Stay the Course

Some days, you just have a terrible start to a run; you feel like you just can’t warm-up and get into the happy flow of it.

Usually, it takes me one mile to warm up, but today it took me three. Those first three felt like ten – slow, painful and boring. Maybe it was because of the dry, freezing air today. Maybe I was just tired from the week or getting sick – but, who knows?

But then, at three miles, that change happened – I suddenly felt light, quick, and perfectly fine. Just like usual: it was no longer a hard run. I just needed a much longer warm-up.

A very wise man once told me (okay, it was my co-worker yesterday), to “stay the course” and “let it happen” in reference to a business project. I thought of this today while running. It’s an interesting concept — that the right attitude is often just to “let it happen”, even when applied to something that takes a tremendous lot of work, such as running or working hard on a business project.

Sometimes, we are better off thinking of ourselves as being drawn forward by something greater than ourselves — to not pay too much attention to our own effort, but rather, make ourselves experience being pulled along passively, if not involuntarily. We need to find hacks to make hard work easy, as there is a natural limit to our will. Meaning, we can only push ourselves so hard; we have to allow ourselves to be pulled as well.