The Incrementalist's Mannifesto

Last night, I bought a book that I hope to review on this blog sometime soon. It's called Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code, and its author is Zed A. Shaw.

I didn't go into the bookstore looking for a book on Python. I went because we found a bunch of gift cards lying around that we wanted to use up before they expired. When I got to the bookstore, I decided that what I wanted was a book that taught me some kind of practical skill. I seldom have time to read these days, and if I'm going to read anything at all, I'd like it to be something useful, rather than just some excuse to pass the time. (I have many other, more interesting ways to pass my time than reading.) Maybe I could learn how to draw, I thought to myself, as I perused the arts section. Maybe I could find a book on classical or flamenco guitar technique, I thought to myself, as I perused the music section. Maybe I could find a cookbook that could teach me to expand my cooking repertoire, I thought, as I perused the food section...

I found no such books in any section, because all of the books that potentially could teach me such things are written all wrong. I don't want to sit and read for two hours, taking notes, studying supplemental information, and committing concepts to memory. If I were going to do all that, I'd just enroll in a class. I don't have time for all of that. What I need is a way to learn a new skill through short, concentrated, daily practice. That's how we learn musical instruments. That's how we learn languages. That's how we train our bodies. New skills should work the same way.

So, I was slightly encouraged when I arrived at the Technology section and found a variety of programming books in which coding is taught through the use of short projects and case studies. That seemed like something I could work with. Python is also heavily utilized in my career industry, so this wouldn't merely be a practical skill, but also a professional one. I was narrowing down my search.

What sold me on Learn Python the Hard Way was looking at the Table of Contents: The book is organized into a series of coding exercises. I browsed the book's Introduction, and was pleased to discover that the book was written using the Direction Instruction teaching method. Direct Instruction is the method we used to teach our daughter how to read, and it's the preferred teaching method in all the best schools. The reason is because it really works. It breaks a subject down into small sequential lessons in which each lesson builds incrementally upon the one preceding it. By the end of a full set of lessons, students tend to absorb material better and retain it for longer than any other teaching method. Direct Instruction can be a little boring, and the first lessons are often the most difficult -- hence the name "...the Hard Way." But if one persists in this kind of instruction, one stands to gain more than any other competing instructional technique.

So here we have small, incremental changes that add up to major successes in the long run. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because I've blogged about it before. In fact, I write about it all the time. The other day, I wrote about how I was using this approach to modify my current running regimen. More to the point, I wrote a blog post six years ago entitled "Incremental Fitness," that quickly laid out the general idea. The truth is, over the years, I've discovered that the absolute best way to improve your fitness is to stick to a fundamentally sound routine while making small changes to it week-by-week or month-by-month. This ensures that the body has enough time to adapt to new exercises and improve upon them, without ever gaining so much efficiency that fitness improvement is sacrificed to mastery of technique.

Then there's music. I've been keen to improve my guitar technique. I'm pretty fast, but I'm not the kind of player I'd like to be. I'm not the kind of player who can take an interesting passage or lick and play it comfortably with tone and feeling as soon as I think it up. I stumble through a lot of what I want to play. I play well enough to impress laypeople, but not enough to impress fellow players. I want to change that. To that end, I picked up a book recommended by Dweezil Zappa (I think), called Guitar Aerobics by Troy Nelson. Again, the idea here is very simple: One lick per day, every day, for 365 consecutive days. The licks increase in difficulty week by week until, by the end of a year's time, one will have hopefully improved his playing dramatically. Best of all, the time commitment to these practice sessions is minimal. I can work my way through each lick a number of times and still have a little time left over to practice or write my own material. All the while, I'm becoming a better player, day by day.

I've applied the incremental approach to personal finance, stowing away daily, weekly, and monthly amounts of money, based on certain criteria, and funnelling that money into a diversified set of savings and investment instruments. I also stopped buying things that I wanted outright, and instead created a dedicated account for my own personal entertainment expenses. This account grows by a miniscule amount, but it grows every day, and within just a few short weeks it was easy to learn the fundamental lesson here: It doesn't take very much money to add up quickly if you save it consistently.

You don't have to clean every room in your house on "chore day." All you really need to do is commit to spending just five minutes cleaning the house each day. That will add up, and if it doesn't solve your clutter problem, add a sixth minute. Big deal. I don't know what the magic number is for you; maybe it's seven, eight, ten, or fifteen minutes. Whatever it is, it's a small and doable number for you to use to incrementally clean your home, rather than relying on a large and unpleasant house-cleaning project.

Again and again, the lesson presents itself in every conceivable context. If you want your life to get a lot better, don't try to work through a major catharsis. Forget about "new year, new you" and all such nonsense. What works better than anything is to simply identify one small thing that can be slightly improved, make a tiny (but permanent) change to that one thing, and then continue on about your day. Changes like this, made consistently over time, will eventually result in your whole life being better.

I call this approach Incrementalism. It's not a revolutionary idea, and I'm not the first person to have thought of it. But it does have the power to revolutionize your life, and if reading about it here gives you an idea to improve your situation in some small way, that's a good thing. 

A Year In Training

This past year, I have trained harder as a runner than I have in years. Part of this was because I wanted to try out the training features of my GPS watch, but once I started training as hard as the schedule was asking me to, I found that I wanted to keep up with it. I started hitting sub-6:00/mile pace work, got back to running long-runs in distances exceeding 15 miles, and easily achieved my mileage goal for the year (1,600 miles) with months to spare.

When December rolled around, as I was trying to push my mileage ever-upward and perhaps do a 20-mile long run for the first time in over a decade, I started feeling some aches and pains in my legs and feet that wouldn't go away. So, I made the decision to rest for a full week. No running, minimal anything else. I did do some strength training to manage my blood sugar, but I concentrated solely on my upper body to ensure that my leg muscles were fully rested.

When I got back to running the following week, I still felt good, but my desire to keep driving myself so hard started to wane. Part of this is natural -- it's getting cold out there, and I hate running in very cold weather. But most of it is, I suspect, a challenge associated with training hard. Unless you have a reason (e.g. a professional reason) to train like a college athlete, it's hard to keep yourself motivated to do that kind of training for twelve solid months (or more).

I love to train. I love it more than racing. I like doing challenging interval workouts, I like pushing myself to see how hard I can go. Training is "my jam." Training is also repetitive, difficult, and physically uncomfortable. It's natural that, after a solid year of pushing, one would start to lose some intrinsic motivation to push, push, push.

