I Ran Every Single Day In June and It Changed My Business
I Ran 3 Miles Every Single Day In June.
Did I lose 50 pounds? No. I started at 225 and I ended at about 212.
Did I Have a massively increased mile time? Nah. Although I never actually timed a single one of my 3 mile runs, I started with them taking around the 30–35 minute mark and ended with them taking about 25. So by percentage it was a great increase, but far from anything extraordinary.
What did happen, and what makes me want to do something hard every day like this each month, is that I learned a lot about myself, my own internal dialogue, my own mental toughness, and how I can cultivate more and more of it. Month after month, for the rest of my life.
This is what I want you to learn, too.
So I should start out by saying that I’m not what you’d call a “fat” 225 pounder. At that weight I was at about 18% bodyfat, so not ripped, but also not a tub of lard. I am also fairly accustomed to running at this weight, and before this self-imposed challenge I was running probably 2–3 times a week just because…well…I like to run sometimes. I have beautiful wooded trails just behind my home in Berkshire County Massachusetts that connect directly to the Appalachian Trail. Many times black bear will cut a run short, or I’ll stop and have a one-sided conversation with a deer who has paused to stare at me. It’s really a great place to have an experiment like this.
I went for a run with a book on tape in my ears as I usually do, and today I was listening to “Unbreakable” by Thom Shea. Shea is a former US Navy Seal, and his book is about acquiring mental toughness, and how Seals do this in training, and throughout their tenure as seals. His first challenge was to “Do Ten pushups, Ten Sit-ups and Ten squats every day when you wake up and before bed for a month”
I know what he was driving at here, but I felt like that challenge was too little for me, as I already do calisthenics like this daily. The message was clear however. Push your mental boundaries, not your physical ones.
One of the biggest and most prevalent takeaways from this section of the book was how he said you need to listen to your body try and convince you not to do it. This is invariably true. After about day 4 my body was saying “Nah, your knees hurt, and you’re in great shape anyway” I had to ignore that and move on. I would go and run and force my mind to say “awww yes, this run is great” and repeat a mantra like that over and over as I ran the rocky hilly trails behind my house for the three miles each day.
The pain never really went away after the 10th day straight of running. I just kept hurting. My mind would tell me that I was hurting myself. I would ignore that as well. This wasn’t about making my body better at all. It was about making my mind better. It was about teaching my mind that doing hard things isn’t so hard, once you do them. I would say to my body “you are incredibly healthy, and this is a simple task. Go do your run” I would.
Some days I would run first thing in the morning. Some days I would be out all day in meetings and I would run as late as 7pm. Never once did I run on a treadmill. By my self-imposed standards I decided that running outside, on trails, rain or shine was mandatory. I got rained on at least 10 times. June is a surprisingly rainy month in the Berkshires.
Around day 5 my old beaten down merrill “barefoot style”shoes completely fell apart, and my foot shot out of them as the mesh came away from the sole. I completed the run with the mesh flopping all over the place, and ran out that evening to grab a new pair of shoes. I had decided it was my duty to complete this run, I knew I needed the shoes. It wasn’t a question of “oh maybe this is a sign” or “maybe I’m being too hard on myself” all of that goes out the window when the goal is just to finish the task at hand. You just need the shoes so you can do the runs. You don’t need the shoes so you can lose weight, or train for the 10k. You need the shoes so you can do the runs.
This was a huge relaxation for me. As an entrepreneur who creates marketing plans for clients and designs websites, my focus is always on outcomes. How did that website perform? How was this marketing campaign? Did that email get a good open rate? It was extremely liberating to do work just for the sake of completing something hard. There was no end goal of being 20 pounds lighter, or winning a race or getting more miles than someone else. It was simply the goal of cultivating the mental strength to complete the runs each and every day.
