“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.”

-Bruce Lee

As human beings we all have limitations, some we can overcome and some we are defined by. When we set our goals, we are usually met with struggle and adversity because we are confronted with unexpected limitations in pursuit of these goals. S adversely, one might think that we should expect limitations to prevent the unexpected nature of them, but then we run the risk of allowing ourselves to fall victim to our limits before we even become limited. So then, we question how to overcome our personal limitations when finally confronted by them, but yet again we run into even more limitations because as human beings we are built with limits; we can’t fly, we can’t read minds, we can’t breathe underwater. So maybe we embrace our limitations, there is definitely some merit to this. We fall in love not in spite of limitations but because of them, without our limits we are nothing. Even superman has his kryptonite, without it there would be no story. We all have surface limitations, our daily struggles that can be overcome with some determination, but we have core limitations as well that when embraced cause very positive outcomes.

Obesity is a limitation but it’s not a core limitation, it is a burden to our lives brought about due to a core limitation. There are many different reasons why a person becomes obese, but study after study shows that obesity happens as a result of  lifestyle. Our core limitation is what is causing the lifestyle which translates to our obesity. 

For instance, there are passive people and there are aggressive people, these traits can become core limitations. A person who becomes too passive can find it difficult for motivation, causing a lack of effort to stick to a healthy lifestyle. This is a person who finds it difficult to stick to things like diets, training programs, and workout schedules. An overly aggressive person develops a craving for more. Although they will stick to things, they will fall into binge eating, procrastinating, and overtraining to the point of injury or adrenal fatigue. This person shoots themselves in the foot before they get started.

“Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.”

― Alfred North Whitehead

It is in our best interest to attempt to understand our core limitations not run from them or even overcome them. Because when we can understand them, we can begin to transcend them, we can turn our core limits that define us into our core strengths. Realizing that it is not wrong to be passive or agressive; we can guide our passive behaviour towards patience and direct aggressive behaviour to a focused diligence. We can soon realize that when we used to either fight or run from our limits that this was our direction all along. Maybe we can’t fly, but we now have the airplane, maybe we can’t read minds, but we are progressing in the science of conscious thought, maybe we can’t hold our breath, but we can scuba dive. The outcomes in our lives come down to our choice to control our intrinsic behaviours or be controlled by them, because we cannot controll the weather but we can choose to dance in the rain.

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

-Viktor Frankl

Life is not a series of events in a uniform line, a track with a runner simply putting one step in front of the other easily concentrated on the one task of crossing the finish line ahead. We like to perceive our lives as it relates to our goals in this manner because it’s simple. But, if this were so, we wouldn’t need coaches, teachers, mentors, and even stories to guide us. It’s easy to be pulled off course through cause and effect of external circumstance, but it doesn’t mean we write off circumstance all together, as it’s these very externals that assist us in aligning our aim. It’s easy to direct our focus and zero in when things are going right, when everything is aligning. The abruptness and unpredictability of life will veer us off course; and it’s not that they could veer us off course, its that they will. Then our aim will become multiple aims and When we are aiming at everything, we are aiming at nothing. 

So, life is not a track, it’s a sea of events where we are left to navigate the waters. The bills coming in, unread emails compounding in our inbox, the influence of emotion from our peers. It’s inevitable to be thrown off track, a ship never steers in a perfectly straight line. It’s what we do when we are thrown off track that really makes a difference, and if we aren’t the type of person that makes corrections, we can always learn to build ourselves, to become better over time in making those corrections by starting with very small manageable corrections. A ship thrown off course does redirect that course when it is thrown off it’s aim, if not it will be left to drift in a sea of the unknown.

So, how to we direct our focus to keep our aim? We can use a multitude of tools, we are usually dependant on others in order to hold us accountable. We can lean on exemplary role models,  interdependent friends/family, or coaches. If we are more introverted and independent we can rely on calendars or goal setting reminders. We can learn to conduct our lives rather than have our lives conduct us. This way, the beautiful music of our lives is still playing, only we are controlling the rhythm and the tempo.

Accountability is powerful, all of these analogies and explanations lead to the simple fact that planning for accountability is like revealing our north star. Which helps to guide us when other things get in the way of our navigation, blurring our sites on our target. Many things can be thrown at us and we will bend, sway, and even be pushed around by external things. But as long as we are accountable to an aim, we will be able to direct our focus and correct our course in order to once again take aim.

Always keep your aim.

