Why We Need Systems & Routines

Routine + System = Results

These days, I run the same route almost every day. The run coach part of my brain grimaces as I type these words.  The runner in me, though, needs this. It’s comforting. Decision fatigue is eliminated. It’s efficient, which is important when marathon training. And there are very few stoplights! 

About minute 35 into my run, I stop at this spot and I take this photo. 

My camera roll from the past few months is filled with these almost-identical looking photos. It’s become a most enjoyable part of my recent running routine, to stand on the littlest beach in Marsha P. Johnson State Park, and enjoy the water for a moment before I plod along into Greenpoint. 

This routine is now part of my larger system known as marathon training. I never thought much about the difference between routines and systems until earlier this year, when my friend Coach Annick dropped this nugget of wisdom on me:

“You fail to the level of your systems versus rise to the aspirations of your goals.”

When I heard it, it was like the world’s largest tuning fork went off in my head. I then asked her to please repeat that 108 more times because it made so much sense.  And I wondered: does my running have a routine? Or do I have running system? And what’s the difference between the two? 

Here’s what I’ve come up with. Remember, when I share nuggets from my brain they may land for you or they may not! Take what works and resonates for YOU and leave the rest.   

My running system: 

• Has a clear beginning - middle - end to the process. This is easy when training for a race: the race date drives the start - middle - end. 

• There’s a goal - in my case, it’s to run a marathon on a particular date. 

• There’s a clear path to the goal. The training plan provides the path, with how each day and each week builds on the one before it. 

• The path is supported by a clear philosophy. My training plan started with a lot of very easy aerobic miles, allowing me to build volume, before adding in any other load or stimulus.  

• The system anticipates bumps in the road, like needing a day off because of a sniffle or a family obligation. 

• Systems are great - on paper.  The most brilliant system is academic without connecting it to the act of the daily routine. That’s where systems shine, when coupled with routine. 

• Has mental and emotional buy in! I believe in the system to best position me to achieve the desired result on race day. 

Marathon training feels more systematic to me than my daily running.  And it should -  my running needed more structure because I am looking to produce specific results on a specific day.  I feel like the system created by my run plan for marathon training signals to me that it’s time to shift gears, get myself into a different headspace and heartspace to increase the running load.  

Why we need both system AND routine

The system doesn’t work unless I actually DO the running prescribed by my plan. This is where the power of routine makes the system come alive. Routine is about daily execution of the system.  I have run and engaged in all the things that support my running: strength training, sleep, recovery, nutrition, positive mental attitude, etc.  

Routine + system = result

It’s possible to have a system and no routine. Or a routine and no system. 

Here’s a completely ficticious example of a system with no routine: 

A runner commits to a training plan, but is unable to - for whatever reason - commit the time and energy to the running and all the things that come with healthy running (sleep, recovery, nutrition, positive mental energy, etc). At the end of the week, when I open up Training Peaks, their week looks like a rainbow - a sea of yellow, green, red, and orange boxes. 

Here’s an example of a routine with no system: 

A runner gets up three mornings a week to meet their run club. They use the power of the group to train, versus individualizing their plan. Many times, said runner will hop into another runner’s workout, because why not! It’s great they are running, but there’s no systematic approach to their running. Without a systematic approach, their running won’t produce a specific result.

We can shore up our systems AND routines. That way, there’s clarity on what’s system, what’s routine, and how they can support each other in the best way possible.   

Integrating our systems and routine is important so we: 

• Do NOT change the goalposts on ourselves. (This is one of my favorite newsletters that I ever wrote, it’s due for an update - coming soon.)  Powerful goals are important, but powerful systems and routines that position us to achieve those goals are even more important. And when we’re in the system and routine where we’re chasing said goal, WE DO NOT CHANGE THE GOALPOST mid workout, mid race, mid training cycle.  

• Get to the start line integrated in mind, body, and heart. Our training processes have to train all three in tandem.  I know that, at some point on that looped course in Jersey City on April 23rd, I will be faced with my biggest adversary and that’s ME.  I better have the toolbox to put my nuts away when I get all squirrely on myself.  Also, our bodies responds to what we think, how we think - the more we learn about how the brain body connection works, the more we understand how powerful the mind is. Of course, we can’t will ourselves to a certain time if we haven’t done the training, but we can have our mind be an ally versus a foe out there. 

• Can weather the normal ups and downs that happen in training. I use the word normalize with my runners and training clients A LOT these days. I get to see the inner workings of a lot of people’s process and you only see the inner workings of yours.  We all have good days, bad days, meh days when training or running - that’s normal.  Systems and routine keep us moving forward so we don’t spin out on emotional black ice when we have a bad day.  

