Running coach Steve Magness (I know about him by way of my husband) has a saying about training for runs: Mostly easy, occasionally hard, vary it up, and very seldom, go see God.
I'm working through a running program called
None to Run.
Some context: about a decade ago, I did Couch to 5K, which is the more widely known start-running-from-nothing program. I did the whole thing. It sucked. It never stopped sucking. I would finish a week and then the next week escalated and I had more running to do? Rude. I got through by running more and more slowly as the program progressed. I hated every minute of it, but I nonetheless persisted, because I am very stubborn when I choose to be. I finished the program, and trained to the point where I ran a half-marathon. I was the last person to finish, which I expected, and I finished with maybe ten minutes to spare before the very generous cut-off time, which I also expected. But I did finish.
(The most annoying part of the last four miles of the marathon was that they kept sending out a constant stream of volunteers on bikes with water. They were asking me annoying questions like “are you okay? do you need anything? are you sure you're okay?”
No, go away, I am right on time, please just let me run, this is hard enough without having to fend off well-meaning people who make me feel like I suck even more than I do.
I found out later that it was historically hot on that day and someone had passed away from heat stroke earlier, so they truly were not trying to do anything except make sure everyone was kept in a living state. At the time it felt like: “great, even the race volunteers think I suck.”)
My conclusion at the time (based in part on the erroneous belief that nobody was in danger of dying and people were looking at me and thinking “this woman is very bad at running, poor girl”) was that Running Was Clearly Not For Me, I gave it the old college try and everyone at college got together and said “Courtney, you need to stop doing this; there is other exercise available.”
I do other exercise. I walk a lot. I hike. I ruck. I have a regular swim date with a friend. I do qigong. I bike.
But—aside from swimming—for various reasons, none of that is actually the kind of cardio that gets my heart in the higher zones.
Swimming requires effort: getting things together, going to a place with a pool, changing, and so forth. I want some kind of cardio that I can do on a day when I’m super busy, where I can just put shoes on and leave the house for 20 minutes. Running seems like it would be great because—like other forms of exercise I enjoy, such as hiking or walking or rucking—it’s basically just me and my feet. I want to like running. I just don’t.
So why did I start None to Run? Mostly just that: the feeling that I should like running, even though I never have.
I honestly don't remember how I happened on None2Run, but what the program said about Couch to 5K resonated with me. Which is: Couch to 5K is actually too hard for most beginners, and it expects everyone to progress in the exact same fashion. People don’t do that.
Both of them are interval training programs. None to Run starts easier and ramps up more slowly. It also gives you guidelines for how you should feel when you run, when you walk, how to pay attention to your breath, so that you’re pushing yourself the exact right amount for your body to recover and learn from the exercise in the allotted time. It has accompanying strength work outs so you can build up necessary muscle. And after you finish a week, it asks you to rate your perceived effort on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being extremely easy, 5 being fairly comfortable, 7 being somewhat hard, and 10 being extremely hard.
If the week is anything above a 7, you repeat the week.
These changes feel so obvious in retrospect, but the idea that you could just…go easy and then repeat a week until what you’re doing doesn’t feel hard was mind-blowing for me.
So for the first time in my life, I am enjoying running. Am I running a lot? No. I'm currently running slowly for forty-five seconds at a time and then walking slowly and then repeating. But I'm actually enjoying it. And that’s kind of cool.
I am not good at the concept of easy, and that may be something that hampers me. I did not say to myself, “maybe my first goal should be to jog a mile in fifteen minutes.” I said, “Can I run? Who cares. I’m training for a half marathon.” And then I did a half marathon, and my reaction was “that sucked and I suck, I’m never doing it again.”
Was that useful? No. But was it fun? Also no. But did it prove a point? Not that, either.
Sometimes, “I can do hard things” feels like my motto. But maybe I need to think about whether it makes more sense to amend it: “I can do hard things, but I should do more easy ones.”
(Please note: this is not really an endorsement of None2Run, although it may sound like one, since I haven’t finished the program and might not do so. But I do promise that it is my personal feeling and nobody has induced me to say this, which you can tell because nobody would possibly think to get a small-scale tea influencer to endorse a running program.)