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

― Miles Kington

Life is made up of many situations, it is within these situations in which we position ourselves in the world. Often, our situations reveal truths about us, about others, and about life. A human being has been given the gift of conscious thought, but with consciousness comes distortion.

We have evolved to only use what we need, we are very efficient, so we have become masters at zeroing in on targets with our eyes and hearing only what we need to in order to move through the world in accordance with maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. In the depths of our evolution, we developed the ability to see bright colours to recognize food and danger. Through countless ancient documents, we have uncovered that humans battled snakes, mostly of which were bright in colour, they were our biggest foe. Fruit was almost always bright in colour in contrast to its inedible vegetation counterparts. Our ability to be focused on an important, complex task and block out distractions is an important ability that has been a necessity for human kind to raise to the level that we’ve gotten to today. This purposeful nature is what drives our human behaviour and our reactions. To juxtapose another fact: our human history is recorded on the selective memory of the very human beings it attempts to explain, memories that in fact become distorted and swayed via emotional bias, before events, during events, and after events have concluded. As tolstoy explains,

“The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.”

-Leo Tolstoy

If we observe our individual history, our situations become our personal accounts of our past.  Our history is whatever we have naturally selected to pay attention to and recount in that moment. It is a sum of realities. the realization that we choose to focus on certain events and repress others is a difficult one. This means that individually we choose to remember events and situations in the manner that we are accustomed to. Which explains why two individuals can experience the same situation and walk away with two completely different accounts of it, both equally convinced that their views are the correct ones. But we don’t realize there is so much we both cannot see.

This phenomenon is what makes us effective, the ability to be able to consciously focus on a task at hand and problem solve is what makes us human. When you watch an incredible athlete, a brilliant painter, a book where the words jump out of the page and reach into your soul, we are observing those that have full control of their situations in a focused manner. Imagine that Micheal Jordan was focused on learning every fan’s name and where they came from, or the concession profits, if he knew everything about everything inside of the arena. He would not be as good of a basketball player and he would, most likely, become very frustrated within the daunting task of trying to remember every detail outside of what is beneficial to him and his team in their ultimate goal of winning. 

The simple awareness to our natural human ignorance is a large part of keeping an open mind and ultimately having empathy towards others. We share this earth with almost 8 billion people, it is a highly beneficial viewpoint, that there are things we can learn from others, that there are things we cannot see, that there are other beneficial perspectives. It is so easy to become absorbed in conditioned thinking, listening to similar podcasts, reading similar news articles, and following similar social media pages. We become drawn further and further into our own biases and slowly our thinking becomes more pin pointed, our emotions more hostile to anything opposing our information bubble. It’s comfortable in the bubble, our system is built this way, but our mental health parallels our physical health. What is comfortable is usually the wrong direction and the more momentum we build this way the harder it is to reverse. 

We cannot see the unseen, but a start is to recognize that there are things we do not see. In turn, If we can take control where it matters to us and direct our focus in our situations, our life situations do not have to change for us to have a better attitude and behaviours within certain events.

When it comes to running, every step we take is a step in the right direction.

It is a seemingly natural human tenancy to over complicate things that are complex and underestimate things that are simple. Since humans have been alive we have been running, therefore it should be a natural and simple endeavour. However, evolutionary and revolutionary progress has led to a natural degradation of our ability to do some simple, ordinary human tasks, running being one of them. Because we have genetically modified our running capabilities over time, we tend to undermine this natural human capacity. Popular culture has us many of us thinking that for better distance running we should mirror forest gump, when forest gump’s running was a fiction within a fiction. I wish the following didn’t need to be stated, but I am not writing this to condemn humanity for its growth, we simply must realize certain facts. Rather I feel compelled to write this to encourage the ambitious runner as a guide to practically building running back into their human abilities in a gradual approach, safely and effectively. As for our limit to running, well, we are still searching for that. People continue to push the boundaries through world records in speed and distance, as well as the discovery of age old cultures like the mayans. 

Be it an olympian track star or someone attempting to run for the first time in their lives, deal with limitations. We have seen two major limitations throughout every level of runner, that come in the form of volume (distance) and intensity (speed); we can’t run far enough or fast enough. What we must realize is that when overcoming these limitations, we can use three main tactics: 

1. Technique
2. Pacing
3. Basic principles

Between volume and intensity lies pacing. A runner must know themselves well which is a major limitation when first starting out, because how can we know the unknown? We can’t. We have to find it. So, we start simple, with a warm-up.