Usually, this calls for something new. Time to take on another round of P90X? Time to train for a different kind of race? Time to try to do X, Y, or Z? I definitely need to freshen up my fitness routine, but none of the usual options seem very appealing to me right now. I've enjoyed become a lot more of a runner again. I've enjoyed slimming down, doing form exercises and speed work, hitting fast paces, and looking and feeling like my old distance-running self. I've also enjoyed the increased blood sugar control that comes with that.

It's hard to keep pushing toward the same thing, but I also have a low level of interest in the other stuff. I need something new, something interesting, something motivating.

Suggestions welcome.

Against Steps

Tracking the number of steps you take in a given day is not a useful measure of anything. It doesn't serve as a proxy for overall activity level. It doesn't serve as a proxy for distance over time. It doesn't provide an estimate of calories burned. Two people with very different overall levels of health can take the same number of steps in a given day and cover very different distances. Walking 5,000 steps is not equivalent in any way to running 5,000 steps, except in mere step count. Two runners covering the same distance can and will have very different step counts, depending on their height and their running form and speed. Even two runners running the same speed and distance can have different step counts.

Step counting is, therefore, meaningless as a measure of activity or health. Luckily for all of us, there are plenty of alternative measurements we can use to estimate our activity level and to work toward a goal of bettering our health.

I suspect that the main reason step counting became so pervasive in the world of activity trackers and smart watches is because it is technologically easy to measure. The "problem" of pedometry, if indeed it ever was a real problem, was solved back in the 1970s or 1980s, when someone figured out how to put a little shaker inside a plastic doohickey and attach it to an LCD digital display. For all I know, there were already analog pedometers out there before then, but I never saw one. It's not clear to me that the people ever demanded such a contraption as a pedometer. My first encounter with them was when my friends' parents and grandparents received doctors' orders to start increasing their activity level for health reasons. Sometimes the reason was to lose weight, sometimes the reason was to rehabilitate an injury, sometimes the reason was to recover from surgery. These folks were given pedometers and told to take an arbitrary number of steps per day, with that number presumably increasing until some therapeutic goal had been achieved.

In this light, I can see the rationale behind step-counting. For a recovering heart surgery patient, I can see how taking first 2,000, and then 3,000, and then 5,000 steps per day could be an important path toward rehabilitation. I can see how this advice would be far more medically meaningful than telling the patient to "try to walk around the block tomorrow, but if you can only make it two mailboxes down the street before you have to come back, no big deal." Providing patients with a number that can be increased over time can provide them a means by which to track empirical improvements in their recovery while still ensuring that the recovery is more or less individualized to each patient. This is especially true for people who have never trained for any sort of competition, people who need easy exposure to the concept of training without having to feel overwhelmed by a "training regimen."

That, however, comprises the limits of my understanding of step-counting. Beyond this kind of medical scenario, there is no reason for anyone to count their own steps, to challenge each other to step-taking competitions, and to measure their daily health by the total number of steps they've taken.

To give you some level of how absurd this sort of thing is: two weeks ago, I placed 3rd in one of Garmin's step-taking competitions despite running more than 60 miles that week and putting in three days of more than 12 miles of running. While it is always possible that the two people who placed ahead of me in the step competition were training even harder than I am, it's highly unlikely, since I train harder than about 98% of the fitness-tracker-equipped population. Statistically speaking, I should win these competitions about 98% of the time, and place second in the competitions I don't win outright. But that is not the case. In reality, I often place below the top 5 out of 10 participants.

The reason I lose, of course, is because I take nice, long strides and go really fast; not just when I'm running, but also when I walk. Someone with a shorter stride length who covers the same distance will exert himself less while taking more steps and beat me in a step-counting challenge. But who is in better physical shape?

If counting steps is not indicative of anything useful for gauging fitness, what else can we do? Well, I happened to write about Training Load just the other day, and I think this is a pretty good measure of how much exercise a person gets. It's hard to argue with a linear combination of time spent exercising and relative heart rate increases. No wonder academic physiologists have been using measurements like these for half a century.

The downside to comparing a community of recreational activity tracker users by something precise and objective like Training Load is that those who don't get much exercise may start to feel discouraged. Why keep trying to beat last week's effort if you're in the fifteenth percentile of people who exercise? On the other hand, if you're in the fifteenth percentile, but you can win a bunch of step-counting competitions, that may provide you with better incentive to keep exercising. At the very least, it provides you with better incentive to keep paying for and using fitness trackers and apps. Thus, it comes as no real surprise that profit-maximizing fitness tracking firms would provide their customers with a measurement that has high motivational value despite its low physiological value.

Still, one of the unintended consequences of this approach to fitness tracking is that it draws a larger crowd of unserious athletes than it draws serious athletes. It's good that so many unfit people are motivated to go couch-to-5K using step-counting competitions to get them there, but ultimately races stop catering to good, competitive runners. In some cases, race organizers stage two separate events, one for competitive athletes and the other for fun-runners. The major commercial draw, of course, is the fun-runner race: the exact opposite of what the major draw ought to be.

We ought to live in a world in which seeing great marathoners edge ever closer to breaking the 2-hour marathon barrier is an exciting spectacle. We ought to live in a world in which fast runners awe us and inspire us. Instead, we live in a world in which the fifteenth percentile can regularly best the ninety-eighth percentile in a "step challenge," and nobody who enters the Boston Marathon actually cares who wins!

How Soon Until I Notice Changes?

The first question from every fitness novice when they first start a new training program is, "How long will it take to see results?" The question comes from a good place, but hinges on what counts as "results."

What most people mean when they ask this question is usually something along the lines of, "The whole reason I started dieting and exercising was to make my body look more attractive; how long will it be before I notice that my body looks more attractive?" The answer to a question like that is entirely subjective. In truth, the question is unanswerable. No one else can tell you how long it will be until you've changed enough to notice it. Some people work out for years and never "notice" anything, no matter how much their bodies actually change. Other people swear they see a difference after just three days, even though no one else can see it. Who's to say what the truth is? The Beachbody people have the right idea in that they recommend doing a basic fitness test and taking comprehensive photos before starting every new workout program, and at various checkpoints along the way. Your eyes can fool you for a long time, but there is no arguing with photographic evidence. For people whose goals are mainly aesthetic, I recommend Beachbody's approach. Just take photos every 30 days or so and call it macaroni.

For people whose goals are non-aesthetic, or whose aesthetic goals are incidental to their non-aesthetic goals, the question runs a little deeper. It might begin with the bald, empirical question. "How long will it take before I run X seconds faster per mile?" "How long will it take before I can bench press my body weight?" "How long will it take before I'm ready to summit Mount Rainier?" These are good, specific questions whose answers are, unfortunately, uncertain. A sixteen-week training schedule will improve your race time, your bench press, or get you in better shape for a big expedition, but there is no guarantee that doing X, Y, or Z over the course of sixteen weeks will result in a particular improvement. That is, if you engage in a good training program, you'll improve, but there's no telling by how much you'll improve. You just have to keep at it until you reach whatever goal you're aiming for. And if your goal is to do something like summit Mount Rainier, then you might just have to give it a try and see if you're ready.

