Have you ever tried to quit something cold turkey? People do this with smoking, and it almost never works. We have no willpower. Or more correctly, we have a limited amount of willpower. It is physically draining to fight a major urge, like an addiction. At some point, we've got no fight left. You see it all the time in dieting - a person eats smart and healthy, denying themselves the foods they love and fighting their urges as long as they can, then I - I mean, er, they, find themselves in the bakery at the grocery store...
Willpower is a limited resource, just like energy during a run. Nobody has the resources to do everything they should AND prevent themselves from doing all of the things they shouldn't. If we did, well by now you get the idea - rich, thin, setting a PR every weekend, etc.
So how do we beat a system that is designed such that the harder we fight, the more assured we are to lose? We stop fighting hard, and start fighting smart. We're smart, right? Damn right!
Barriers don't always work against us. They have no motive, they aren't for or against us, they are just there, and we move in one direction or another because of them. We need to build our own barriers, barriers that direct us away from failure. Let's practice, with the examples of smoking and dieting.
An active barrier to smoking would be tough - short of putting a mousetrap in the cigarette package, there aren't many options. Passive options are better, because you think about them less - they become part of your lifestyle more easily. Things like only taking a set number of cigarettes with you to work, telling your coworkers that you're trying to quit and not to give you any more under any circumstances. Removing the cigarette lighter from the car so you can't smoke in there.
Dieting comes with more plentiful ideas, and is a great example because food is omnipresent, whether you are a runner or not. In the first post we talked about the idea of locking up the candy bowl as an active barrier, or not having candy as a passive one. But how do we keep me, er, I mean, our hypothetical person who may or may not have a love of chocolate chip cookies, out of the bakery at Kroger? For starters, I don't go there. I don't buy anything on the cookie isle unless I absolutely have to. And when I feel the urge coming on, I don't hit it head on. I make myself accountable by telling someone (my wife typically), setting a goal, and placing whatever it is I want as the reward for reaching that goal. Shame from failure, or from disappointing others, can be a powerful tool - fear of this shame makes a powerful barrier.
So how can we apply this to what we really want - running success?
We have to use barriers to eliminate barriers. Confusingly simple, right? I know personally, my own reasons for skipping a morning run tend to be getting out of bed, having enough time to both run and get ready for work, and being able to push past those days when I just don't feel like running without any specific explanation as to why. Getting out of bed in the morning is hard. I'm a morning person, once I've escaped from the smotheringly comfortable confines of my blankets, but it is so easy to "just lay here 5 more minutes". So what do I do? Multiple alarms, spaced about a minute apart, in multiple locations around the room. Annoying, buzzing, beeping, dinging, multiple active barriers to me sleeping in and missing a morning run.
Once I get up, I need a little time to get fully awake, time to plan my clothes for running once I've seen the weather (winter running requires me to determine how many layers I'll need on a day-to-day basis), have a little coffee and a little water, and get going. And I'd love to just get going - if I could only find my shoes, or gloves, or that one particular garment that I'm missing. This is a passive barrier that has to be overcome. Typically, I try to do as much as I can just before heading to bed that will grease the wheels for the next morning. This means gathering running gear and placing it by the door, preparing anything I can for work (such as lunch), etc. - any thing that I can do to shorten the amount of time I need to get ready (which lengthens the time I get to spend on running), I try to do. To make sure this happens, I need strategically placed reminders - active barriers to things that I have to do. For example, I put my running watch right by my toothbrush - gotta brush my teeth every night, and the watch sitting there tells me to go get my shoes/clothes organized while I'm brushing.
What about those days where you just don't think you have it in you? This is where guilt and shame find their use. Guilt will drive a person to confess to something even after they've gotten away with it. You can punish a child simply by telling them that you are ashamed of what they did. This should tell you all you need to know about the power of these as motivational tools. A lot of people in a lot of advice arenas (weight loss, quitting smoking, exercise, etc.) will tell you that you should "make yourself accountable" to someone else if you want to reach your goals. This is right, but I say just telling friends and coworkers doesn't quite take it far enough, you need to hit it with everything you've got available. We're not young athletes training for a high school race here, where if we fail, "you tried your best" covers it. We're grown-ass men and women. If we make an honest effort and come up short, so be it, but if we can't set a goal and work towards it, what kind of people are we? Making yourself accountable to others is good - announce intentions on Facebook, tell spouses and coworkers what you're doing, hell, make bets with people about it (let your wallet keep you accountable). That's easy, when we fail it is easy to find people who are willing to be ashamed of us to help motivate us. But we need to be accountable to ourselves as well, shame and guilt have to work together. We need real, tangible, visible reminders of what we're working toward, and what the consequences of failure are. Your previous race times compared to the goal for that race could work (as someone who likes to race, it works for me). How about a picture of you in the best shape of your life, taped to the mirror where your reflection can easily show you that you're not in the best shape of your life? Guilt barriers are pretty personal, so everyone has to come up with their own.
When I started writing this series, I had some really good ideas, but as writing the posts became delayed more and more (why did this take 3 weeks, you might ask? Tune in, my next post will tell you all where I've been lately), the ideas have slipped away. I really need to start jotting down notes as soon as I have a good idea for writing, because a good idea slips away so fast, it goes from something profound to something mediocre in just a few hours of waiting. I had a good ending in mind here when I started this post (weeks ago), now I have nothing more than a recap. And since my page shows the last 5 blog posts, I'm not even going to take the time to write a recap.
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