Motivation

Learning from David + Megan Roche and Meb Keflezighi

© Peter Kováč | Dreamstime

Everything that I’ve achieved physically in running started psychologically, with the simple thought, “I want to do this.”

— Meb Keflezighi

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Around this time last year, our 8-year-old started taking piano lessons. Once a week, his piano teacher came by our house, where she would sit with him at the keyboard, walking him through all the notes as she taught him scales.

At the end of each lesson, she asked him to do one thing: practice for at least 10 minutes a day, so his hands could develop a feel for playing the keys, and so playing could start to become second nature, until his lesson the following week.

If you’re a parent, you probably know: he didn’t practice his 10 minutes a day. In fact, he didn’t practice at all. Each week would come and go with the same admonition, but the practice never happened.

Until one day, my son told his teacher how much he liked Jurassic World. (And when I say “like,” I mean “completely obsessed about to the degree that now knows almost everything there is to know about dinosaurs.”)

That gave his teacher an idea.

From the other room, I heard her play the notes to John Williams’s famous theme song from the movie, the one with the single, quiet piano notes that lead into the full orchestra, the ding… ding-ding-ding that give way to the dramatic BUM-bum-bum-BUMMMMM. One by one, she led him through how to play those spare first notes, until he started picking up on how to do it himself.

That day and the days after, you could hear the Jurassic theme song over and over and over, ringing throughout our house. Whenever I walked past his keyboard, it seemed, my son was sitting in front of it, working out by ear how to play the song.

He went on to play the song at his recital this past spring (perfectly and flawlessly, of course, in his parents’ eyes at least!) and has since done the same with every song he falls in love with. So, we’re hearing LOTS of theme songs in our house lately, from Jaws to Top Gun and now Mission: Impossible and even Halloween.

(No, we haven’t shown him Halloween, I promise! He just loves the scary high notes in the movie’s theme song, I swear.)

I thought about this when a reader named Kevin posted a question about running motivation in our thread discussion earlier this week, when he asked:

“Like some of the other people here I’m curious about motivation through injuries and other setbacks. I find it easy to feel motivated when things go well – I set a PR, I feel good on a long run. But when a flare up occurs or progress seems to stall, that’s the tricky part.

[Also] how to stay motivated across the long term. What about motivation after you peak for a race, when you’re trying to build back?”

To be completely honest, it’s hard for me too. I started running when I was in my twenties, living here in Atlanta, young and single. I had a job that left me with lots of time on my hands, so I filled it with running around the neighborhood park near my apartment.

It wasn’t until later, when I started dating a girl who was into running too — she’d run a couple of marathons, which before I met her would have seemed like climbing Everest. But, because she was into it, I decided I’d try one too.

So, my interest at first was purely mercenary. I wasn’t until I joined her on our weekly long training runs that I learned, wow, this can give you a really amazing feeling. I like this thing. And I feel better about myself when I do it. That’s interesting, and a change from the way I normally feel. Hmmmmm….

That was when I discovered where running could take me. That there were amazing places you could run — in Alaska at midnight, along the California coast, even the streets of Venice. I felt like a puppy then, and I wanted to soak it all up, travel to all of these places and run these amazing routes.

Recently, I read something that has stuck with me: “only intrinsic motivation lasts.” What I think that means is that you can push yourself for a while to do something — to exercise, to eat better, etc. Eventually, however, pushing yourself stops working. Everyone’s willpower has a limit, even the most disciplined among us.

But when a goal is fun, when you naturally desire it, you don’t need to push yourself. You’ll organize your energies toward achieving it without having to throw a metaphorical yoke on yourself. When that’s applied to running, you’ll happily run the miles you need to run, because your goal is this shiny, amazing thing out there just beyond the horizon that you want to go after.

A lot of us might think we don’t have running goals, legendary marathoner Meb Keflezighi (one of my personal heroes, whom I cite often here) writes in his great book Meb For Mortals. But we should take a closer look:

“You might say … you just want to run to relieve stress, not create more of it, and that the rest of your life is plenty goal oriented.

I’m fine with that approach. But you might not realize that you probably already set goals in your running. You don’t head out the door saying, ‘I’m going to run until I get tired.’ You have a route in mind or a general idea of the duration your run will be. You probably also run a certain number of times each week, and you probably aren’t happy if something keeps you from getting in that many. So you already have some basic running goals, even if you never stated them as goals. It might be the case that setting more-formal goals will help you enjoy your running even more.”

To be clear, of course you can approach running by simply pushing yourself to do it. You can be your own drill sergeant, and will yourself to run more and more miles. But why would you want to?

I’ve never found that I’m able to get very far doing that. (Believe me, I’ve tried. Not for long, but I’ve tried.) What has worked for me instead is finding a goal that lights me up inside, that excites me.

A couple of years ago, I got to spend some time talking with David and Megan Roche, both of whom are highly accomplished runners and sought-after coaches — each has won USA Track and Field’s Trail Runner of the Year award — and the authors of 2019’s The Happy Runner.

In the book, they emphasize that if you want to run over a lifetime, you need to accept that you’ll go through ups and downs, and that the runner you look like at 25 or 35 won’t necessarily be the runner you are at 45 or 55 or 65:

“Because no one approach works for every runner (or even the same runner at different phases of development), a happy runner cannot be an inflexibly certain runner, either. You have to accept the fickle uncertainty of a running life and be patient with a worldview that adapts as you do (and as training knowledge evolves)…

In running, your exact approach won’t be the same year-to-year as you grow and change. In the face of an ever-changing you, it’s essential to have a worldview that flexibly changes too. When our athletes go through crises, we try to calm them with a dose of perspective… Being willing to change your approach to running and life over time is the only way to hold onto what brings you contentment in an ever-changing world.”

They emphasize the importance of knowing why you’re running, and what you want to run for. To be honest, that sounded a little airy-fairy to me when I first read it. “What do you mean, I need to know my ‘why’?” I wondered.

But when I heard my son play the notes of Jurassic Park over and over and over, when no one was asking him to practice, I got it. He had found something that lit him up inside, and he wasn’t going to let go.

I think there’s a big lesson in that for us, when we’re looking to find our motivation. Like I mentioned, I don’t think pushing ourselves works over the long term. Finding a new goal — a new mountain to climb, a new place to run, something to get excited about — seems to work much better, at least for me.

What about you? What works for you?

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running life is going — I always love hearing from you.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Talk running anytime in the Substack app

If you missed my email earlier this week, The Half Marathoner is part of a special pilot project to test out a new feature for Substack mobile app.

It’s called Substack Threads, and it allows us to start a thread, ask a question, share a photo or an article, post a thought, or even update us all on how your run went today — without having to wait for Fridays, when we have our regular live discussions.

I’m posting questions this week and plan on putting our training plan there this fall — and make it a place we can gather, especially on the weekends, to share our runs, hear how each other did, and discuss anything and everything we want to chat about.