• Manage our load - and ALL of our loads. We are all busy people! Load is load. Remember, the body doesn’t know if it’s load from a big emotional adult thing you’ve got going on, or a hard workout, or a busy work week. When we stick with systems and routines, we have a better chance of maintaining our barriers and boundaries. (Remember, boundaries let in light and air. For some of us, the littlest bit in is too much - which is why we need barriers instead.) 

• Continue to pray at the altar of almighty consistency. Running responds to consistency over a very, very long period of time. While my race is relatively important to me, it’s more important to me that I keep consistently running all 12 months this year. Training for this race helps me do that, but I also want to run AFTER the race is over. It’s good when our running is a little boring! That means it’s going well. 

As always, we want our running - whether we are training for a race or running as part of our daily life - to be sustainable and nourishing. My reflections on systems versus routines made me realize: it’s not the faith in the running itself we need to keep. It’s the faith in the systems and routines that get us out the door each day. If we tend to those, lots of happy miles can follow. 

We All Get A Little Squirrelly With Our Nuts .....

Or the BIG mental shift I'm making so I can meet my running goal this year

My running goal this year is to run for 12 months. I have no time goals, no mileage “run the year” goals - I want to stay healthy and not burn out on running so I can run for 12 months straight. That’s it.  This goal sorta felt like a punt when I first thought about it when I reflected on my running at the end of last year.  What about time goals in a race? What about getting faster? What about blah and blah and blah? The more I reflected on what I wanted out of my running this year, I kept coming back to: I want to run all year, I want to be healthy enough in my body and have a healthy enough relationship with my running that I do it all year long.  The more I thought about this goal, the more I got onboard.

What’s the number one obstacle to me achieving this goal? Well, it’s me, of course, and my own unique brand of runner crazy.

To reach my goal of running all 12 months this year, I have to - no exaggeration - do a number on my brain every day and shift how I think about what happens on each run.  I’ve been trying to name this shift in my head, and I think I’ve landed on it: I’m shifting my running life to emphasize my outcomes rather than outputs. 

Wait, Steph, aren’t these the same things? Yeah, I thought so, too, until recently.  For years, I used these two words interchangeably, without much thought.  Part of this is rooted in one of the few nuggets I retained from grad school.  When I first saw this model in one of those classes that uses statistics to make human behavior less messy, I fell in love with it. 

Input - > throughput -> output 

I loved its simplicity. There’s a direct connection to what you put into a process at the beginning and how it affects what comes out at the end of it.  For years, this is how I thought of my running. If the input is willpower and a desire to run this time and the throughput is a lot of hard work, then the output is - of course! -  going to be the time I want to run and it will all be A Success.  

Like many productivity driven models that emerged from social scientists in a post World War II era, the problem lies in the application of this model to people and bodies. We are not a simple species and running isn’t a simple sport. 

Here are four key reasons why I’m focusing more on outcome based versus output based running these days. Or, as I said to one of my runners today “we all get a little squirrelly with our nuts” - meaning, here’s my special brand of runner nuts and how I’m trying to keep it in check this year so it doesn’t bench and/or derail me. 

1. Outcome feels more dynamic and reflective of the framework I build during a specific process of training.  It also allows for a natural ebb and flow between training and running. (Remember, training and running are different!) We can always be running, but we can’t always be training. Being focused on outputs in the past meant I was trying to train all the time (pro tip: that doesn’t work)  and was chronically under-rested because *every* race was an “A race” (“A race” = goal race).  It took me a few years to realize how this approach burned me out.  When I was on First Avenue during the 2016 NYC Marathon, and I took my Poland Spring-branded green sponge, looked around the throngs of spectators and was enveloped by all the cheers, my soul screamed at me “this isn’t fun” - it wasn’t a “oh, I’m tired because I’m running the marathon" moment. It was a feeling from a much more existential part of my heart and it wasn’t a happy one. My running had become lifeless and arid because I was too consumed with the output of a time-based goal all the time. 

2. By being an output based runner, I was constantly putting all my emotional running eggs in one basket.  I was, in my head, only as good as the time I ran that day.  That kept doing a number on my heart and my body, as a bad race put me in a bad mood and I thought the answer was to always push harder. Now, I think of output as being reflective of one performance on the day of a specific event - we ran the race in XX time.  Is a race day output always reflective of your training? On paper, yes. In the real world, no. More often than not, output is reflective of how you performed within the circumstances of the day that were OUT of your control (like the weather!)- and how well you managed those circumstances.  An output is a single point in time during your running journey, whereas an outcome is the actual process that emerges when we embrace running as a regular practice. 