Warm ups

If you’ve ever felt like when you are running you have been fighting you’re speed the whole way or you are simply fighting to keep running, you’ve probably bitten off more than you can chew initially in regards to volume or speed. Adversely, if you have ever felt like you are ‘in the zone’ sort of speak where you feel like you are gliding across the ground with very little effort, focused on breathing through your strides, you have most likely initiated, and built, your run productively. Our run starts before we start running.

It’s best to think about running like we would weightlifting, when going for a 1 RM back squat we don’t simply load up the bar and go for it, we progress to it through proper warm-up, drills/skills, and load progressing, running is no different. 

So first, we should look at how we are initiating our runs: are we warming up at all or enough? Are we doing a proper warm-up progression that includes the right tools?  When we get to running, are we focused on our speed progression?

A warm up is intended to prepare the body for the task it is about to do. A simple concept when preparing to run with a warm-up is the longer the distance the lighter the warm-up, the shorter the distance the heavier the warm-up. This is because shorter runs will be faster, longer runs will be slower relative to the athlete and speed is force production, the greater the force production the greater the preparation. Each warm-up no matter how involved should include a general warm-up to initiate blood flow to specific areas, specific joint mobilization, and drills that address the skill of running.

Here is a 5km sample warm-up that includes all of the above and  takes 10mins:

A. General

3min Easy run, nose breathing

20 straight leg front to back swings/leg

20 straight leg side to side swings/leg

B. Mobility

Piked runners calf pedals 60s

Standing quad pull 30s/30s

-Squeeze the glute to increase hip flexor range

C. Specific

ABC drills 50ft x 2 on each

Running starts, like anything else, with proper progression. There will be a significant increase in your ability to sustain faster paces and greater distances when initiating your runs with proper warm-ups.

Technique

This is one of the most neglected aspects of running, we are dealing with major full body movement; when we are running we are dealing with a complex movement pattern through the transverse plane. Take this fact coupled with the idea that humanity has been deconditioned to this movement and we have issues that start right here. It is vital to, at least be thinking about running technique and mechanics. My main point on running technique is get a coach who has experience running. A general rule on a running coach: if they discuss proper footwear more than they discuss technique they do not have enough experience to teach you about running (more on that one later).

The first thing to note regarding the mechanism of running is that runners will use a lot of quad engagement because more than our bodyweight strikes the ground through the balls of the feet. It is more than our bodyweight because we are adding velocity to our bodyweight at the point of impact. Therefore, primarily our quads, secondary our calves, will become heavily use when running. Tracing this up the kinetic chain, our hip flexors, spinal erectors, and even our front delts will also become heavily used. So in order to maintain a balanced engagement we want to keep the body tilted forward, if we find ourselves reaching too far with our foot to increase stride length, we will strike the heels, engaging too much posterior chain and putting on the breaks in the process. 

So rather than increase stride length, we want to focus on a quick toe strike on the ground to increase our time spent in the air, as there is less friction this way making for faster, more effortless, and decreased injury risk running. Think gazel or moonman.

The second thing we need to address with our technique is that we actually initiate each running stride with the arms, not the legs. This is true for not just distance runners but even more so with sprinters, watch a sprinter use their arms to propel their stride, it’s not the other way around. If we put our focus into our shoulders and arms when we run, our stride will naturally fall into place. The key to this is that our shoulders must remain relaxed and we must understand the concept of energy transfer. I see a lot of runners start to benefit from using the arms, but in an aggressive attempt to create propulsion, the arms will start to twist creating lateral momentum. This is a problem because distance running happens in a very straight line, meaning we want as little lateral force as possible. Momentum should all be generated forwards, with nothing being expended sideways. A rule of “thumb” for the arms is to relax the shoulders by relaxing the fist, hold the elbows at 90 degrees, driving the knuckles from the shoulders in a straight line. Like taking a key from our pocket and inserting it into a lock at shoulder height. 

Pacing 

Pacing is simple mathematics because of complex biology. The first thing that a distance runner, or any endurance athlete should become aware of is how our body’s metabolic system works. When putting in longer duration efforts we are generally within our aerobic metabolic energy system, this means oxygen is very important to us. It also means that if we become too eager and burn up our energy too much at the beginning of our effort, the rest of the effort will not be enjoyable and our performance will ultimately decrease. On Top of this, if we train in this manner, we are more at risk for injury, adrenal fatigue, and exponential performance decrease.  Adversely, if we gradually build our pace starting slower and gaining speed through the effort, we can find the ideal pace best suited for our ability and how we are feeling that day. For new runners, this poses a problem because it becomes a mere guessing game. But, if we are attentive to our pacing times, we will be able to gradually dial this in and watch our running get more effective and more enjoyable over time. It won’t feel like we are fighting ourselves anymore, it will feel like we are pushing ourselves.

