Learning from running

In 2005, Steve Jobs told the graduating class of Stanford a now-famous story about connecting the dots - a story about the calligraphy courses he took in his college years, which later influenced the industry-leading digital fonts that shipped with the Macintosh. He said:

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I’m a firm believer in this idea. I think every experience - even "frivolous" ones - can teach you something valuable if you’re willing to pay attention. 

In the spirit of connecting the dots, I’m writing a series of articles about useful lessons that came from unlikely places. I hope they not only entertain you, but perhaps compel you to consider what you could learn from your own adventures!

(Last time I talked about what I've learned from playing video games. This time I'm talking about distance running!)

I've been running on and off for as long as I can remember. By certain measures, I've been at it since I learned to walk: my dad used to strap me in a baby jogger (don't worry, they're safe! probably) so he could take me on his runs while I read Sonic comics. Through the many seasons of my life - the turbulence, the heartbreak, the stretches of calm - running's brought me balance and comfort. No matter how my day goes, I can always hit the road for an hour to quiet my mind.

Running has taught me much, especially as I've made a serious effort to get better at it. This includes a lot of "learning how to learn", which has carried over in many ways to other parts of my life. In no particular order:

It's worth your time to do things you don't have a talent for

Although I run a lot, I'm not that suited to it. I'm a compact five foot six, and my body loves to put on muscle in response to any type of exercise, which makes me heavy for my height. This is lethal for my energy efficiency, as I have to cart around a bunch of extra weight on relatively stubby legs. I can feel very acutely that I didn't pick the sport my short, stocky body would prefer, which is wrestling or perhaps gymnastics. But I don't love those like I love to run.

I also think doing things you're not gifted at can nourish the soul. I won't say I like being naturally slow - it's painful to think of the shame, frustration, and envy that bubble up sometimes when other runners blow by - but with enough persistence and curiosity, I've managed to become faster than I ever expected to be. To my surprise, I find a lot of meaning in that, even though I'm not setting any records (plus, struggling and grinding to put up times that come easily to others has given me some perspective. I'm more grateful for the talents I do seem to have, and more mindful that others may have difficulty with things I find trivial.)

If, like me, you're a type-A overachiever, you probably expect to excel at the things you focus on - and if you're like me, it can wreak havoc on your ego and self-image when you don't. I've learned from running that there are many paths to deep fulfillment beyond success and recognition. Consider exploring some of these: it's not always easy, but you might end up a lot happier.

It's easy to grind your way to disappointment

There's a certain kind of category error that's very common among new runners, and I think it stems from a faulty mental model I like to call "the Bank Metaphor."

Imagine a simple, idealized bank, almost like a piggy bank. There isn't much to say about it. When you put in money, the balance goes up; if you put in more, it goes up more. The balance always reflects the exact amount of money you've put in over time.

This is the Bank Metaphor, and it can be easy to rely on it sometimes without realizing. For example, people new to running (or new to exercise in general) often assume that exertion directly strengthens the body, which implies that working harder for longer raises your overall fitness level more quickly.

But that's not what happens during exercise. The point of working out is to trigger certain kinds of adaptations; these can be quite complex, as can the signaling chains that set them off (they can also vary widely between individuals, so a workout that's effective for your friend might not work as well for you.) Training is not about depositing effort tokens into the effort bank, it's about coaxing your body to adapt using very specific stimuli.

When you run long distances, for instance, you're leveraging many different physiological systems at once - two of the most important being the aerobic and anaerobic energy systems. The aerobic system creates energy from fats and carbs via a very efficient process called cellular respiration, which uses oxygen from your bloodstream. The anaerobic system does the same thing without using oxygen, but it's also less efficient and produces waste products like lactic acid. Your body uses both of these systems for energy, even when you're doing an endurance sport, so if you want to run fast it's important to target them both. You need to bifurcate your workouts - each one should use mainly the aerobic system or the anaerobic system.

When it comes to aerobic exercise, the rule is "low and slow." Low-effort, high-mileage, luxurious, slow-cooked runs. You need to take an easy pace that makes heavy use of your aerobic system and hold it for long enough to kick off adaptation. Do this right and you'll improve your ability to take in and utilize oxygen - your heart will get stronger, your lungs will get more efficient, and your muscles will develop extra capillaries (and extra mitochondria! I know that sounds crazy but it's true.)

