Running through life
Why I Run Now?
I ask myself this question often. Why do I spend so much time running when I could be doing something else? I could have used all the hours I spent running to master an instrument, write a novel, or perhaps even start a business. From trail running and exercise biking to resistance training in the gym, I spend roughly 11 hours training a week, which is both physically and mentally exhausting. That’s a serious amount of time that requires a serious amount of commitment, and I’m not even a great runner. Sometimes when I’m lying dead on the couch with brain fog after a long, gruelling training week or when I’m looking at my calendar trying to figure out when I’ll have time for socialising and my other priorities, I try to convince myself that training at such a high constant volume while also working a full time job is an unpractical waste of time. And from the outside looking in, perhaps it is. However, I’m not looking in from the outside. I know my mind well, and it isn’t wired to be either sedentary or complacent; when it is sedentary and complacent, the real irrational thinking begins.
My days a largely spent seated at an office desk. That’s more than enough sitting to inspire me to maximise every passing second when I am not, and with fitness being one of my top four priorities, for me, this involves a serious amount of running.
Unfortunately, running excessively comes at the sacrifice of time. I’m a creative and business-oriented person, I love making music and writing stories, and I am fixated on the idea of finding an idea that I care so deeply about that I cannot help but obsess over it. However, as I have learned over the years, having both a creative and business-oriented mind can be counterproductive. I often feel guilty for not further exploring my natural talent. However, my pragmatic, business-minded rationale convinces me that a career in music and financial freedom is an unlikely combination. But who knows, perhaps I could compete against the odds if I spent less time running and more time future planning? But then again, if I spent less time running, my hyperactive mind would very quickly become overwhelmed, agitated and catastrophic. The less I run, the more I worry – that’s just how my brain works, and slowly but surely, I am coming to peace with my unconventional way of thinking. That said, running has undeniable benefits. One of the most valuable assets I have gained from running is how to be productive, both at work and in my personal life, which is essential when trying to make the most out of every hour the day has to offer.
Why I Started Running?
I wasn’t supposed to be an athlete. I started running because I wanted to lose weight… and I did, at a rapid pace. However, running wasn’t part of my weight loss journey until it became necessary. Waking up at the crack of dawn to brave the brisk morning air has not gotten any easier... I’ve just gotten used to it. It’s funny how your mind works.
Before running, I lifted. However, the problem with lifting is that you can’t physically see results unless you diet, hence the eating disorder. Nevertheless, my routine of diet and exercise worked. I was aesthetically in the best shape of my life, and although it paid dividends, it came at the price of an unhealthy fixation. I only ever ate what I perceived as safe foods. Unfortunately for people with an eating disorder or disordered eating, life happens, so whenever I found myself in a situation in which eating a ‘bad food’ was unavoidable, I had to engage in dramatic strenuous exercise to make up for it – enter running.
Now, I’m not going to dive into my relationship with food. Why? One, because I have done that before, and two, I’d rather not; that’s not what this blog is about. This blog is about why I run NOW, not why I started running initially. However, for context, I will cover what I think you should know… Without doubt, my impractical training routine is a byproduct of my eating disorder, which I am still overcoming today. That said, I don’t run to lose weight anymore; there are better methods for that. Instead, I run because I am obsessed with the sport, namely seeing my fitness improve. I enjoy achieving personal records and watching my resting heart rate decrease. Fitness is the goal, and to achieve it, your stomach must be satisfied.
If you have read any of my other blogs, you would be aware that I’m passionate about nutrition. I tried so many diets when my focus was on lifting: Keto, Slow Carb, High Protein. Slow Carb was my favourite. Coined by the author of The 4 Hour Body, Tim Ferriss, the Slow Carb diet is high-protein and low-glycaemic. I subtly changed the diet to my liking after listening to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman describe his eating habits on his self-titled podcast. Huberman saves his carbohydrates until the evening, and I did the same. According to Huberman, carbohydrates release high levels of serotonin and tryptophan, which contribute to calmness and help you wind down before bed. Huberman followed this diet because he wanted better sleep, I followed it because I felt lighter eating proteins and fats.