But that doesn't mean there won't be any observable changes. The truth is, exercise produces a lot of observable changes in a relatively short span of time, and most of these are changes people don't expect. Some they even possibly ignore completely or thoughtless attribute to other factors.

Let's talk about some of the changes you can see when you start to exercise.

Six weeks of exercise is enough to create a statistically significant difference in a patient's microbiome. If you ask me, though, two or three days is enough to observe microbiome changes. Pardon my bluntness, but after taking on a new and vigorous exercise regimen, you should notice changes to the frequency and consistency of  your stool in as little as a few days. Confirm this for yourself. The above link goes on to state, "Further, the genetic expression of the bacteria changed so the bacteria produced more short-chain fatty acids, which reduces inflammation in the body and enhances metabolism." This means that it's not just that your microbiome consists of new bacteria; there are also felicitous physical changes within the old bacteria.

One to two weeks of exercise is enough to notice your changing relationship to food. I don't mean that your diet will suddenly become successful or that your cravings will disappear. What I mean is that bad food like pizza and french fries will start to noticeably slow you down. Where you might have once had little problem with a night of greasy pizza, once you take on an exercise regimen, you'll notice that you need good fuel to keep your training up to snuff. The day after pizza night will feel like a total drag compared to the day after lentil soup with fish and vegetables. Again, don't take my word for it; confirm this for yourself. You'll see.

One to two weeks of exercise is also enough for you to notice that beer and serious training is almost completely incompatible. I first noticed this phenomenon while training in college. I noticed that I wouldn't make any significant progress during the first week or two of any training schedule unless I eschewed beer. If I did, everything would be fine. Now, one or two beers every now and then might be alright, but even those one or two beers is enough to make you feel sluggish the next day, ditto for spirits. Wine, by contrast, seems to have little impact on training, so long as you (I?) don't drink more than a glass or two with dinner. Part of this is dehydration: As you tear up old muscle tissue and rebuild it with stronger muscle tissue, your body craves water to feed that process. Still, if this were solely a matter of dehydration, all alcohol would impact the body differently, and it is clear enough to me that wine impacts things a little differently. Wine is known to aid digestion, especially the digestion of meat; perhaps that and the changes to your microbiome account for the difference. I don't know. Your mileage may vary here; try it and find out for yourself. All I can say is that I can drink moderate amounts of wine while training, but drinking any other kind of alcohol is like putting my muscles in a blender.

One week of exercise is enough to increase your insulin sensitivity. This I know firsthand for obvious reasons. Just yesterday I ate a meal with in excess of 45 grams of net carbohydrates, not counting the wine or the tomato sauce that surely involved at least another 10 grams. This is a dinnertime meal that would ordinarily correspond to three units of bolus insulin for me, but due to my increased insulin sensitivity, not only did I go low, but steeply low, dipping down to 50mg/dL of blood glucose for the first time in months; and that, too, after snacking on a few treats because I felt my diabetic body's telltale carb-craving.

Healthy people won't have to worry about hypoglycemia, of course. For you normals, insulin sensitivity is all-upside, no-downside. One week of training is enough to start the process.

A few days, possibly as little as two, are enough to change your sleep patterns for the better. After committing to daily exercise, you'll get more deep sleep and more REM sleep. You'll fall asleep faster, and you'll wake at a time that corresponds more closely to your circadian rhythm (unless, of course, your alarm clock doesn't line up to that). You might even notice that the total hours of sleep you need to feel well-rested decreases as your sleep quality increases. This is certainly true for me. Six to seven hours of sleep is perfectly adequate for me if I am training. Eight hours is what I need if I'm not training.

One week of exercise is enough to make you feel more energetic. This one is a bit of a paradox, since a lot of vigorous exercise will also tire you out. Somehow, though, physical fatigue hits you in a way that doesn't decrease your subjective "energy level." You can be tired from exercise without nodding off at your desk in the morning, which is a marked contrast from being tired from a late night or an extended happy hour. A "girls' night out" will have you in bed all day the next day; a long run will possibly result in a nap that afternoon, followed by a surprising readiness for the next adventure, whatever it is.

So, to sum up: How soon will you notice changes when you start a new exercise program? If you include changes beyond just what you look like in the mirror, then the answer is a highly encouraging two days at the minimum, and two weeks at the maximum. That's not a lot of time at all.

Good Arguments For Healthy Choices

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of health and fitness is the fact that everyone knows what's good for them, and hardly anyone actually does it.

Why not? Clearly the benefits of health and fitness are indisputable. Working out regularly and keeping yourself physically fit will extend your lifespan, protect your body against age-related physical degeneration, preserve your balance and agility deep into old age, prevent dementia, and give you something to do while you enjoy all those extra years tacked onto your life. Eating a healthy diet, by which I mean a diet well supported by the medical literature, such as the DASH or Mediterranean diets, will prevent weight gain and everything that comes from weight gain, including diabetes, heart disease, bad-fitting clothes, premature death, and so on. I'll add that a healthy and varied diet will also expand your flavor palette, enabling you to enjoy a wider variety of foods than you would if you just stuck to chicken nuggets and fries like a four-year-old.

But so what? It's not as if anyone doesn't already know this. The problem isn't a lack of knowledge or a lack of supporting evidence. The problem is that people would just rather binge-watch Netflix series while eating chicken nuggets and fries like a four-year-old, even despite knowing they're killing themselves.

People don't need more or better knowledge to make healthier choices. Instead, they need more compelling reasons to change. Below, I've compiled a list of reasons why I think people ought to eat healthy and work out. Maybe these reasons aren't enough to convince you, but they're the best reasons that came to my own mind.

Do it for the children.

Like it or not, your children are going to grow up to be just like you. So, if you have body image problems, a bad diet, and an antipathy to exercise, so will your children. You, alright? They learned it from watching you!

Children want to do everything their parents do, at least until they discover that it's hard. If you spend your family time watching TV, then that is what your children will believe constitutes "family time." If instead you spend your time hiking, biking, or playing board games, then that's what your children will learn "family time" is. When your child becomes a teenager and doesn't want to do anything but watch TV and play on the internet, don’t ask yourself why your child became such a bum. Instead, admonish yourself for teaching your child that down time means staring at a screen.