By day 15 I started rolling my ankle almost daily on the trail. You see, each trail sloped slightly to the right, and my right ankle has always been a bit beat up from hurting it many times over the years and never getting the physical therapy I needed to set it back straight. So I would roll it once or twice a run every day. Not once did my ankle swell, however. I would just say to my body “it feels great! No worries!” and keep running on it. And we would be fine. I’m not sure if I really just didn’t hurt my ankle that badly, or if I actually did some real damage to it and my mental toughness won out, but It was probably a small mixture of both. Was I worried about injuring myself? Not really. Was I worried about stress fractures, or bone spurs, or whatever else? No, it never even crossed my mind. All I was worried about was today’s run, getting it done, and then resting until tomorrow’s run.
The last week of June we went to Cape Cod for our annual family vacation. There were beautiful trails near the home we were staying in, so I ran those. The trails sloped the other way and were therefore a great relief to my poor right ankle. I promptly started rolling my left ankle at least once daily.
In the end, I finished every run and ended out the month with no major injuries or issues to speak of. My hip flexors were noticeably tighter than before, and my left knee is a little stiff but will probably heal over the 4th of July weekend as I give my body a well-deserved rest.
The best things I learned from this were about myself. I have always been an outcome-focused guy. Let’s get my bench to 350. Let’s squat 4 plates. Let’s run a 7 minute mile for 5 miles. Let’s do a $10,000 month. On and on. These are all awesome because they’re goals. They’re quantifiable, and they feel good when you make them. The problem I think I have had for years is with goal obsession. Sure I can run, but what’s my goal? Well wait a minute…why do you need to have a goal for running, other than the fact that its hard, and you know when you finish a bunch of those runs you’ll come out the other side a better person? Maybe I should just let the universe figure out the rest along the way and put in the work.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of benefit to tracking goals, and quantifying results. It’s the world I live in every day. But there is a lot of magic that can also be found in simply doing something hard for the sake of its challenge, and then seeing how it all works out in the end.
In the end I found that I had more patience with my wife and child. I switched over to a ketogenic diet halfway through, and I feel much stronger and healthier. I had more energy to complete work each day. I would stay up later, and get up earlier. Even though this was only a single item, I felt as though my days were structured around my run, and it made everything feel more grounded. I Fell in love with running and fitness again, where before both had seemed to become boring as I had ran out of “goals” for me to chase.
Next month I plan on making a more reasonable workout plan, and then applying the “once every day” mentality to my business. More on that soon.
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I wrote the above on June 30th. Today its August 8th and I’m looking back at two months now — June and July.
In July I applied my newfound mental toughness to two frontiers — business and fitness. I stuck to my every day running goal — but ramped it up to include a sprint workout every other day. I also added a business goal — to cold prospect ten new businesses every single day. I stuck to my plan and in the end called upon 310 different businesses, and brought in more than ten thousand dollars in new revenue for my company in that month — more than I ever had before. I also became so well booked with work that I was able to raise my prices slightly on small business websites as well — as it was the only way it became worth my time to do it. I had broken the seemingly insurmountable “time for money” barrier in web design.
Many of my colleagues in the web development space, whom I keep in touch with via Facebook and are from lands as far away as Ukraine — were truly inspired by the change they saw in my business, and had many questions to ask. As such, I started a Facebook group called Ten a Day where I record many of my cold calling adventures, and show others how to do the same. I have built an ever elusive “Tribe”, and have begun my journey toward the ever-elusive “thousand true fans” in the business world.
For a young, new entrepreneur with his first taste of success, I can’t stress the importance of these “activity based” goals enough. I spent YEARS of my life going into a new venture thinking “OK, I NEED to clear $5k in revenue the first month” and then sitting on my hands, not sure what to do to get there. Remove the outcome based goals, at least at the very beginning, and instead focus on one simple thing that will DEFINITELY make huge changes in your business. The focus on the almighty dollar is very romantic — but it can easily lead a young business astray when things like developing an initial process to make a customer super-happy, finding that perfect balance of followup and leave-alone to move a client down the pipeline, and other nuances are really what you need to find. There is no training program for entrepreneurs (regardless of what the last “guru” email you read says) and the best way for you to learn it activity — get out there and do. Do every day, ESPECIALLY when you don’t want to. Keep doing. Keep trying. Keep failing. Eventually you’ll find the exact thing that clicks with your business. At that point, you’re already working at it each day, and a small tweak in process can mean huge results.