To target the anaerobic system, on the other hand, you should run very hard (probably harder than you want to.) You need to get to the point where your body exhausts its ability to deliver oxygen to your muscles. Interval workouts (like the dreaded mile repeats) are good for this, as there's only so long you can really book it before something gives out. This type of training triggers a different set of changes - for example, the threshold at which your anaerobic system kicks in will go up, and you'll get better at clearing lactic acid from your muscles.

In general, anaerobic training is about intensity, and aerobic training is about volume. The crucial implication is that getting better involves spending a majority of your time at a leisurely pace (especially in the beginning, before you've built up an aerobic base.) Paradoxically, this is one of the hardest things for new runners to handle. They get bored and anxious, which makes sense - if they believe harder workouts do more for their progress, they probably feel that running slow has barely any use at all.

So, they go too fast. More precisely, they take their runs at a speed that feels productive to them: usually faster than an aerobic workout and slower than an anaerobic one. They end up in a "dead zone" where they're not using either system enough to kick off adaptation, so they don't improve - at least, not until they learn to slow down.

I think the Bank Metaphor typifies the perils (which I've discussed before) of applying linear thinking to nonlinear systems, which we're sometimes prone to doing in tech (I'm thinking in particular of the "hustle culture" phenomenon - which has recently rebranded to "9 9 6", I guess.) There's an obvious appeal to a straightforward, grind-centric view of the world; while it may not be easy to just power through every problem, it certainly is tractable, so it's tempting to believe that it always works.

And to be fair, the Bank Metaphor is trivially correct in the simple case of Getting Things Done - all else being equal, the more you work on a project, the further along the project will be - but it can sabotage you when you're trying to achieve an outcome beyond "the things are done."

(P.S. I'm going to immediately contradict myself by explaining in the next section how it can help to rack up a ton of miles - but the catch is that you have to do these miles in a certain way or they basically don't count, so the Bank Metaphor is still wrong.)

Consistency is magic

To see results, you need to convince your body to invest some of its limited energy into getting stronger. Part of this, as we've seen, is targeting your workouts, but you also have to stay consistent! If you do one hard run and then don't go back out for a month, that looks to your body like a one-off, but if you keeping running every few days you'll convince your body that through some improbable chain of events you are now in an environment where you have to constantly jog for long distances to survive. Your body will decide it's worth it to make you better at that particular skill.

Consistency is easy, but it's also hard. It's easy because it's straightforward: you just have to show up. Anyone can do that (you can do that, right now!), but showing up for months or years - when you're well beyond the rush of getting started - is not so simple. Or rather, it is simple, but it takes up space. When you practice every day, practicing becomes what you do; it absorbs some of your life. There's fun you won't have - memories you won't make - because you're practicing instead, and that's a substantial sacrifice.

But although consistency is hard, it's also easy, because after a while it gets into your bones. Do anything for long enough and you start to crave it (and running in particular is notoriously habit-forming.) You reach a point where skipping a day makes you antsy and disconcerted. It becomes a habit, and habits compound, since once you build momentum it takes effort to stop.

(I'll take a moment here to make an important meta-observation, which is that the brain is part of the body and follows a lot [but not all!] of the same rules. For example, I've found a lot of success using the strategies in this post when I'm trying to build up my skills in a subfield of programming or math.)

Consistency works! In fact, I'd say it works shockingly well. Several times in my life, I've found myself suddenly capable of doing things I thought I could never do, and I didn't get there with one soul-rending burst of effort - I got there by making sure I was training the right things and being consistent, and then just waiting for eighteen months.

Corollary: mileage is also magic

There was a time in 2023 where, after a year or two of steady progress, I plateaued hard. None of the fancy tricks I tried were enough to unstick me, which left me kind of upset and demoralized. My partner - an excellent runner - suggested I just try running more, and more often. I thought that seemed too simple, but they have a habit of being right, so I gave it a shot.

Over the course of a few months I almost doubled my weekly mileage, from twenty miles to over thirty-five. I made my long aerobic runs even longer, and I did more of them (at the start I was running three to four days a week and by the end it was six days.) That was pretty much the only thing I changed, and it worked! I got faster on mileage alone.

Ramping up the volume is often a necessary - but not always sufficient - component of success. If you feel like you haven't made progress for a while, definitely try making strategic adjustments, but also consider just putting in a boatload of hours and seeing if that helps (sometimes it does!)

Put your performance in context

I ran with my high school's varsity cross country team junior and senior year. This was an elite team (state champs!) and I really shouldn't have been there, but they were kind enough to let me run with them, which I'm grateful for to this day. One moment I remember well from back then was preparing for my very first race in my first season. My stomach turned with anxiety and excitement: apart from the occasional Turkey Trot, I had never run for time before, but after months of hard training I was fit and full of energy. I felt ready.