As difficult as it is for some parents to believe, children will learn to eat anything that's put in front of them. There is nothing genetic about the fact that Indian kids like samosas and Japanese kids like gyoza and Italian kids like ravioli. Kids around the world come to prefer whatever they eat most often. If you discover that your child only ever wants to eat mac-and-cheese, ask yourself how often you serve mac-and-cheese. Stop serving it; stop ordering it at restaurants; stop allowing your child to demand mac-and-cheese. Then, sit back and watch as your child, as if by magic, learns to acquire new favorite foods.

Furthermore, if your child watches you engage in emotional eating, negative self-talk, binge-snacking, and constant grazing, then guess which habits your child will develop. If instead you choose to eat well-balanced meals at scheduled mealtimes and strictly limit snacks and treats, guess which habits your child will adopt then.

So maybe you don't have enough desire to turn over a new leaf for yourself. But unless you want your child to have all the health and fitness struggles you have, you ought to do it for them.

Being Healthy Is Glamorous.

Pretty much the easiest way to command attention in a room full of people is to be extremely healthy. That might seem surprising to some people, considering the fact that working out takes time and effort, but consider the alternatives. Most people who command this kind of attention do so by being well-respected leaders in their fields, which means they've invested countless hours and dollars in schooling, pursuing perfect grades and a flawless resume, with a good dose of luck along the way, across decades of their lives. Compared to that, going to the gym every day and eating your vegetables seems almost trivial.

Of course, many people are glamorous simply because they're attractive. There is a genetic limit to how attractive a person can be, but every factor that is within your control involves diet and exercise. If you want your clothes to fit better, diet and exercise. If you want to find fancy new clothes that will make you look attractive in public, diet and exercise. If you want to take appealing photos of yourself and post them on social media, diet and exercise. If you don't want to do any of that, and would prefer to simply marry into a glamorous family, well how do you think you'll be able to accomplish that? You either need money, power, or attractiveness. And considering the costs, diet and exercise is the single easiest and most effective way to get there.

Glamorous people, of course, are glamorous even on their days off. They look glamorous when they're wearing pajamas or lounging around in board shorts. How? By diet and exercise.

Any way you slice it, when it comes to glamor, the most effective way to achieve a modicum of glamor without having to invest decades of your life in career success or hitting the genetic lottery is to eat right and exercise.

Being Healthy Is Fun.

Time and again, when I talk to people who resist the idea of diet and exercise, their resistance generally comes down to the notion that eating right and working out isn't as fun as eating pizza and watching TV. I think this is nonsense.

For one thing, I'm not even sure whether it's neurologically true. Exercise releases endorphins, triggers and satisfies opioid receptors, produces endocannabinoids, releases dopamine and serotonin, reduces physical sensations of pain, and increases your sex drive. The combination of all of this is enough to clinically alleviate depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD. How many other ways of spending 20-40 minutes of your time can accomplish all of this at the same time?

But for another thing, consider what this argument implies: It implies that eating cupcakes and spending a night out drinking is more fun than wingsuit diving, downhill mountain biking, open water swimming, mountaineering, ice climbing, skateboarding, intramural soccer, pickup basketball games, and so on.

I certainly understand that there's no accounting for specific tastes. If basketball isn't your thing, that's fine, and also beside the point. I don't know anyone who doesn't envy a wingsuit diver for flying through the air like Rocky the Squirrel. I don't know anyone who wouldn't like to breathe the air of the Himalayan Mountains at least once. I don't know anyone wouldn't like to try riding a bike through the landscapes of Moab, Utah, or going skiing with the beautiful people in Aspen, Colorado. Even if a few of these things don't interest you, there is always something.

There is always something that people desperately wish they could accomplish that involves physical fitness. It doesn't matter which specific thing it might be for you, personally, it matters only that for some people, physical fitness is the only barrier between them and their dreams.

Consider that, dreams! There is no way cupcakes are worth your dreams. There is no way that eating a Baconator-a-week is worth a dream. We all understand this, and maybe achieving a dream is a lot of hard work and involves willpower that many do not have.

But to argue that smoking cigars and being 300 pounds is more fun -- as several of my acquaintances have argued -- than eating right, exercising, and being able to skydive or hike to the top of a mountain in Jasper, Alberta is complete and utter nonsense. Doing the things that you can do when you're fit is the most fun you will ever have.

People Remember And Value Experiences Over Things.

I don't remember where I was when I ate the best pizza I've ever had. In hindsight, there are a few restaurants that might be able to claim the title, but I have no way of knowing for sure, short of retracing my 40 years of pizza-eating across countries and continents and then trying to remember it all again. The truth is, the best pizza-related experiences I've ever had had nothing to do with the actual pizza. I loved The Factory in Logan, Utah because my sister recommended it to me, and my friends and I had a lot of fun hanging out there. I loved Pizza 73 in Lethbridge, Alberta because they had funny cooks who made jokes with me when I placed phone orders. I loved Lorenzo's Pizza in Ottawa, Ontario because my wife and I used to go there when we were dating. Every great pizza has a corresponding fond memory that has nothing to do with pizza.

Which means, my love of pizza has nothing to do with pizza. You could have taken away the pizza, replaced it with oatmeal, and let the memories play out otherwise the same way, and my love for pizza would become a love of oatmeal. (Actually, I do love oatmeal!)

There is nothing you remember having eaten and loved that is not in actuality a memory about the people you were with, the peripheral experiences you had, and the time of your life in which you experienced it. This is, after all, the reason addiction specialists insist that recovering addicts get new friends. It's not merely that the old friends are bad -- often they are perfectly good people -- it's just that addicts have to learn how to have experiences without associating those experiences with the addictive substance.

And people who are convinced that Thanksgiving is wonderful because of the food are idiots. You can buy turkey and serve pumpkin pie any time you want to. Why, then, do you reserve it for a special occasion? The answer is, of course, because Thanksgiving isn't really about the food at all.

Compare that to getting in great shape, buying a daring bathing suit, and going to Cancun where you can show your body off. Again, it's not the bathing suit that you'll remember, and you'll probably not really remember what Cancun was like, either. But you'll remember being in great shape, you'll remember turning heads, and you'll remember any passionate night that came from that.

And suppose you opted instead to summit Everest or run in the Boston Marathon. You'll remember those experiences, those sets of experiences, far more than you'll ever remember The Greatest Doughnut Anyone Ever Brought To The Office.

If you want to fill your life with great memories, skip the doughnut and train for the beach. Or the marathon.

The Power Of A Watch

As of yesterday, I'm training for a half marathon.

There is no great story or project attached to this. It's quite simple, really. I bought a new running watch, and I'm having lots of fun with it. Part of the functionality of the watch is the ability to import training schedules from Garmin's online platform to the watch. I searched for a half marathon training schedule that seemed to work for me, found an upcoming half marathon to train for, scheduled the workouts, exported them to my watch, and away I went. Really, it was just another way to play with my new watch.