Today, as an obsessed runner, I’m more concerned about performance than aesthetics. Not only do I want to feel good on my runs, but I also want to consistently improve. Your glycogen stores should be full of carbohydrates before putting out a solid effort, you can’t expect to feel good neither perform if you only ever fill up a quarter tank at a time. According to the literature, carbohydrates are the most critical macronutrient for performance, and whenever I treat my glycogen stores as I did my first car, I find it roughly 30 per cent harder to endure my workouts, which may not sound like a lot, but sure does feel like it. Retaining pace at distance and elevation without carbohydrates would be like rowing upstream with one oar. So, unless I get injured to the point of no return, you won’t be catching me following a low-glycaemic diet anytime soon.
I have the discipline to endure discomfort, the perseverance to achieve my vision and the values to live a fulfilling life. No matter how difficult the situation, running, especially when I don’t want to, has helped me build the resilience and discipline to stand tall when life tries to tear me down. Through self-inflicted adversity, I have managed to find happiness in something I once hated. From satisfying the chip on my shoulder to contributing to my weight loss and silencing the critic in my mind, the list of reasons why I started running is short. However, the list of reasons why I continue to run is much longer.
Every Bite Counts
From brain fog and fatigue to injury and muscle atrophy, I have experienced the consequences of underfueling firsthand. I started running when I found it became harder to lose weight solely through resistance training and dieting – an unnecessary, counterproductive hazard during the pursuit of fitness. Long story short, I lost a significant amount of muscle; my ribs looked like they had been eaten by my chest and my pelvic bone was sharper than my jaw line.
Perhaps I looked like a runner, but I certainly wasn’t feeling like one, neither was I thinking like one. In fact, I was running with the perspective of a bodybuilder on a cut. Back then, I weighed myself daily. I specifically remember hitting 64 kilograms because I was very proud of it – I had dropped almost 26 kilograms from my heaviest. No one celebrated this achievement with me, as in reality, it wasn’t a celebratory moment; rather, it was the moment when friends and family started to worry, and relationships began to collapse. I injured myself shortly after reaching this ‘milestone’, which, in hindsight, isn’t the slightest bit surprising given the circumstances.
Life took a turn for the worse. I’ll spare you the details, but I will say this… I’m not a fan of the saying ‘everything happens for a reason,’ but as I write this sentence, I am potentially in the most fortunate situation of my adult life. Yes, I am still indecisive, constantly anxious, a catastrophiser and an overthinker, but I cannot help but wonder where I would be now if I had never endured the consequences of my previous decisions. Would I be a runner? Maybe, maybe not… I guess we will never know. Nevertheless, although the journey yet to come will have its challenges, I’m sure it will be a prosperous one, and I’m sure the good moments will outweigh the bad.
Now, back to the point…
Somewhere between being diagnosed with an eating disorder and experiencing what I can only describe as chronic depression, I gained back a lot of weight, and quickly. Nevertheless, I noticed a marked increase in my strength within a short time – lifting became my new priority while running briefly took a backseat. Up until that point in my 'fitness journey,' as they say, I was aware of how nutrition fuels effort and gains, but I chose to neglect it because I was afraid of calories.
Although I lift less and run more these days, I now understand the nuances of proper nutrition extensively. In fact, retaining my, perhaps unconventional and at times extensive, training schedule would be impossible if I did not.
I make sure to hit my hourly carbohydrate target and stay on top of my sodium intake on a long run, and I know the nutrition my body requires to retain muscle and recover after a hard effort. Personally, I find that eating for endurance, despite being time-consuming, is less mentally exhausting than eating for aesthetics, perhaps not during the workout but certainly thereafter. I’d rather be a runner than have to constantly think about reaching protein targets, limiting carbohydrates and reducing sodium as a body builder does. I am obsessed with learning the science behind endurance nutrition, and particularly, how I can leverage it to fuel my own workouts. I’d rather learn about the nutrition required to perform rather than the nutrition that isn’t to be lean. Also, running doesn’t so much trigger my eating disorder mind, which is a bonus.