3. Outcome-based running is proving to be more emotionally and physically sustainable for me. Running by rate of perceived effort (RPE) versus pace provides the perfect opportunity to do an honest check in before I step outside to run: where am I in relation to my running today? Where is my head brain, my heart brain, my body brain? Have I set myself up to have a good run, am I fed/hydrated/slept/focused? I’m no longer siloing my running over THERE and divorcing it from all the factors in my life that impact it. It’s a beautiful thing to go out for a run even after a night of raging hot flashes and be able to do so because I’m hanging out at an RPE of 1, whereas I’d have nothing in the tank for a higher RPE workout while feeling underslept and dehydrated.  An unexpected upside to more consistent running is that the pull to “go fast” is less and less, as I need to live to run again tomorrow.  

4. Outcomes foster that little voice of possibility, the “what if’s” that can quieter as we get more settled and soldier on with our lives.  Anyone can start running, at any time, really.  And then what happens? We might remember how exciting the possibility is - even though this is my 6th marathon coming up, I’m like “am I really going to run 26.2 miles? How is that even going to happen?” Or when I ran a spry mile in a race recently I was like “this is terrible and I want it to stop but I’ll be more upset if I do stop because I want to see what is possible today.” 

One of the biggest d’oh moments in the past few years was realizing how much my running changed when I was going through perimenopause, and then it changed again when peri was over.  Now that I’m clearly on the other side of hormonal turbulence, I am super clear on what doesn’t work.  I’m still muddling through what does work. Maybe my running goal for this year reflects my settling into this stage of my life.  I was really resentful of these mysterious and uncomfortable changes that my body and brain were going through while I was in it, and I still don’t love raging hot flashes almost every night.  But, but. There’s an opportunity, for me as a runner, to start over. I was forced into trying new ways of running and training because the effectiveness of the old ways had clearly expired - now, a few years into this experiment, I appreciate that my running isn’t over but I’m learning to speak to it in a new language.  The act of getting out the door may be a consistent through line for us, but the running itself and the inner landscape of it changes with us.  

Here’s another way I’m thinking about “run all 12 months goal” -

Have a short term memory (around the output - if you’re disappointed in an output, it’s easy to throw out the outcome as well - resist!)  to engage in a long-term process (which is the outcome, the process in which you learned all the important stuff about running and running lessons as they apply to real life) with the most excellent sense of humor, so the head and heart, legs and lungs, remember they are on the same team.  Because you can’t run with your heart if your head is always in the way.   

Let's Talk About Getting Nervous Before A Race

On a practical level, your running practice is a great place to practice what happens when you get nervous.

Do you get nervous before a big goal race? I do! A vivid memory from my adult running life is being the one of the last runners out of Wave 1 in the 2014 Brooklyn Half Marathon, despite being in D corral. I was so nervous I retied my shoes upwards of 20 times (no joke)!  Over the past seven years, as the parent of a competitive athlete (for my new friends - my son Beckett - “Bex” - is a highly competitive rock climber in USA Climbing),  I’ve watched my son deal with the same nervous energy before his rock climbing competitions that I have before my races. 

Since this past September, though, his nervous energy before and during competitions has been replaced by confidence, connection and joy.  Sure, he still gets nervous, but not like before. And it doesn’t do him in on the wall like it has in the past.  What happened? In addition to changing his training on the wall, Bex’s new coach, Zoe Sayetta, is equally focused on training his mental and emotional game. Today’s newsletter is inspired by a talk she recently gave to the team parents on how she’s training the team’s mental game. As I listened, I took notes as a parent AND as a run coach AND as a runner! 

Like Bex, I also get nervous before a goal race.  Zoe is teaching Bex to normalize being nervous, especially before a competition. When I heard this, it was a major light bulb moment! Of course I’m nervous before a goal race - my nerves are a manifestation of the depth of how much we care about our running. Once we normalize nervousness, we then have to learn: Nervousness does not represent a threat. However, in most of our brains, nervousness is perceived as a threat and, as such, a cascade of hard-wired responses follow feeling nervous.  Until we divorce nervousness from the threat response, our brain will continue to respond in the same old ways that don’t serve us in low-stakes situations, like a race. When we know how we’re hard wired to respond to a situation at hand, we can craft a response that disrupts this cycle in a healthy, smart, sustainable way.  (For my Marvel fans, I call this “disrupting your Dormammu loop.”)