I won't put up my actual result (that's not really what this post is about), but I can say that, while not awful, it was nowhere near a competitive varsity time. Disappointment weighed me down, but my teammates seemed excited. "That was your first race?" they said, "That's crazy!"

I knew they were just trying to make me feel better. After all, I had given it my all, and I came up dramatically short. What was there to be proud of? I wasn't fast.

What I didn't realize was just how much speed I'd gain over two years of hard work - by the end of my high school career I was already finishing four or five minutes faster. I still wasn't close to the top seven (and only the top seven runners on a team officially count), but all told my pace was pretty respectable! After that I was off to college, where I focused on other things for a while - but if I'd kept up my training, who knows? Maybe I would've improved even more.

Trying something new often comes with a natural urge to benchmark your progress. In general I'd caution against this, but if you can't help yourself at least control for as many variables as possible. Compare yourself to people in the same circumstances and at the same phase of development. Looking back, for my first race - my first race ever - I didn't do too badly, but I, a novice, decided to hold myself to an expert standard, and that made me feel hopelessly behind.

By the way, if you take my advice and find that you're below average even for your cohort, don't treat that as a final judgement. Everyone takes their own path as they get further into a discipline - some go through huge growth spurts, and some end up losing steam. You won't know what your story will be until you put in the effort and find out!

You can't feel yourself getting better

I think about this all the time. It might be my favorite lesson on the list (or maybe the first one is...let's say they're tied.)

There was a time when I expected training to make me feel powerful. I imagined Being Fast - my legs electrified by the sheer magnitude of my effort and ability as I output incredible amounts of energy. It would feel like I was doing something onerous, something impressive.

I discovered that, for the most part, it doesn't work that way. My gains would always seem to sneak up on me. I'd put my hours in, I'd be consistent, I'd trust the process, and the whole time I'd stress out about whether I was feeling improvement from workout to workout (most of the time I felt exactly the same, which never failed to engender low-level panic.) There would inevitably come a point where I'd start to lose my nerve. "I don't feel stronger," I'd think, "so maybe this isn't working? Maybe I should change something?" Then I'd take (what felt like) a completely normal run and smash my PR by a couple minutes. I was always mystified.

Truth be told, I was getting better the whole time, but not in ways I had insight into. I mentioned the many changes that take place in your body as you train - more capillaries, more mitochondria, better lung function - these are slow, invisible, and nonlinear processes!

I've come to think of it like this: when you work at something a lot and improve, your baseline gradually changes. Easy things stay easy, normal things feel easy, hard things feel normal, and harder things feel hard. There may be a few crystalline moments when you realize (to your delight and surprise) the things that challenged you before are now straightforward, even automatic. But then you get used to your new baseline, and you're basically back to how you started: easy-normal-hard-harder. You don't undergo some kind of apotheosis.

Ironically, this is something I've had to keep in mind and correct for in my own self-perception. I very rarely feel accomplished, even in domains where I have a lot of experience. As soon as I master a skill or technique, it becomes banal and unremarkable to me. It's not that special; it's easy. Anyone could do it. Of course, intellectually I know this isn't true - I know that it took me a long time to build up my skills and knowledge, and as a result I can do things others can't (or can't yet.) But I don't feel like a smarter or faster version of the person I was ten years ago - even though, in a certain sense, I am! I still just feel like me.

(I'm speculating, but maybe this phenomenon is why experts are known to have trouble explaining their technique. For them, the amazing feats they perform just feel normal, and it can be hard to reflect on the normal things in your life. Could you explain to an alien how you walk down a flight of stairs?)

Corollary: don't over-measure

Don't get me wrong, measurement is great and hard numbers always beat vibes, but trying to measure the unmeasurable (and worse, assuming you've succeeded) is a recipe for heartache. I ran a brief, disastrous experiment where I tracked my heart rate and times for every workout and made a huge speadsheet with all of my data in it. If my lines weren't trending down every single week, I concluded I was screwing up and found something to change (or, if I couldn't think of anything, I just got all anxious and depressed.) A better approach - for me personally! - was: committing to a strategy (e.g. ramping up mileage, or experimenting with speed workouts) and then chilling out and internalizing that I would need to wait before I could tell if it was working. I stopped measuring every workout; instead I would take a couple readings every month or so. This led to better results and better mental health!

