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.
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.
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.
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.
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.