If you're a habitual runner, what's your demand for quality mileage?
If I allowed myself to meet only my minimum requirements for "doing a run," almost every step would seem like work
When you think of “quality running” or “quality mileage,” you probably imagine speed workouts, uphill running, or some other kind of specific preparation for a competitive effort. In other words, the kind of running almost no one would do if not planning to race in the relatively near future.
Of course, if you are running and enjoying the experience for any subjective or objective reason, and gaining more life utils than you would have had you substituted another activity for the run, then it’s hard to make an argument that this isn’t also “quality mileage.” In fact, if your running is aimed only at whatever you think means “health and fitness”—be it looking good topless at the fun-run, reducing the urge to set fire to municipal buildings, or living long enough to see World War III, discrete goals that can be easily harmonized—then your real, if unstated, goal is to have every running moment feel pleasurable.
That doesn’t mean avoiding unusual or even extreme effort; it just means you get to choose when to increase the pace, or better yet, to decide that the sensation of moving along at with the apparent effortless and speed of an elite runner translates, for all practical purposes, to being such an athlete. There’s nothing wrong with feeling like you finished the last three miles of an eight-miler at 5:30 pace when it was really 6:30 pace, provided you don’t publicly report the fantasy version of run as the true version.
Since I have a lot of racing in my past and the unsettling idea of more in the future, but none on the schedule presently, I run for the experience of being out there. Every trot is sui generis, even if I repeat a lot of the same courses or portions of courses every day. If I’m with my dog, I never know when she’ll spot a raccoon darting into a sewer or happen across a rabbit with no interest in budging until another creature is within two feet of it; in these scenario’s, Rosie’s goofball excitement becomes my own. If I’m alone, because I run for time and not distance, I can veer off in the direction of anything that seems interesting, be it a pack of runners or a burgeoning homeless camp under an overpass.
Either way, if I start running, I commit to a minimum of 20 minutes, although in reality it’s become more like 25 in my relative dotage because even though I don’t think primarily in terms of distance, I like to believe that I never run less than three miles, rounding to the nearest mile. The world would not end if I covered only 2.49 miles in 20:00. But as television’s all-time best vengeance character, Omar Little of The Wire, said: “A man got to have a code.”
There is tension in the idea of stopping a run even 20 or 25 minutes in. This is because, as most people figure out fairly early in their distance-running lives, even a fit runner won’t feel like his or her true running self until at least 10 minutes into a run and usually closer to 20. And the more mileage a runner consistently logs, and the more often he or she goes running, the more likely it is that the initial minutes of any run will feel draggy.
About the only way to feel good on every run is to be out of shape, at least compared to the fitness level you could attain. If you’re fresh all the time, you probably aren’t “working very hard.” But since that concept is reserved for competition-oriented runners, if you’re someone who simply likes running three miles three times a week, almost all of your running is high-quality, even if it amounts to “only” 60 to 90 minutes a week.
When I was regularly putting in over 100 miles a week, I would usually feel like the inner workings of a very old cow for the first 15 to 20 minutes of any run, and in those days I had to start most of my runs uphill. Even applying the ideas in this article (Weldon Johnson was around in 2002? How old is that guy?) goes only so far in mitigating the effects of the almost visible cobwebs loading your limbs until they are dissolved by gentle breathing and a minimal sheen of sweat over the course of about 3,000 to 4,000 unforced steps.
I now run a little over an hour a day, which is enough, especially given my lifetime odometer reading, to ensure the persistence of that draggy feeling into my everyday efforts in the present. But I usually run twice a day, which means a lot of runs that stop at 25 or so minutes—especially if I have Rosie with me, as I won’t take her for longer than that in summer heat even when she can dive into a creek at any time. As a result, I’m often wrapping up a run just when I feel like doing more.
If I have Rosie with me in such a situation, I will sometimes drop her off at the house and continue on for a while, depending on what I have planned next. But just as often I’ll stop and start snacking on the same foods Rosie does.
I’ve been considering moving to singles more often for the essential reason of assuring myself a lot of enjoyable running as a function of the whole. This is an oversimplification, but if I run for X minutes, I usually feel like a genuine runner for (X - 15) minutes. If I were to run twice a day for 30 minutes, half of my weekly minutes would be, if not drudgery, something akin to foreplay. If I ran for a solid hour a day, three-quarters of those minutes would be maximally enjoyable.
Rosie sometimes insists on riding in the car to go running. About two-thirds of the time when we head outdoors and I’m in running clothes, Rosie will start ambling down the street. But about a third of the time, she marches up to the side of the car and plants herself there. So I will go inside, grab the keys, and drive a mile or two to a familiar spot, and run from there.
Lately, I have been employing the trick of running with Rosie from wherever I parked the car back to the house, then running back to the car (directly or circuitously) to finish the session. (I’m not quite used to this self-administered coaching tidbit, so for the first second or so after the house comes into view, I find myself thinking, “Who bothered to steal my fucking car?”)
The idea of laying out continuous, almost effortless miles is not divorced from the idea of “training seriously again,” either. The more often I feel strong—even if this is partly an illusion in terms of its translation to rapid forward motion—the more likely I am to want to capitalize on that somehow. But if I don’t, it just means that my daily sightseeing becomes more reliably coupled to the sense of having recaptured something important.
Another consideration: Those first 15 or 20 less-palatable but necessary minutes aren’t free. They still add up to around 20 miles a week, and they still add to the physical costs of running. So if you have an idea in your head of the maximum amount of running you can or will consistently do, you might want to set aside a couple of days a week where you run for an unusually long time, at whatever effort feels right on the day. You can offset these efforts by resigning yourself to a few “low-util” 25- or 30-minute runs. These may feel like they’re missing something, but they beat doing nothing.
There is some overlap here with the ideas Scott Douglas proposes in Running Is My Therapy, which I reviewed in 2018. Douglas is a little older than me and has similar personal bests despite never breaking 30 seconds for 200 meters (and he honestly tried). He emphasizes that if you embrace running as the centerpiece of an anti-depression campaign, then you are wise to commit to, say, 30 minutes if you are going to bother at all. Sometimes, you’ll feel like crap at the start, and it might be mainly or entirely psychological. This is where the importance of recognizing the “therapy” part enters the picture; you wouldn’t get up and walk out of a one-on-one talk-therapy session without a compelling reason, and if you’re serious about exercise being the linchpin of your mental health, you don’t get to dodge your therapy on days you feel iffy.
The key is the continual recognition of how you almost certainly will feel if you move for those 30 minutes. There is no Strava field for this sensation, and no one else needs to know or pretend to care. That time is yours. I’m still playing with ways to freshen mine up. But what this topic really makes me aware of is how healthy I have been for years now, and the number of people who would love the sole option of a huffing-and-puffing 20 minutes, in any weather and on any surface.