What I think is great about this is the fact that virtually anything can be a good excuse to try something new. If something as silly as a new watch can get me excited about running a race, well, that's just fine. I love little motivating things like this. I've heard stories about how certain famous songs were written, and they often begin with the songwriter having been out somewhere, having seen something that stuck out for him/her, and having decided to write a song about it. We often get the impression that people who do things do them for grandiose reasons. I wanted to accomplish something great! I wanted to set a world record! I wanted to give the world a powerful message! That can be very inspiring, of course, but it's just as fun when something meaningful grows out of a simple experience or observation.

Not that training for a half marathon is extremely important or meaningful. On a personal level, it will take a few weeks of time and effort on my part, of course, but it's not something that anyone else necessarily ought to care about. It's just something I've decided to do, inspired by something relatively meaningless, and that makes me laugh a little.

This "Level 3 Half Marathon" schedule, made available by Garmin's affiliates, is a relatively challenging schedule. It's rare to come across schedules that are designed for people who are better-than-beginners. This schedule seems quite good, actually.

One thing I noticed about it is that, since it is designed around timed runs and heart rate zones, my weekly running mileage will probably increase. I've been going out on fast, five-mile runs, 32-33 minutes at a time. Those are fun runs, of course, but when my schedule tells me to go for a "40 minute run in Zone 2," that's still five miles or more, but it's a recovery run. I come out of a run like that feeling much more refreshed and ready to do more. Consequently, the schedule has more to do: Tuesdays and Thursdays are two-a-day running days, with a recovery run in the morning and a speed workout in the evening. And then, of course, we have a weekly long run. So, that's still six days of running per week, which is what I generally try to stick to, but it's eight workouts instead of six, and very comparable per-workout mileage. I might end up running as much as 50 miles per week under this schedule, which is about a 15-20 mile lift.

I may have to cool the P90X a bit while I do this. Training hard as a runner makes it hard to also train hard as a Beachbody enthusiast. But in a way, that's what the shorter P90X programs are there for. I intend to try to keep up with a P90X3 regimen -- the 30-minutes-per-day version of P90X -- while I do this. That ought to keep me in good muscular shape, with good flexibility and balance, while I train harder as a runner.

All this, because I got a new watch.

You Really Can Improve Dramatically

By now, I should be writing a book review for The Path of Daggers, next in line in Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, which I have been working my way through for the past two months. I found this book off to a slow start, so I didn't feel quite so inspired to read it. As a result, I'm only halfway through. Despite being several hundred pages shorter than many of the other novels, I'll likely spend an additional week reading it. Oh, well.

The fact that I've read more infrequently over the past few days has given me insight into another matter, however. I'm still reading the book at the same pace while I read it, I just haven't been picking it up as frequently. This has caused me to notice the speed at which I'm reading, which, I must say, is remarkably faster than I realized.

When I first started reading this series, I was reading 100 pages or more per day, but it was taking me a full day of reading to do it. Right now, I can read a hundred pages without hardly noticing. Two hundred pages on a weekday is entirely feasible, and if I had a day I could afford to dedicate to reading, I think I might be able to finish a whole book.

I don't say this to brag, and I am well aware of the fact that many other people read faster than I do. What's interesting to me is the relative increase in my reading speed over the course of these two months. I've more than doubled the pace at which I read; in fact, I may have quintupled it. Whatever my base rate was, that's an increase worth noting!

It's not entirely surprising, of course, to discover that persistent daily dedication to a habit can make significant improvements in a person's ability, but we all spend so much time mentally invested in our daily tasks that we seldom get to experience a stark reminder of just how much self-improvement we have "on tap." For me, this process of improving my reading has been one such reminder.

An added dimension here is that, the reader will recall, I found time to read by giving up a lot of my social media time. That means that I could have spent this time practicing anything, not just reading; and I still can. When I finish all the books on my plate, I can spend this time practicing my guitar playing -- and get tangibly better. Or I could spend it learning how to play the piano better -- and get tangibly better. Or, I could spend it learning a new language -- and make tangible progress. Right now, it's reading, but in the future it could be anything. This feels like a windfall to me because it is "found time" of a sort. I can spend it how I please, and make myself a better person in any way I choose.

The same is true for you, of course. If you can find the time to do it, you can spend a little time on something every day. Within two months, you'll have improved significantly, and perhaps even dramatically. You could quintuple your reading speed, or accomplish something else; something you never thought possible before.

The 50/20 Versus The 100,000-Step Intentional Dreaming Guy

When I was growing up, there was an annual event in my area called "the 50/20." (Some brief googling reveals that this event still occurs. I also discovered a Facebook page dedicated to the 2014 iteration of the event, although if it were still as popular as it once was, I'd be able to find more information about it.) The goal of "the 50/20" was to cover 50 miles on foot (running, walking, or both) within 20 hours. I first heard about it when I was in elementary school. Some of my friends had done it. In fact, lots of grade school children and their parents and grandparents completed the 50/20 back then. I remember seeing people walking and running down US Highway 89, AKA "State Street" in Utah, in the mid-afternoon as they made their way from the state capitol in Salt Lake City to whatever their final destination happened to be, somewhere in Provo.

Smart phones and activity trackers didn't exist back then, and even pedometers were uncommon. We measured distances using odometers and "engineer's wheels," wheels that drove odometers and were attached to a handle. We'd walk or run the distance we were curious about, while holding the engineer's wheel, and by the time we were done, the odometer would display the distance traveled. Had smart phones and activity trackers existed back then, however, think how many people would have achieved 100,000-step days. At least hundreds of them, per year, and that was just one area local to me. Surely other "50/20" events, or similar undertakings, existed elsewhere across the country and around the world.

*        *        *

I was thinking about "the 50/20" because I recently came across an autobiographical article/blog post written by a 65-year-old man who recently trained for and accomplished a "100,000-step day." That is precisely what it sounds like: he registered 100,000 steps on his fitness tracker within a single 24-hour time period, walking the equivalent of just over 40 miles in 19.5 hours. This old guy pretty much staged his own, private 50/20, all by himself, and then wrote an article about how you, too, reader at home, can accomplish the same thing.

My first thought was, "Yeah, you can. You can just enter the 50/20 and be done with it." That was when I realized that "just enter the 50/20" means something to me that doesn't translate to you, nor would it translate to the old guy who trained for and achieved a 100,000-step day. That made me wonder: Why doesn't it translate?