Numbers don’t Lie
I can stop drinking after one beer and I can gamble without having to chase my losses. Although an addict, my addictions are unique, often involving an area of life that I know I can control. For instance, before my obsession with running and fitness, I was fixated on monitoring the number on the scale. Fortunately, you cannot be anorexic and fit simultaneously. Therefore, although I do have addictive traits, my brain tends to obsess over constructive behaviours, however, often to the point of destruction – if that makes any sense.
Every day, I spend at least 20 minutes scouring the data collected on my Garmin, typically in the morning when I wake up and at night before bed. I investigate trends with my resting heart rate and how my training is impacting it, I try to understand the logic behind my race predictions for distances of various lengths, and I measure the intensity of running segments by tracking how many times on average my heart beats per minute throughout the duration of a one-kilometre split. It’s safe to say that I am hooked and obsessed.
Running isn’t a very attractive sport. There are no 720 Twists as there is in skateboarding, and there are no Slam Dunks as there are in basketball. However, unlike Skateboarding and Basketball, a bystander cannot judge the talent of a runner off pure observation. Rather, running is a solitary endeavour that you can participate in and improve upon in the shadows. In fact, unless you were to run a spreadsheet of fitness data, the only other way of proving yourself an efficient runner would be on the track.
Unless you are one of the greats, running long distances doesn’t necessarily rely on a person's talent. I can’t speak for all runners, but during the build for a race, how well I train informs me on the time I can expect to pass the finish line.
For instance, I am training for a 53-kilometre ultramarathon on a hilly, rugged route with over 1,400 metres of elevation. Currently, life outside of running is not too stressful, so there was no better time than the past few months to commit to a comprehensive training block. I like to think there are three essential checklist tasks in a training block, as follows:
Consistent mileage. For the two months prior to last week, I ran more than 60 kilometres every week, with a few weeks exceeding 70 kilometres and one week exceeding 80 kilometres.
Leg strength is perhaps just as important as running – dragging your body up one hill after another is just as hard as it sounds. So, training the legs was a non-negotiable discipline that took three hours from my weekly calendar.
Not all runners do this, but I have found that adding one to two light cross-training sessions to my weekly routine, typically an hour of swimming and an hour of cycling, helps me recover without losing fitness.
Now, let's break this down... For simplicity, imagine that every 10 kilometres translates to one hour of running. Add that together with the time spent in the gym and cross-training, and you have a minimum of 11 hours of ultramarathon training per week. Although this is a mentally and physically taxing pursuit, in hindsight, fully committing to the challenge made me realise some important things about myself.
Through doing what I despise one day after another, I started to believe that the box I live in is, after all, just a box that can easily be opened. I felt like a legitimate athlete for the first time in my life, and the data recorded on my wristwatch, which I obsess over, proved it to be true. It also had me questioning the future importance of wearables in health care, which I won’t get into.
What I am trying to get at is this... I am an obsessive person and always have been. From baking and writing music to interviewing for broadcast and, how could I forget, running an ultra, when I get onto something, I really get onto it, to the point where I find it almost impossible to think about anything else other than whatever that thing is. The problem is that the next thing always comes along before I have time to master my obsession. Running, however, although never at this level, has been a consistent part of my life for years, and I feel like the more time I give to genuinely improving at the sport, the less space I have in my mind to think about my eating disorder, despite how time-consuming it may be.
Just like measuring to the decimal gram and tracking to the pound, my obsession with running is both progress-oriented and numbers-oriented. Although excessive at times, running has redirected my focus from weight and macronutrients to pace and resting heart rate, and for that, I am forever grateful.
Distraction From the End Goal
It turns out you can outrun your problems, momentarily, that is…
I wish I could stop thinking about the things I don’t want to think about, but that’s just not how my mind works. I am just the passenger. However, when I am running at threshold, edging on Vo2 Max, I simply don’t have the mental capacity to think about anything other than reaching post-workout euphoria. Nothing suppresses the chaos of the mind like a hard run.
