What I learned from running 1000 km in 2018
Two weeks ago I heard a presenter say: everyone wants to do agile until they do agile. That doesn’t resonate with me. I love agile thinking, planning, and adapting so much that it sneaks into how I approach most aspects of my life.
In this article I share how I setup my sprints and burn down charts to do something I had never done before: running 1000 km in a year. This is not something extraordinary, but it is a major milestone for me. I reached this goal three weeks before schedule by using each week as my basic sprint, building buffers (running more than I had to when I could), and managing myself.
The weekly sprint
For years, I’ve used the week as my basic sprint. It’s long enough that you can get things done, yet short enough that if you are deviating off course the damage shouldn’t be too material by the time you find out.
For my running challenge I committed to running 20 km per week. The graph shows what I planned to run and what I actually ran. I was below the line 13 times, just met the mark 19 times (19 to 22 km), and ran 23+ kilometers 17 times.
Focusing on kilometers per week helped me stay challenged every week and avoid the vanity metric of kilometers ran to date. Every week the challenge started over. No matter how good or bad the previous week was, the week ahead was there to be had.
Love buffers
The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war is a saying that resonates with me.
“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”
The uber motivated me ran 37 km on the first week of 2018, but on my fourth and fifth week I was ill and could not reach my 20 kilometer target. Because I ran more when my body felt great and the weather allowed, I was never more than 3 km behind schedule through the entire year, despite emergencies, vacation, illness, and injuries.
The graph below shows buffers as mountains that rise above 0. Having a buffer that was at least one week worth of running felt great psychologically, and is what I strived for. By April I had more than three weeks worth of buffer, 64 kilometers ahead of schedule, which was almost all used up by the end of my summer vacation in week 29.
The opposite of building a buffer is catching up. I hate catching up because it is an external force moving me to do something.
Manage thyself
There is an HBR article titled “Managing Oneself” by Peter Drucker.
“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves — their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.”
I highly recommend it. Over the years, I learned how to be a little better each day and applied a few tricks to keep myself focused and motivated about running 1000 kilometers in a year.
The key thing I had to do to keep myself motivated was define the why I should run 1000 km. At my average running pace (around 5 minutes per kilometer), running 20 kilometers per week represents about two hours of my free time per week. It is not a big time investment and it had a big return: it gives me energy. Running helps me hack my day. Every time I had an important meeting or presentation, I would make sure to wake up at 5:25 AM to go for a run. A few times I surprised myself by waking up at 4:00 (without an alarm) and clocking in 10 km before the world woke up.
Reminding myself that running actually gave me energy, was the best motivator to keep me going. On those days where I did not feel energized, it was the thought of the running high after the run that pushed me out the door into the dark and cold winter mornings. It didn’t matter that much whether I was doing a great or bad time while running, the effect after the run was always the same: a better mood, a broader smile, a stronger desire to meet the day.
Must goals always go up?
Running is a habit that I want to keep and 20 kilometers per week is a sustainable velocity for me. I am not increasing my sports budget. Two hours of sports per week does not sound like a lot, but it represents about 5% of my free time, which I have to share with other tasks like eating, chores, showering, and commuting. Giving more time to running implies taking time away from other activities. I want to stay fit, not run marathons.
In 2019 I’ll focus on a habit closer to my career. In 2018, I wrote my first web application, learned ruby, python, docker, and bash and wrapped all these tools together to write my first cron job. Next year, I will be more deliberate as to how to exercise and polish my professional skills in my free time. I will stick to my formula of weekly sprints, build buffers, and defining a convincing why. What exactly I’ll do, I have three weeks to find out.