*        *        *

"The 50/20" is a phrase that roughly maps to the following concept in my brain: It is a relatively hard thing that grade-schoolers do with their parents, once a year. Reading the old man's article makes clear, however, that "walking a 100,000-step day," which theoretically should map closely to "the 50/20" on a conceptual basis, instead maps to something more like "the greatest physical accomplishment of my lifetime."

Let me try to rephrase that in a clearer way.

A = "walking 50 miles in 20 hours"

B = "an activity suitable for very young children and very old men to complete annually with minimal training"

C = "walking 100,000 steps in a day"

D = "walking 41 miles in 19 hours"

We know from the old guy's article that C = D. We know by definition that A ~ D, and thus A ~ C also (since C = D).

What we cannot conclude without risk of insult to the poor, old man is that C = D = B. In other words, it's impolite to suggest that what the old man accomplished is the completion of an activity suitable for very young children and very old men to complete annually with minimal training.

One of the reasons we aren't supposed to say that is that the old guy took all that time to glorify his accomplishment with an explanatory blog post.

*        *        *

Certainly, what the man achieved is some sort of accomplishment. I, myself have only topped 20,000 steps a handful of times since I started wearing fitness trackers. That, too despite working out multiple times per day and being an avid runner. Despite the achievement of it, though, it struck me as being a rather odd thing, emblematic of a strange social shift away from the spirit of competition. It made me wonder some more about why my mental concept of "the 50/20" (which is Statement B, above) doesn't translate onto other people's mental concept of "getting 100,000 steps in a day."

The article itself gives us some insight, though.

It isn't until the second half of the blog post that he describes how he actually did it, which involved getting up at midnight and walking on a treadmill while binge-watching on Netflix series. (Those of us with some exposure to the ultra-marathon world, where it is not uncommon for people to walk every uphill section and pause to take naps, should not be surprised by his strategy. It still caught me off-guard, though.) My first thought was that the way he did it was cheating. But that sentiment reflects the biases of a bygone era, in which second-graders walk 50 miles in a single day, every year. In the new world, this is how it's done; we walk 100,000 steps in part by watching television.

Watching -- no, binge-watching -- television, taking breaks, slurping down sports gels, and snapping photos. The 100,000-step day is perfectly emblematic of what fitness means in the year 2019 (or, rather, December 2018, when he actually performed this feat).

That's the second half of the article. The first half is even more revealing. In it, he presents the "seven essential ingredients in the recipe of [his] life." Presumably, we are interested in these ingredients because he managed to achieve a 100,000-step day. In other words, walking 40 miles in a single day is a feat noteworthy enough that many people who read the internet might be inspired to pattern their whole lives after this guy.

Imagine if I said, "I read 2,000 pages last month. Here's how I did it -- but first, let's examine my personal philosophy to set the stage for the greater insight I am about to provide for you…"

You might think, in response to such a statement, "Dude… you just persisted in reading, that's all. There's no great wisdom about it, you just started reading, and then kept doing it." If so, you have an approximate idea of my reaction to this man's article.

Of course, as the article proceeds, the hidden motive is revealed. All this autobiography and personal philosophy, and even the story of walking 100,000 steps in a single day, is in service of David Paul Kirkpatrick's real objective: To sell you on his public speaking business on "intentional dreaming."

That's a big difference between a public speaker who did a thing with his Fitbit that he can now use to advertise his public speaking gig, and a bunch of grade-schoolers in rural Utah who did a thing because it seemed badass. Kids don't generally need to dress their accomplishments in the language of new age hocus pocus. They just need to be adequately convinced that something is badass.

Or, at least, that's how it used to be, back when my friends and I did stuff like "the 50/20."

*        *        *

Still, I can't help but think that there's a causality here.

In today's world, people are motivated by the prospect of monetizing their blog or Instagram account to track minor personal accomplishments at home, while binge-watching TV programs and waxing new age gibberish. In the 80s and 90s, people were motivated by the prospect of doing something badass to perform minor personal accomplishments with their friends, and watch TV later while laughing at each other if they sounded too circumspect about what they'd just done.

There is a performative aspect in both cases, of course, but it does not seem accidental to me that new age nonsense, and social media, and monetization all go together on the one hand; while being badass, and hanging out with friends, and trying to make it seem like no big deal all go together on the other hand.

Would it be too controversial to suggest that only one of these attitudes is psychologically healthy?

More Than Carpe Diem

A long while back, I read an article about a man who realized that he did not have enough time left in his life to listen to all the album in his record collection. He did have a rather large record collection, but not so large that he did not know what he owned. He wasn't collecting for the sake of collecting. He was buying albums that he was legitimately interested in listening to. It just so happened that he reached middle age and realized that there were many records in his collection that he would never hear a second time.

In part, he meant this as an exposition on focusing on what you love. In part, he meant it as a commentary on the sheer volume of music out there, and how most of it is destined for obscurity. In part, he meant it as an expression of the realization that life is so very short.

Children, with their whole lives ahead of them, can afford to while away some of their time. For them, it's not really "whiling away," anyway, since children learn by playing, after all. For adults whose life path is essentially set, however, time is of the essence. There are only so many performance reviews before you have to give up on ever getting that big promotion. There are only so many years to start saving for your child's education, or for your own retirement. There are only so many summers to be spent climbing Kilimanjaro or visiting the Louvre. You don't have to do it this year; but you only have so many years, and if you don't plan on doing it during one of those years, at least, you'll never do it at all.

It takes time to lose weight and get in shape, time to get yourself "beach-ready," time to get dressed up and go to a fancy party. If you don't start today, how much time will you have? Do you think you'll be "beach-ready" when you're 65 years old, no matter how good of shape you're in? You need to be fit today to get to the beach tomorrow. You need to train today to run a marathon next year. You need to apply now if you want to get a passport for this summer.

The book I'm reading now is seven-hundred pages long. I can read fairly quickly, but it still takes time to read seven-hundred pages. If you want to read the great literature, you need to get started. If you're as old as I am, it is already likely that there is some great literature you'll never have the chance to read, no matter how fast you read. And if you want to write a book one day, suffice it to say that it takes longer to write seven-hundred pages than it does to read them; longer still to have them edited; and longer yet again to have them published -- if your first attempt is even good enough to be published!

To strum a few chords on the guitar or to plink away on the piano doesn't take all that much time. It does take months, though. And to play with any degree of pleasantness, you'll have to study for a couple of years. As for mastery, you had better be in it for decades. How many decades do you have left? If you've ever dreamed to learning to play an instrument, you ought to start now.

As for love, the time is simply now. Now or never. You offer your love to those who might want it today, or you waste your years away loving no one. Every day spent without love is a day never to be regained, and love itself evolves as we age, going from one phase to another. A truly mature love requires as much time as anything else, and probably more.