Distance running is best thought of like driving a very simple car. You are the car, your energy is the gas tank, and your ability to pace is the pedal. If we push the pedal all the way to the floor, we will quickly run out of gas to the point where we are running on fumes. The closer the pedal gets to the floor, the more quickly our “gas” is used up. If we are attempting to run greater distances, than it is imperative to note that we only have just enough gas in the tank to get us from start to finish. As the Km’s decrease, we can afford to press the pedal down little by little. This can be a guessing game at first, and is not as black and white as we would like it to be.

However, it becomes very simple once we have our best times in a few different distances: 400m, 1,600m, 3km/5km are popular. Once we have these distances tested, we can use our times as a guide to our pacing. Hypothetically, if I have a 25:00min 5km as a best time there’s no way I should start at less than a 5min/km pace for a 5km effort. In fact, if I want to pr my 25min time, the best thing I can do is run a little bit slower than that at the start. Because, metabolically, if I work above an aerobic level, I will start burning up glycogen at a much too rapid pace, my body will start to feel weaker as my respiratory rate starts to skyrocket in response to this metabolic surprise. I will feel the body respond with lactic acid, and I can even experience exercise induced asthma this way. On the flip side, our fastest speed should be saved for the end of the run because the Anaerobic energy stores, such as ATP, that we need in order to produce our fastest speeds will only last up to 2mins in the best of conditioned athletes.

 We don’t bank time, we bank energy in the endurance game, this is a principle that will drastically change the game for us with regards to endurance. The name of this game is to be patient with ourselves and observe our running from a more macro standpoint. Run slower to run faster.

Principles

I is actually best to think of running as mostly strength, not cardio, from a definitive standpoint. What limits us from greater speeds and going further distances, is a very specific type of strength and/or power depending on the distance. The greater the distance the more strength endurance, the shorter the distance the more explosive power, the middle distance is the goldie locks zone, it elicits an Anaerobic threshold response that if trained properly through smart intervals, it can help us become better runners at many distances and overall better endurance athletes. This is the biggest mark missed by most runners who simply hit the pavement and push only the distance envelope, left to wonder why they can’t run more than 3km without stopping.

Volume vs speed 

We need to incorporate both in our training but rarely at the same time. We can do so via three training days: Endurance Day (volume), Speed Day (Intensity), and a Tempo day (Finding a feel for pacing). We can calculate as much as we want and have all the fancy watches and gadgets, but nothing beats a runner who can accurately feel their pace. So,  if we currently only have the strength to run 3km without stopping, the most ineffective way to improve is to keep trying to run greater distances. A most efficient way is to break the 3Km’s down into various speed and tempo intervals that total 3km’s or higher and run faster. This coupled with longer slower training sessions will catapult us to greater distances, faster times, and more comfortable running.

Capacities

If we wouldn’t train with a max effort everyday in gymnastics or with a barbell, we shouldn’t do it with running either. When we are reaching outside of our distance capacities everyday our ambition stunts our growth, staying in the realms of our capacity and extrapolating what we can from within is the way to build a solid foundation and when it’s time we will watch our capacities start to grow exponentially. The answer to an overwatered plant is definitely not more water. This is why we must address all three endurance training areas every week: Speed, Tempo, Distance. When we train all three in a balanced manner, we will start to build real capacities, built on a foundation of rock, not sand.

Injuries

Injuries must be addressed when having any running discussion, since injury rates among runners are higher than they should be. Runners experience injury for many controllable reasons, including: Technique, equipment issues, track methods. 

Technique is the obvious contributor, as stated previously. Equipment issues range from shoes to treadmills. Now, I am a big believer that runners don’t need anything fancy in regards to footwear, we do not need a shoe salesman to analyze our running stride in order to safely pick out shoes to wear. The biggest problem with our footwear happens after we make our purchase, not beforehand. Most runners hold onto running shoes for too long, the shoes begin to deteriorate, losing their rigidity, and the support turns into a soft cushion; not good when repetitively striking the feet to the ground. If running 3x/week with 5-12km/session, a runner should change their shoes every 6 months. Keeping the shoe rigid is very important, if not you might be better off running bare foot (which is not ideal). 