Running is a distraction from my obsession with the end goal. The vision of my ideal life can be daunting, and I am constantly plotting and scheming about how I can achieve it. This is problematic for two reasons...
The first being that I am my own biggest critic, and the second being that my mind is not like a television; I can’t just shut it off when it’s time to go to bed. I’m sure many of you can empathise with this mental battle and understand the overwhelming pressure that the pursuit of achieving success and fear of failure can inflict. It takes a toll on my vulnerable mind, and running is my way of addressing it. Anxiety suppresses when my heart rate increases and sweat begins dripping down the back of my neck.
I’m not arguing against future planning and backwards thinking. I’m suggesting that having a break from the anxiety it induces can momentarily remove the endless pressure of your future-oriented goal, especially when you’re struggling to do the legwork to achieve it, and running is how I reduce the pressure. Truth is, my life has not turned out the way I envisioned it... by this age, I wanted to be living overseas, working as a journalist for one of my favourite publications (an optimistic but achievable goal). However, as I grew older, my values shifted, and the reality of living below the poverty line caught up with me. Although running helps me escape the four corners of my mind when I can’t stand another second of it, what it has really done is embed a sense of retainable control and discipline into my life that has kept my mind out of the darkness and in the light as I continue to come to terms with that reality.
…
I’ve always liked the idea of meditating, escaping the chaos through focusing on the rhythm of your breathing and your body’s sensations seems like a great way to rid the mind of stress, build attention span and improve the way we deal with life’s inevitable challenges. However, the reason I have never practiced it is because I imagine running without headphones would be the non-complacent equivalent. I am probably incorrect in saying that, but personally, running bridges the gap. There are no distractions out on the track, it’s just you and your thoughts – no one's going to battle your demons for you.
From ongoing school or workplace pressure to divorce and financial stress, running is a perfect cure to overcome these anxieties and supress the negative self-talk. As mentioned earlier, running is a very accessible medium of life that everybody and anybody can have control over, and I think having a sense of control is essential. However, if you’d prefer not to think through your thoughts, just ramp up the intensity of your run, it’s unlikely that you’ll have the mental capacity to think of anything other than the finish line.
Fit Enough to Say Yes
When I talk about discipline, what I’m really talking about is the influence we have over our destiny. And through running, especially when you don’t want to, you build up this sense of autonomy, proving your true capabilities. For instance, I wouldn’t consider myself a great runner by any means, but through consistent training, I’ve improved tenfold compared to where I started a few years ago – consistency compounds, as any well-versed stock market analyst would say.
I don’t run because I enjoy the actual running. Running is uncomfortable and more physically demanding than any other sport... You have to eat like a tyrant, wake up at the crack of dawn, and brave the brisk morning elements all before moving on with your day. But then again, building up fitness is supposed to be a challenge; if it were easy, 66 per cent of Australians wouldn’t be obese or overweight. I’m not discriminating against that segment of the population; I understand the struggle. I’ve fallen in and out of that 66 per cent far more times than I would have liked. When the odds are stacked against you, it’s far more difficult to avoid indulging in bad habits than it is to fight against them. However, discipline doesn’t mean perfectionism – it’s not about flicking the switch in an instant. Discipline, just like consistency, compounds with every good decision you make.
On my first intentional run ever, I wore a pair of sneakers (not runners) and hid my body underneath a baggy yellow jumper. I couldn’t finish the whole five-kilometre distance. In fact, I only got through two before turning around and walking home. Back then, I couldn’t even fathom running a marathon, let alone an ultra, and this week, I will endure a gruelling 54 kilometres over 1,400 metres of elevation. It all began with taking ownership and control over my actions, making good decisions consistently. And when you repeatedly choose diligence over complacency, you start becoming the person you want to be before you have the chance to even realise it.