You may have supposed that my purpose in writing this is merely to say carpe diem. Sure, seize the day, that's a good idea. But my real point is to spend your time wisely. Invest in the things that you want to say that you did. If you want to say that you made great art, or achieved great work, or loved passionately, then do those things. Do them now. Invest yourself now.

Do not spend any more time "binge-watching" television programs. Do not waste any more time scrolling mindlessly through social media. Do not lose your hours to soap operas and other such time-thieves. Imagine how embarrassed you will feel on your death bed when you realize that the time you invested in The Sopranos could have taken you to The Matterhorn, or that the time you spent on Facebook could have enabled you to retire in the tropics, if only you had invested yourself a little differently.

How Do You Motivate A Child To Be Great?

Today, I was overcome by daydreams of what I want for my daughter. I would like to teach her how to pursue greatness; not that she must pursue greatness, but that she must know how to pursue it, on the off-chance that she chooses to do so. How does one teach a child self-motivation?

I thought I blogged about this recently, but scanning through my recent posts, it looks like this was all just a passing thought on my way to conceiving of this post. There, I discussed the fact that being open to a change is a major necessary condition for human progress. If you don't think things can get much better than they are now, you're less likely to pursue something different.

The seed of that post, though, was my attempting to think through how I am going to teach my daughter to be a good distance-runner; if indeed she chooses to be a runner at all.

As the old adage goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention." People don't tend to figure out how to solve a given problem until they actually need to. You'll never pack your suitcase as efficiently as the day you need to fit 25% more clothing inside the same amount of space. It's impossible to cook a decent meal from a few boring ingredients until you're snowed-in, unable to make it to the grocery store, and stuck with what you have on hand. No matter how little free time you think you have, it's amazing how easily you can scrape together several hours when your young child needs you for something.

Unfortunately, there is a flip-side to this, which is that people who are living comfortably and easily will tend to eschew innovation. After all, why bother trying to make things better when things are already fabulous? And why bother to push oneself to be a great runner if one lives comfortably, in a nice house, with many wonderful toys and a family who loves you no matter how you choose to spend your time?

As a child, I, too, lived comfortably and had all the toys I wanted. But I was also a social outcast who tended to be chosen last in pickup games of football, basketball, baseball, and so on. Sports never resonated with me until I discovered distance-running. Whether I was drawn to it because of my natural ability or because it was an easy way to express athletic superiority in a community of people who lorded their football ability over me, I have no idea. The fact simply remains that I had found my kingdom and intended to defend it. Whenever any other kid came close to beating me in a race, I'd angrily spend the next few weeks pushing myself harder and harder. When I'd lose races, I'd feel ashamed. I desperately wanted this thing, distance running, to be mine. I imagine that other people who do things well feel similarly for those things. When you've tasted what it's like to be the best, you never want to be anything less. This drove me to reach ever-further, until I was one of the top 10 distance runners in a state full of great distance runners.

I cannot guarantee that experience for my own child; and quite obviously, even if I could, I would never wish it on her! My drive to be a good runner grew out of a bad situation. Only a very cruel parent would create negative conditions for his own child so that she might reach greatness. That's crazy.

But then, how do you motivate a child to achieve great things? It's easy enough to force a child to do her homework; the assignment is given, and child must do it or else get bad grades and generally flunk out of life. An old teacher of mine, from China, used to tell us students that the reason Chinese students do well in math is because they do each homework assignment three times. That seems a little extreme, but realistically so. If I wanted to help my daughter better understand her subjects, I can imagine myself telling her to do her homework three times.

I cannot imagine forcing my daughter to run. I can't imagine driving her to the gym while she's crying or frustrated and wants to do something else. It extra-curricular. Her life will be wonderful whether she or not she becomes a great runner (or a great artist, or a great whatever). Since I have no intention of forcing her, then the next-best option is to try to plant the seed in her mind that the voluntary pursuit of achievement is awesome. But how?

Some of you might be wondering what difference it makes whether she pursues some great achievement. After all, I myself have achieved very little, and I have a great life. It's likely that things will be the same for her, too.

That's fine, but there are many good reasons to try to be great at something. By being a pretty good distance-runner, I got to enjoy all of the following unique experiences: I had a full-ride athletic scholarship to university; I got to experience the way schools pamper varsity student-athletes; I got to travel throughout the country for competition, and I never would have had those travel experiences otherwise; I found a social group to which I belonged, and was able to have many coming-of-age experiences within the safety of that social group; I earned many people's respect, which is a nice feeling; I learned about the limits and capabilities of my own body; I developed a sharp sense of self-discipline; I acquired a lifelong hobby that keeps me healthy and fit.

If any parent could guarantee all those good experiences for their own child, they would do it instantly. Those are the things I want for my daughter. So, it's not really about the greatness so much as it is about the kinds of experiences people gain access to when they are pretty good at something.

I'd be crazy not to give that to my daughter, if I can do it.

"You're Only Cheating Yourselves!"

I.

Interesting news in The Washington Post today about a half-marathon race held in China:

Witness last weekend’s Shenzhen half-marathon, where 258 runners were caught taking shortcuts or otherwise breaking the rules, according to the Xinhua news agency (via Reuters). There were three “impostors” in the race and up to 18 wearing fake bibs, according to the report. They face a lifetime ban from the event.

Most of the other 237 runners were caught by traffic cameras and photographers as they cut through bushes on the 13.1-mile course. Each of them can be banned for two years from the annual race, which attracts a field of around 16,000 in China’s fourth-largest city. Some runners were caught turning around at least a half-mile before they were supposed to, according to AFP, thus potentially shortening their distance by at least a mile.

From what I could gather, the Shenzhen Half Marathon is not a major event. It’s pretty much just a fun run in China. Reuters adds this:

A sharp rise in the number of events in recent years and mass participation has also been blamed for the problem. 

China has held 1,072 marathons and road races this year, up from 22 in 2011, according to the Xinhua report, quoting figures from the Chinese Athletics Association.

II.

I started running on the high school track team in Spring of my ninth-grade year. This was a year early in my area, as ninth-graders in my area more typically ran on junior high track teams. (Ninth grade is housed in junior high schools in that area of the country.) I was one of the fastest runners in my junior high school, and certainly fast enough to run at the high school level, so every day I caught a ride to the high school and ran with the big kids. In part, this was to push myself to a higher level of performance. In part, it was also because it boosted my ego to know that I could do it.