Focus on the basics

There's a famous story Alan Stein Jr. tells about watching Kobe Bryant train:

I had an opportunity to work a Nike Skills Academy with Kobe Bryant. So I figured it was a great chance for me to watch one of his private workouts. I remember being shocked at how basic the stuff he was doing was that he was doing very basic footwork, and very basic offensive moves. At that age, I was expecting someone as great as he was to be doing the flashy stuff, to be doing the sizzle. But he was doing the basics and he did them with incredibly razor sharp precision, with very high levels of intensity...He understood that if you’re going to have this really high level intricate finish at the basket, that that’s actually built by the building blocks of several basic moves put together and then they have to be a coordinated fluid motion.

Now, to be realistic, if this were really all it took to make Kobe Bryant who he was, there'd be a lot more Kobe Bryants in the world. Also, this guy's a motivational speaker (although he was indeed a basketball performance coach before that), so his story might be an embellishment, but I still think the advice is sound (at least in my experience.) To the extent that I've made progress in my training, it was not by learning a trick or hack that unlocked my potential, but by getting very good at a small number of basic things:

1. Be consistent
2. Target specific systems with each workout
3. Don't overtrain
4. Eat well and eat a lot
5. Drink enough water
6. Cross-train and prehab to ward off injury
7. Get a lot of good sleep
8. When your body adapts to a certain load, change the load

I think a similar (though more verbose and subjective) list exists for programming:

1. Understand the infrastructure below your code: hardware, operating systems, networks, database, etc.
2. Understand (at a high level) how programming languages work and the features they might offer (memory management, type systems, concurrency models, control flow, OOP support, and so on.) Understand what an interpreter does and the pros/cons of interpreted vs. compiled languages
3. Develop an intuition for which problems are going to be easy and which will take a lot of investment (harder than it sounds!)
4. Get good at translating your plans and ideas into code. When you're very experienced, you can cut out the middleman and start thinking directly in terms of the code
5. Understand what it takes to operate software in production and the things that can go wrong
6. Understand the different dimensions of performance, and what it takes to make your software perform well. Understand how performance trades off with other concerns. Understand when high performance is called for and when it's a distraction
7. Understand how complexity emerges as small systems grow into large systems. Have an opinion on what it takes to minimize the complexity gradient
8. Understand why it's hard to do fast and accurate work on large systems. Have an opinion on how to write code that's easy to change
9. Learn how to track down and fix bugs, especially bugs that aren't your fault. Understand how to take a scientific approach to diagnosing problems
10. Don't over-engineer
11. Understand how the world looks to people who don't know what you know (much harder than it sounds!) Hone your ability to explain complex situations to a nontechnical (or less-technical) audience
12. Understand how, when, and why to dive deep and specialize

One implication: when you're getting into something new it can help to determine what the basics are so you can focus on them! Not everyone always agrees on the answer, so this might take longer than you think, but deciding for yourself what a field's fundamentals are can be an important step in your personal development.

You won't improve if you don't challenge yourself

Getting comfortable is a great way to plateau. This is common knowledge, but people still have problems with it. Why?

I think it's because most of us equate comfort with ease, when we should probably be associating it with certainty. If you're doing something difficult, but you are one hundred percent certain how to handle it, you're still in your comfort zone. Imagine: you're training hard. You go out and do your forty miles every week; nothing you can't handle, but quite a lot of effort! You feel like a champ, like a well-oiled machine. You watch your sleep, your nutrition. You're doing everything right!

And then...nothing. No movement up or down. You feel like you should be getting better because you're putting in the hours - but you aren't. Instead you're getting Red Queen'ed: your hard work is keeping you from backsliding (which is great!) but it's not making you any stronger.

The problem is you're too confident! You've acclimated to forty miles a week, and so has your body. You need to change something up - more mileage, more intensity, different workouts - to the point where you're not completely certain how your body will respond, and where you feel like you need to keep an eye on things to make sure you don't overtrain.

The price of progress is being a little uncertain, a little on your back foot - like you're in over your head and you might not be able to pull this off. This is the headspace where you're going to see gains; if you feel too good you'll stagnate, too panicky and you'll probably just fail without learning. If you do things that are right on the edge of too hard, your body will slowly adapt to make those things easier. And this doesn't just apply to exercise! Remember - as with the body, so with the brain:

A desirable difficulty is a learning task that requires a considerable but desirable amount of effort, thereby improving long-term performance...As the name suggests, desirable difficulties should be highly desirable and increasingly challenging. Research suggests that while difficult tasks might slow down learning initially, the long-term benefits are greater than with easy tasks. However, to be desirable, the tasks must also be achievable.