Let's Do This!

Sometimes, you're invincible.  Occasionally, it's a hard workout, and hit or exceed all of your targets.  You may feel completely wiped afterward, but damn it, you DID SOMETHING out there today.  Sometimes, you're beating the odds, overcoming some unforeseen setback, succeeding in spite of circumstances.  More often than not though, it's some random time that you feel inspired.  Maybe it happens while you're driving, and you find yourself plotting and planning your upcoming training, proposing a crazy schedule that you'll never keep, but you feel so empowered that you don't recognize the insanity.

And then sometimes you're whipped.  It's hard enough to want to cook dinner at the end of the day, let alone run a 5 mile tempo run that you had planned.  Or you slept too little, or too much, or you just feel crappy for no explainable reason.  The complete antithesis of that insanely motivated, empowered you who believed that they could hop out of the car and run a marathon right then and there.

Motivation is such a fickle concept.  So psychological, so easy to understand if you're on the outside looking in, or in the future looking back, but it's like attempting a Rubik's cube blindfolded when you're in the moment and searching for it.

It's easy to be motivated on race day.  Even when you're not in the shape you want to be in, racing is fun.  It's the payoff, the reward for the training.  We've all skipped workouts for various reasons, but how many times have you ever skipped a race you were planning to run just because your motivation is a little off?  Not many.  Training motivation is the one that counts though, keeping yourself focused and working consistently towards your goal.  It sounds so easy, even to me as I sit here typing it.  So why do we skip workouts, why do we lose motivation?

I'm going to classify missed workouts in two categories - life, and motivation loss.  Life happens, things sometimes truly get in the way of your running, and it can't always be anticipated and dealt with.  Things in this category aren't going to be discussed here - I have a pretty strict policy of trying not to let things that I have no control over bother me.  This series will focus solely on motivation, digging through the ins and outs of the human mind, discussing ways to tweak thought processes and hack your life so that loss of motivation doesn't result in skipped workouts.  Cool, huh?

Psychology is king here, and the main ideas that can help us understand and overcome a loss of focus are psychological barriers and cause and effect relationships. 

There are two kinds of barriers, mental road-blocks that can dictate what you do or don't do - active, and passive.  Active barriers are things that actually prevent an action - if you lock the candy bowl in a cabinet and put the key in a desk drawer, that is an active barrier to you eating candy, because the process of obtaining it makes the reward of candy worth less than the hassle of getting off the couch, getting a key from one room, opening a cabinet another room, and getting a treat.  Passive barriers prevent action through the absence of something - if there is no candy in the house, you cannot eat it.  One of my favorite non-running bloggers, Ramit Sethi, frequently discusses barriers in the context of personal finance, and I will link to his blog several times, as he is a freaking genius when it comes to understanding the motives behind actions.  Mr. Sethi's blog can be found here.

We can use cause and effect with this to work our way backwards to the source of our motivation loss, and how to prevent it.  Starting at the effect (missing a workout), you go backward dissecting the causes and identifying barriers that need to be overcome (as well as places where you can create barriers that help you).

And that's what the next post will be about, why we don't run.  What's getting in the way, preventing us from training and performing the way we want to.  Look for that post on Sunday or Monday.  Until then, stay warm, stay motivated, and when you can, stay invincible.


I've ran 4 of 5 days so far this week, which is pretty good.  I need to be consistent, since I don't have much time left before Thanksgiving.  Hopefully I'll get out of bed for a 10 mile run tomorrow morning.