How we'll run together this fall

And what we're running toward

Photo by Kristian Egelund on Unsplash

Good afternoon, my friends! ☀️

First, thanks for sharing your thoughts last Friday on training together this fall — it really does help me to know where each of you are with your running, what you’re struggling with and what you’re looking to achieve.

As I’ve shared with you over the past couple of weeks, my own running has been spotty for much of this summer. Though I’ve been running more consistently over the past two to three weeks, I feel like a beginner all over again, to be honest. So, when you tell me how much you’ve been struggling with motivation, I definitely feel where you’re coming from.

In terms of what will motivate you, individually, I wish I had an answer. That there was a rock-solid “why,” a reason to run that I could pull down from a shelf and put in your hands, like a gift from Santa Claus. (I really do!)

So maybe I should start with my own.

Lately, I’ve been thumbing through old books, as little nuggets of insight pop into my head from the background chatter of my mind, and I go digging in my bookshelf to recall where they came from. One I’ve been drawn to again is The Incomplete Book of Running, written a few years ago by Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.”

In the book, Sagal tells us the story of his life through his running — how, at different moments, it helped him deal with the ups and downs of a hectic career, with the dissolution of his marriage, and ultimately to face up to the person he’d become.

What we’re looking for out there on the roads (or the trails), he tells us he learned, is change:

“And now, a million years later, as you get up every second day just to do another three miles around the housing development, heaving and breathing and trying to distract yourself with a new podcast, you are actually becoming, in tiny increments, the thing you were meant to be. The soft fat stored from a modern diet of processed industrial compounds starts to dissolve and drop away; your unused muscles in your legs start to tighten and firm; your lungs fill and empty and fill and become elastic and clear. Your heart, that small beating thing, strains to meet the stress and finds that it can. You can feel it growing in your chest cavity, like the Grinch’s.

It’s like one of those modern vampire or zombie movies, where some strange compound transforms the human body into something else, something much stronger, something much more dangerous than the weak and pasty suburbanites who become its prey. Instead of the Walking Dead, we are the Running Living. The urge to transform can come from within, from a sense of either loss or surfeit in your life. I have known people who ran because they felt there was something missing, and they thought if they could pick up some speed they might find it. I have also known people who’ve found themselves like Marley’s ghost, with chains of stress and responsibility and unwanted pounds, who began to run in the hope that all or some of it would shake off from the jostling. Heraclitus said, ‘What does not change is the will to change,’ and thus our motivations are inexhaustible as we propel ourselves doggedly down the dawn streets. We are fueled by Gatorade and dissatisfaction.”

I’ve bolded the last couple of sentences there because the quoted phrase — “what does not change is the will to change” — to me is at the heart of why each of us laces up our shoes and gets out there too.

Now, Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher who lived 500 years before the common era, in what was then known as Ephesus (near modern-day Kusadasi, on Turkey’s Agean coast). I mention that because there are so many variations on what he said about change, like “the only thing constant is change” — which you’ve no doubt heard a million times in your life — but also, “it is in changing that we find purpose.”

Slowly but surely, over the past few weeks and months I’ve been realizing a change I want to make: giving up drinking. It’s become increasingly apparent to me how it interferes with my sleep, gives me headaches, makes losing weight extremely difficult, and just contributes to an overall feeling of “blah,” of a brain fog I’m just tired of experiencing.

Like many of us, I started drinking more often during the pandemic, and never put the brake on it that I should have. (Especially those first few weeks, when we were shut in our homes and couldn’t go anywhere — it felt like an excuse to “celebrate.”)

Alcohol is sneaky. You don’t intend to drink more than one glass of wine, but another couldn’t hurt, right? You don’t intend to have wine every night, but it helps you relax after work, right? Before you know it, you’re drinking more nights than you aren’t, and then every night for a week, and then, and then… you just keep coming up with more and more excuses.

Before you realize it, you find yourself in a place you never wanted to be. You’ve made all these little accommodations to alcohol, it’s not clear who’s in charge anymore.

I’m ready to yank back the steering wheel, and dedicate my running during this fall to getting myself to a healthier place vis-a-vis drinking. (This is all very personal, I know, but I’m sharing this because I know if I don’t “burn the ships,” I might backtrack. This way, I’ll be on the hook for actually living up to it.)

Do you do this when you train for a race? Is there a change you want to make, that your running might help you make? Or, can you use the energy and the feeling of agency that running helps us generate to make a change you’ve been wanting to make?

I’d love to hear, either in replies back or in the comments — as always, keep in touch!

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Our training plans!

As promised, I’ve put together a couple of different half marathon training plans and one for a 10-miler that we’ll use to run together over the next few months. (I still owe you one for a 10K, which I’ll send out later 😉)

Run a half by Thanksgiving

For those of us who’d like to run 13.1 miles by Thanksgiving, our plan starts with tomorrow’s three-mile run — and, to the day, is timed for exactly twelve weeks before Thanksgiving.

It’s a five-day-a-week plan, and looks like this over the next week:

• Thursday, Sept. 1 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 3 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 4 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 6 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 7 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

Or, run a half by the end of the year

For those of us who can’t devote five days a week to training, I’ve put together a 16-week plan, which ends on December 24 — and starts with this:

• Thursday, Sept. 1 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 3 — 4 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 4 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 6 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 7 — off

Or, train for a 10-miler

If you’d like to train for a 10-miler, we’ll also follow a 12-week training schedule, with a plan that starts with this:

• Thursday, Sept. 1 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Saturday, Sept. 3 — 3 miles/40-45 minutes

• Sunday, Sept. 4 — 2-3 miles/20-30 minutes

• Tuesday, Sept. 6 — 3 miles/30-35 minutes

• Wednesday, Sept. 7 — off

For the full training plan, become a subscriber

For the next couple of weeks, I’ll include each week’s training miles in our weekly Wednesday newsletter. After that, they’ll be included for paying subscribers only. If you’d like to continue with us beyond that, I hope you’ll sign up.

You’ll get a special Sunday issue with amazing races you’ll love running, plus lots more interaction with our amazing community that’s spread all around the U.S. and the world.

All you need to do is click/tap this button to join us!