Matt Gets Running

I’m ill. Which is fine. I’d spe­cific­ally planned to do bugger-all dur­ing the period between Christ­mas and New Year, and if you’re going to loaf about unshaven for a few days, you might as well fit a cold in while you do it.

It helps that — so far — it’s just a reg­u­lar winter lurgy of a sore throat and a run-down feel­ing, not hideous full-blown flu. Hope­fully it won’t get too much worse, or last more than a few days. And the enforced slow­ing down gives me a chance to reflect on my run­ning, my gen­eral fit­ness, and my plans for the year ahead.

Like many, I think about res­ol­u­tions at this time of year. Last week, I was at Ave­bury for the Winter Sol­stice, there for the dawn, to see in the turn­ing point toward longer days. It seems a good time for look­ing for­ward as well as back.

But you have to be care­ful about res­ol­u­tions. As Mer­lin Mann observed in the latest Back to Work pod­cast, people tend to be a little bin­ary about new year’s res­ol­u­tions. And it’s pos­sible that that’s espe­cially true of pro­gram­mers, like myself. “I’ll run three times a week”, I think to myself, “Just like I used to.”

But how real­istic is that? To go from — given my last few weeks’ record — no runs a week, straight to three? And how much of a fall am I set­ting myself up for if I don’t do three runs a week in the first week of Janu­ary? If I haven’t done three runs a week, then my resolution’s “failed”, and there’s always that tend­ency to think, “well, I might as well give up, then.” Failed or suc­ceeded, true or false: bin­ary thinking.

Also, how real­istic am I being about my past per­form­ance? Well, luck­ily, I have RunKeeper’s “Fit­ness­Re­ports” fea­ture, so I can eas­ily check. In 2010, a good year for run­ning for me, I actu­ally only aver­aged 1.3 runs per week. And that was a good year. So my ini­tial “I used to do three runs a week” was, in fact, utter rub­bish. Sure, there were some weeks where I did three runs, but not many. I think nos­tal­gia has me men­tally inflat­ing how “good” I used to be.

So, what to do instead?

The ques­tion seems to be answer­ing itself. I resolve to run every week in Janu­ary. At least once. Just to get myself star­ted again. That’ll be more runs in a month than I’ve man­aged for ages, but still sounds very achiev­able. And if I don’t man­age that, I won’t count myself a fail­ure, either. I’ll just look into why I didn’t man­age it, for­give myself, and fig­ure out a way to keep trying.

And I’m not going to worry about the weight, yet. You can eas­ily cram too many res­ol­u­tions into a new year, spread­ing your­self too thinly across all of them. I’ll have a think about the weight and my eat­ing pat­terns when we get to Feb­ru­ary. For now, I’m just going to run.

How about you? Got any res­ol­u­tions? How real­istic are they? Do you have any hard evid­ence that you’ve ever been as “good” as you’re plan­ning to be? (Look­ing back at my own records sur­prised me!) And are you set­ting your­self up for that “oh, I didn’t man­age this exact goal, so there’s no point in car­ry­ing on try­ing” moment?

Or are you pre­pared to for­give your­self and make adjust­ments as you go along?