The treadmill. 

if this is our only option, we might want to consider investing in some outdoor gear and selling the treadmill. It’s that bad. I began training with a running coach when I was 9 years old, I had 5-6 different running coaches through the 12 years I was a runner. Not once did I train with any of them on a treadmill. The treadmill causes future problems because of the artificial nature of the treadmill stride. The athlete’s foot strikes the machine and the belt pulls the foot back for us. This causes a disengagement of the hamstrings and overdeveloped quads over time. Something, like an air runner is much better and can drastically help our technique. However, nothing beats the outdoors. 

Finally, when running on a track, runners do not often think about direction of travel. We have seen specific injuries such as patella femoral syndrome (runner’s knee) specifically linked to running the same way on a track each day. Simple fix: alternate directions of travel each session if possible. 

With some attention to detail, running is a very safe and effective way to build an athlete’s endurance capacities.

You better be running

My highschool cross country and track team had this quote engrained in us that I want to leave you with, as it always revs me up to get out and hit the pavement:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

-Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

“People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand.”

-Jordan Peterson

There are those that look to the past for guidance, those that look to the future, and those who live in the present moment. I am a believer that we need to use all three to map out where we are in life; learing from the past, enjoying the present, and planning the future. 

We speak to many people with goals in the fitness industry, but deeper than the external goals that we might want or even think we want, lies self awareness. A crucial internal step in learning where we are in life that is missed by many in search for the external in where we want to be. Before we get to where we want to be, we must know where we are.

Anyone that has dug deep and hit pay dirt with their goals has, at some level, discovered a little bit more about themselves as a person. We are not our goals, and our goals do not define who we are. This is not to say that having goals is not important, on the contrary, goals are necessary in order to stay true in life. But having goals without attempting to learn about ourselves,  is like trying to arrive at a destination in the dark. Self awareness is our gps system in our navigation and will allow us to observe our past, absorb our present, and see our future with open eyes. To discover ourselves we must observe ourselves in order to gain a perspective shift. Just as the feeling we get from seldomly hearing our own voice on a recording, some of what we see in our self discovery will disturb us at first. This is the major deterrent for most of us because it becomes too scary to face, this is true for all of us, we all have low points in our lives that are hard to adress. But we will come to find, the courage to stay strong through the uncomfortable will eventually start to light up the map towards not just we want, but what we need.

Choosing Strength

Our lives on a whole are the sum of the choices we make. After we are born into what nature has provided in parenting, genetics, geography, and social status the rest is up to us. Which direction we travel, is up to us. We can go in two directions with each decision, we can go up or we can go down. If we are without values or principles hearing this truth of cause and effect can seem stressful, because there are so many choices to be made over the course of just one hour of one day in our lives. However, if we can center our choices on values and principles, decision making, although still difficult, becomes directed. We can give ourselves the strength of knowing that we are choosing the right things for ourselves because we govern our own choices by what is important to us. 

Handling Change

As a fitness community we discuss many topics surrounding adaptation because the analysis of how we are adapting to our past situations will define the path of our current and future adaptations.  

I have had a few major relocations, or moves, in my life and it has always been consistent in mental and emotional adaptation, only now do I realize that this was all just adaptation to my ability to handle changing circumstances. When we are among major change, like relocating where we live, we often fail to recognize the macro viewpoint because we are usually too involved in the chaos presented within the change. But with each change large or small, we have the power to make a choice, which is why there is discrepancy among us when it comes to change. Some people fear change and can never go anywhere, they easily become stuck, and others close to them become stuck along with them. Where some crave too much change and are always looking for something new, never being able to see things through and overwhelming those who are close to them. 

In both of these situations we are running, in one situation we are running away and the other we are chasing, but nonetheless we are running when it is best to observe. But rightfully so, change is quintessential to mental barriers because the adaptation to change is to face ourselves, our deep selves, in essence we become the barrier to ourselves. That is downright scary for all of us whether on a conscious level or otherwise. However, if we can direct our choices and stay focused on our goals, we can find our way through those barriers of change more calmly, productively, and even find that the barrier is not a barrier but a new possibility. “When we experience change, everything is up in the air, it’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities.” (Peterson) Change presents itself differently and comes in many forms, one thing that is consistent about change is always chance. It is a chance for us to start new and redefine ourselves by either confronting ourselves when we would normally run away, or stay our course when we would normally stray.