…
At one point in my life, running a marathon and climbing to Everest Base Camp seemed unfathomable. However, in the last year, through consistent training, I completed both of those challenges, reaching the level of fitness required to achieve what I once thought impossible.
It’s been just over four months since I ran the Rottnest Marathon, a hilly four-lap route that covers the Island’s Northwest side. I finished in 3 hours and 45 minutes, a relatively good time for both a first marathon attempt and a course of that nature. Now, as I type this very sentence, I’m four days out of running a 54-kilometre ultra on the Bibbulmun Track, a hilly 1,000-kilometre trail spanning from Perth to Albany in Western Australia. Good news is that I’m the fittest I’ve ever been; bad news is that I’ll be racing with a mildly injured foot. For now, let’s focus on the good news…
Through the sacrifice of long training days in the mountains, chronic fatigue, bonding with my mates, and what felt like endless amounts of time, I managed to build a stronger mind and a tougher body, which provides me with the confidence required to reach the finish line. Some may call this process a chore, but I like to call it fun. In other words, if it’s walking distance, I ain’t driving.
My ideal vacation typically revolves around some type of activity, whether that be climbing to Everest Basecamp or surfing in the Mentawais. The world’s magnificent geography has so much to offer, and right now I feel more capable and confident in my ability to tackle some of its toughest challenges. From rock climbing in Yosemite National Park and hiking the Annapurna Range to drawing a line in the face of a wave at Pipeline, my fitness has fuelled my determination to discover the physical limits of my body and mind. I’ll be summiting when I return to Everest.
However, I’m also not getting any younger... Sounds rich coming from a 25-year-old, but it's very true. Given my desire to tackle some of the world’s toughest challenges, I am more aware than ever that my physical capabilities will begin to derail, regardless of the training hours I put in. It is a worrying thought, one that has me questioning the decisions I made and the path I am paving, and it’s not the only expedition-related worry I have. Exploring the gifts of planet Earth is financially costly, requiring wealth that I, nor many people, have. And money is only one part of the problem; once you establish wealth, you're struck with another issue: the lack of time. Hard workers are too good at their job to take time off work. If you’re a business owner, going offline for a minimum of two weeks to trek to Everest Basecamp would be nothing short of a pipe dream.
However, even after catastrophising a stark future brought on by the cost of living, my desire for adventure and personal freedom remains. Perhaps that’s why I have always opted to avoid the golden shackles of Western Australia’s thriving, circumstantially driven Fly-In-Fly-Out culture. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be a millionaire, and I hope one day I will. However, I know I won’t be able to build a million-dollar business off the back of an idea I am not completely and utterly inspired by. So, until that idea and I cross paths, I can’t see how chasing a lacklustre pursuit would be worth sacrificing time, relationships, opportunities, and, of course, running.
The Final Sprint
Some people run much farther and much more than I do, 50, 100, even 200 miles, yet I still get asked why I run at all. When you turn down a friend’s invitation for a cold beer and a hot dinner on a Friday night just to put in six easy miles after work, they might assume your priorities are out of order. Maybe they are. But what they don’t always see is the why… running isn’t just about the miles.
Running is a contract I signed with myself, and I will honour that commitment day after day. I let the skeletons out of the closet when I run, using their shouts and screams as a fuel source to power my workout. Eventually, one by one, they pile back into the cupboard. Once the chaos is over and there are only easy miles left to run, my mind quiets and my self-criticism disappears. This is why I ran for years. It wasn’t always about getting better at running, it was simply the outlet that made sense to me.
I’d be lying if I said I’d completely overcome my eating disorder. The head noise may have disappeared when I fuel for exercise, but I still feel guilty on Sundays if I miss my weekly mileage target, especially when I’ve eaten to reach it. Maybe those thoughts won’t ever fully disappear. But as long as they are there, so is running, and for now, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
When I run, I try not to think about the mistakes I made, the future challenges and my past regrets, I simply put one foot in front of the other. From battling demons and pursuing excellence to building perseverance and satisfying my unconventional thoughts, ultimately, I run NOW because it calms my anxious mind and keeps me grounded.