How Voltaire inspired me to a half-arsed run
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good
The alarm cut through a mild anxiety dream. Reluctantly I opened my eyes and looked at my watch. Shit. 6:45am. My Monday morning 6:30am 5k run was not happening.
I can pinpoint where it went wrong. I was making a roast dinner and the recipe required a glass of white wine. I’m a great believer if my food is having a glass, I also need a glass. A glass of wine at 5:30pm is never a great idea.
This was compounded by Husband – very much the devil on my shoulder last night – persuaded me to watch the final episode of BBC’s Sunday night drama, The Gold. It was midnight before my head hit the pillow, two thirds of a bottle of wine woozier.
Alarm still beeping, my head was whirring. I’d set my alarm for 6:45am thinking I would be straight up and at them. At the gym for just after 7am and back well before 8am. I should be able to fit in a steady (for this particular tortoise) 4K run in 30 minutes.
Turns out wine consumption is not conducive to efficiency and it was ten past before I was dressed. I had 50 minutes to travel to and from the gym and do the actual run. Was it worth bothering?
At this point I have a confession to make, I’m a recovering perfectionist. I’m much better than I used to be, but I still have to remind myself
Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.
This is often attributed to Voltaire, but likely predates him. There’s no such things as perfect in almost all cases, therefore we’re always inadvertently doing this anyway. Or we’re stuck in an infinite loop, never completing anything.
The key is do it with intention, and to do it with intention, we need to add another word to it to the famous phrase – enough. What does good enough look like?
It is different for all of us. It depends on our circumstances, the benefits, and our risk appetite.
In my case, the circumstance is training to do 10k in under an hour. The race is late May. Training has been going well but achieving my goal is far from certain.
The benefits are obvious. I need to keep getting the miles in. It’s also going to be difficult to get this run in without sacrificing something else. I can’t wind back time, so I need to make the best of the time I have.
The risk is I’m not going to get home in time, or I get there so late it’s not worth bothering.
From this, good enough for me was more than 20 mins at at least my slow run pace. A ten minute walk would still be better than nothing, but I could make my next run ten minutes longer instead.
It’s an easy framework to follow and it helps me make better (and quicker) decisions.
A bit of mental maths later and I out of the door, even allowing for bad traffic I should squeeze in at least 20 minutes.
I was on the treadmill by 7:18am. I cranked it up to my usual steady pace, but everything felt a bit off. Once again, I decided a slow run was better than no run and cranked the pace down to my run forever pace. This felt better, a couple of times I tried to put the speed up, but again, it did not feel good. Back down to slower than slow. I knew I needed to be off the treadmill by 7:45am. As the clock flicked to 7:44am, I slowed right down to walking pace, having completed 26:29 minutes and 3.08km. I was back home by 7:55am.
A 25 minute run might not have been the 5k on training plan but thanks to Voltaire it was good enough.
