity. 

So, running. You can see the connection. Yes, running is good for you and yes, it can help you solve your problems. But it doesn’t have to be all virtue, and it probably shouldn’t be. I think we can all agree that virtue is nice, but it’s not super motivating. Running is supposed to be fun but that fun needs to be in addition to any sense of virtue you get from it. You need to find joy in it if you’re going to have a long-term relationship with it, or with anything. 

When I was going through a very injury-prone period (more on that in a different post), I remember setting out one evening in Arlington, VA with my knees and my hips hurting so badly that I thought “I can’t go on like this.” It was then that I thought I might actually have found the beginning of the end of my relationship with running.

I couldn’t let myself not run, so I just pounded out painful miles every day in  steady, grinding unhappiness. I stopped running for a bit then and turned to my surgeon, who turned me to some very intense physical therapy, which slowly extinguished my pain. But the fear in that moment, in that run, reminded me of Mike Machinist and that long-ago day in our practice space: this wasn’t fun any more. And that terrified me.

Because without fun, you can’t go on doing anything every day. Without fun, there’s no point in pushing yourself. Remember: it’s supposed to be fun. Don’t ever leave your joy behind, because without it, its meaning will be lost. 

See you all again next week, and for today, remember: go run. 

*Named because I figured it was sort of aggressive and the dudes in the band would like it and because I rifled through my memories to write the song lyrics. I’ve always enjoyed a double entendre.
**For those who know, Pianos in 2007 was a big deal.