Why do you run?
By BF Mitch
To spend time with friends.
To impress those friends.
To lose weight.
To abolish the feelings of guilt for eating like a crazed lion.
Or do you run for deeper reasons?
To test your physical, mental, and emotional capacity in an all out war against a course or trail.
To have time away from the daily grind and time for yourself.
To distract your mind from whatever may be going on in your life.
Or because you’re a closet masochist and running is your medium of self torture. (No judgement here)
It’s most likely a combination of many reasons.
Yea we like pushing our bodies and minds to the limit but who doesn’t like some friendly competition and eating contests along the way?
Either way. When we get rid of all the fluffy stuff, we all run for one simple reason.
We LOVE running.
There’s just something special and unique about it. Something that fulfills a little part inside of us that nothing else has and that nothing else will.
Even though there are days when we don’t feel like running (or moving) we always come back to this simple, yet elegant, activity.
Through the injuries, the intense pain, the long hours, the extreme weather, the sleep deprivation, the months and years of training, and so much more.
That itch to go for a run is just always there.
To outsiders we look insane.
And yes we do get a kick out of it and most of us agree. We are slightly insane.
We have so much dedication to something that some just don’t understand.
Who would do that to themselves just for a t-shirt and a medal?
Well… we would. And we will. And we love it.
But even without the possibility of others ‘ooing’ and ‘ahhing’ at our work ethic, we would still get up in the wee hours of the morning to hit the road or our favorite trail.
But sometimes we lose sight of why we’re doing it and what it means to us.
We start to treat running like mowing the lawn.
It’s something we ‘should do.’
We see the grass growing taller every day, and tell ourselves we’ll take care of it tomorrow. Knowing full well that it’s not going to be any more exciting or enticing to go start the mower tomorrow than it is today.
Or maybe we treat running like a reading assignment.
It has to be done.
If we don’t do it now, we’ll be screwed for the test.
We have the silent debate of whether or not to put it off.
If we put it off, it would mean that we would have to read twice as much tomorrow.
Okay, we’ve come to a consensus.
We’ll do it now, but we’re not going to like it.
The point I’m trying to get across is that something went wrong.
Running is now among the other list of chores.
Running is no longer our escape and our salvation.
It’s now a task, or a chore.
Running is now something that ‘has to be taken care of’.
Running is on the to-do list. It must be crossed off.
Maybe it’s sticking to the training plan.
Maybe it’s the overwhelming feeling of guilt for missing a day of running.
Maybe we think we have to.
For some reason or another, we began to feel obligated to run.
Even if the pain we’ve been feeling seems more like an injury than our usual dose of soreness, we push through.
Far too many of us have fallen into this trap and ended up stressed out, or injured, or demotivated, or all three combined.
The root of the problem: The Task-Completion Mindset
The moment running became a ‘task’ for us is when our bodies, our desire, and our work ethic started to fall apart.
It SUCKS.
We ambitiously signed up for a race.
We were extremely excited.
We found a suitable training plan.
Maybe from a running friend or from a quick Google search.
We started off strong and we pushed through the first couple of weeks or months of the training plan.
But over time it got harder and harder to find the desire to lace up our shoes and push aside everything else we should be doing.
We no longer felt like running because we lost sight of why we run.
That’s because our sight and our focus was on something else.
The training plan.
The beautiful system that was supposed to lead us to running glory.
Instead, it deceived us.
The obligation and commitment we made to our plan was so strong that we would rather push through fatigue and injury than admit to ourselves what was really going on.
We hoped for the best, but ultimately we knew where this would end and we pushed through the sketchy pains and got injured.
This is the story of too many of us.
It’s happened to me.
It’s probably happened to you.
We need to re channel our dedication to completing our daily running chores and instead focus on what we really get from running.
Now I’m not suggesting that we all throw away our training plans.
They have their place.
Nonetheless, if we hope for many more long years of running we must do our best to abolish the task-completion mindset that comes along with it, and replace it with a new, more enjoyable mindset.
Running is FUN.
It’s an adventure.
It’s a journey that should be experienced.
Not just a chore along with washing the dishes and doing the laundry.
There are up hills and there are down hills, high points and low points.
One would not exist without the other.
We learn from the high points and we learn from the low points.
Again I ask, why do you run?
Let’s see what you can come up with this time.
- Mitch