Remember, your nervous system responses have a direct impact on how your brain responds and reacts to the situation at hand.  Think of your nervous system as an elaborate call and response system. The brain is hardwired to send different responses to the various systems in your body when it detects a situation. If you are nervous before a race and lack tools to work with those feelings, your brain will send certain signals to your body that can impact how you perform.  

Soooooo …. This is all great to know.  But how do we - on a practical level -  shift our relationship to performance-induced nerves?

A great aspect of our running practice: it’s a low to no-stakes environment to create tangible and practical strategies to deal with nerves. We can practice these strategies when we are training so we’re confident AND competent when we enter the corrals on race day. 

We have to ensure our strategies are sticky for our brains. Each of our nervous systems are as unique as our fingerprints.  What works for me may not work for you.  For example, if you’re triggered by flight/flight when you get nervous, you may go out too fast in a race.  If you’re more of a freeze and hide person, if the start of a race is chaotic, you may shut down and not be able to perform at all because you detect the chaos as a threat. Know thyself and use that as the foundation for your nerve-busting blueprint. 

Bring the bigger stuff - like how and why you’re wired in this way and the feelings that go with that - to therapy. Untangling the cat’s cradle of your backstory is the job of a great mental health therapist.  (Please remember while running has therapeutic qualities, it is NOT a substitute for therapy.) 

Be kind to yourself.  Your nervous system responses are NOT conscious! They are complicated and have been crafted by your brain, over many years, to respond to your life situations.  I often elicit self-kindness from my runners by asking how long they have been running. I then translate that to a human age. For example, if you’ve been running five years, your running is in kindergarten and is learning to tie their shoes. Would you talk to a five year old who is learning to tie their shoes in the same tone of voice you’re talking to yourself about your running? Give that a think. 

Pause before we head out the door for a run. This is from the yoga teacher part of my brain - and I see it work all the time at the beginning of my yoga classes. When we collectively pause and take three deep breaths before class begins, it’s amazing how it shifts and gathers the energy in the room.  Can you take three deep breaths before you leave for your run? This is a chance to take stock of where your thinking brain, body brain and heart brain are that day.  Correlate your effort to where you are at the beginning of the run, not where you want to end the run. 

Take inventory of what you can control that day - and let the other stuff go.  Zoe calls the “Circle of Control” with the kids.  Last year, many of you will remember I called it “our variables and controllables.” Name what you can control (getting out the door for a run) and acknowledge what’s out of your control (the weather).  There’s a lot in our running practice that’s out of our control - and for those of us who are perfectionist, Type A, this is a super hard thing for our actually change part of our brain to register.  When Zoe said “perfectionism hinders the growth of confidence” in her presentation, I was like, OMG THAT’S ME.  It’s critical that we separate growth from perfectionism in our heads, especially if we are a striver, an achiever, have been a “good girl” our whole lives and that’s how we have received praise and recognition. A big part of this journey away from perfectionism: internalizing that Circle of Control. 

Breathe! Once again, I’m putting on my yoga teacher hat.  Your breath is your nervous system’s GPS. Practice noticing your breath on your run. Is it jagged like a broken mirror? Is it smooth like just zambonied ice? Is it bumpy like an ATV going up a mountain? Where are you breathing? In your chest, your belly, your sides, your back? Do you even know if you are breathing or not? Are you holding your breath? Simply notice the quality of your breath - there’s no need to DO anything with these observations. Making the observations is the action your brain needs. And this leads me into our last strategy …. 

Become skilled at the practice of noticing.  The power of noticing is HUGE as it is an immediate reset button for your brain. Because all of your brains are different, you need different ways to notice.  What works for your brain? My visual learners, what visual landmarks can you notice on your run, like trees or boats? My Type A folks, maybe counting dogs and lampposts works for you.  I’m a words and crossword puzzle person, so I like to keep a running list of all the states I see on the license plates on the parked cars on my run. 

Some of these suggestions will work for you, and I encourage you to come up with others that are specific and resonate for YOUR brain. We know that learning new ways of being in the world is hard - and uncomfortable. It’s hard to be a beginner as an adult, it’s challenging to take risks, it’s challenging to be honest with ourselves. Many of us don’t operate in a world that celebrates honest effort - in our adult-ness, we are often rewarded for what we are good at, versus the process of mastery and longevity.  The more we create positive and balanced experiences around all aspects of our running - including our mental skills prep - the more enjoyable it will be and the more we’ll want to do it!