The transition into varsity high school sports from junior high sports is not an easy one, however. When you’re a very young athlete, everyone is more or less at your level. If you happen to be one of the best, as I was, you get used to placing first by wide margins, and so it was in my experience. Until, that is, I started running high school races and discovered that even a fast ninth-grader is no match for the average high school senior. I went from the front of the pack to the rear, and I had to spend the next four years fighting my way to the front again. Not everyone has that level of persistence in the face of a great challenge – I certainly couldn’t repeat that effort when I made the transition to the NCAA. But those who can are in store for great things.

The crux of it is in the attitude adjustment: You have to still see yourself as a frontrunner, despite very definitely not being one. When training, you have to train as a frontrunner.

This struck me right away, and it really hit home for me on one particular occasion, when I was on a training run with the older kids. Every day, we’d run down a long hill. At the bottom of the hill was a large, grassy park. We’d run around the park and down the rural road a few miles until we’d gone far enough to turn around, and then we’d come back the way we came. Some of the kids running with us would always cut through the park at the bottom of the hill. They’d cut through the park on the way out, and they’d cut through the park on the way back. It was just part of how they trained.

The first time I went out on that run, I was running alongside one of the fastest boys on the team. I wanted to eventually be the fastest boy on the team, and I figured the best way to do that was to hitch my wagon to a star, so to speak. As we neared the bottom of the hill, about half of the boys in our group cut across the park as usual, but the fastest boy on the team did not, and I stuck with him. He looked over at the group cutting across the park and called out to them, joking: “You’re only cheating yourselves!” We cracked up.

His words stuck with me, though, for the rest of my life. I never ran past that park again without thinking about how cutting through it was “cheating myself.” If I cut through the park, I’d be cheating myself out of a full workout. That wouldn’t make me a faster runner. I’d never be better off having cut through the park. No one else would know, but more importantly no one else would care. Our coach wouldn’t have said anything about it. None of my teammates would have cared; half of them did it themselves. The only one who would know and care was me, and I couldn’t do it.

III.

You don’t have to try out to be on a high school track team – at least you didn’t when I was a kid. The track team was starved for athletes, they’d take anyone who came out. The trick wasn’t getting people to practice, the trick was getting them to come back day after day.

I started running seriously – seriously – at age eight. I don’t really know why it appealed to me so much, but it did. It’s something that resonated with me from the moment  I started, so I stuck with it and it turned into a lifelong commitment. It’s something I just love. Part of the appeal has always been the masochism of it, the process of putting my body in situations that are physically strenuous, physically painful, and proving that I can get through them on sheer force of will. It takes a certain kind of person to want to do something like that. Not everyone has the right stuff.

To be sure, not everyone who gave track practice a try had the right stuff. One day I showed up at track practice and my heart leapt in my chest, all the way up to my throat and stuck there for three hours. My high school crush had just shown up to track practice. This seemed like the greatest thing to happen to me, first because it meant that we might have a common interest, second because she’d be able to see me doing the one thing I was genuinely awesome at doing, and third because it meant we’d be seeing a lot more of each other… but only if she stuck with it. I thought about my good fortune all night long, couldn’t wait for the next school day to end, hurriedly put on my running clothes and ran out to the track. She wasn’t there the next day. She wasn’t there the day after. She didn’t last more than that first day, much to my disappointment. Like so many others, she was gone after the first attempt, never to return again. (Eventually, I got over it.)

There were others, though, who stuck it out but didn’t try. They had what it took to show up and hang out with other kids every day, but they didn’t have any internal desire to push. They never wanted to be good at it. They all cut through the park. When they weren’t cutting through the park, they were quitting the prescribed workout halfway through. They’d run perhaps half of the prescribed intervals and spend the rest of the time slowly jogging or walking around the outside lane of the track, chatting. When we’d go for longer runs, they’d just sort of… disappear. I never saw them finish a long run.

But they were always there the next day, ready to half-ass another workout.

IV.

To go from 22 road races to 1,072 is a 4,873% increase. China has essentially gone from having no discernible distance-running culture to having quite a robust one in a period of 7 years. Like so many aspects of Chinese growth, this is basically unfathomable to an American, including myself. No one in North America has any idea what that kind of rapid growth explosion is like. The closest thing I can think of was that two-week period a couple of years back when suddenly everyone was playing Pokemon Go. Imagine that trend hit, and then kept growing and growing and growing, every year, for seven years straight. It’s not just difficult to imagine, it’s impossible.

Running in China must have become some kind of social phenomenon. I have no evidence of just how strong a trend it is, other than the aforementioned growth rate in road races. For all I know, it might rank relatively low in terms of popular hobbies in China. But a 4,873% growth rate points to something definite, anyway.

When something like distance-running grows that fast, it’s bound to attract a lot of people with the wrong stuff. A good number of new Chinese distance-runners are surely terrible at running. Some of these awful runners just want to stop running as soon as possible. They want the social status associated with participating in distance-running, but they don’t have what it takes to actually be a distance-runner. These are the ones who will cut through the grassy park at the bottom of the hill. A second category of new Chinese runners will persist in at least showing up day after day, but they have no desire to run fast, or to run well, or to win a race. On the average day, these are the people who will show up to group runs, make sure that everyone sees them, and then sort of… disappear… over the course of the workout. On race day, these are the people who will turn around early and cut a mile off their half-marathon.

All that is to say, I don’t believe that all of the Shezhen “cheaters” are cheaters. I believe that a good, solid percentage of them are just people with the wrong stuff. They’re people who got caught up in the distance-running phenomenon without ever bothering to ask themselves “Why am I doing this? Do I love it? What is it about this sport that so many people love so very much?”

V.

Nobody else runs at age 8. To this day, I’m the only person I’ve ever known who started running at such an early age. It wasn’t popular among my peers; everyone else was into football and baseball. People made fun of me for running. People tried to punch me as I ran past them. People honked at me, swore at me, flipped me off, anything. I did it anyway. I did it because I loved it, and I still love it. It’s still the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything.

Robin Hanson has this book that posits that most of everything that humans do is social signaling. That is, most of what people do is designed to win them a higher social status. I expect that Jordan Peterson would tend to agree. This theory doesn’t resonate with me because almost nothing I do wins me any social status at all, and social status is beside the point of most everything I do. Running is a great case-in-point. In order to become the runner I am today, I had to actively disregard prevailing social trends. I had to favor my own training regimen even over the prevailing social trends within the distance-running community. I had to go out into the woods and do my own thing. I did it then, and I do it now. Most people I know don’t know I run, and when they find out, they don’t really care. Running is a truly terrible way to win social status. You’re better off wearing a jaunty hat.

I can’t imagine anyone showing up, day after day, running mile after mile, for social status. If it’s true that the majority of people do things for social status, then perhaps this theory explains why they don’t stick to running. They quickly see how much effort is involved, and how little social status, and they head home instead.

I can’t even imagine anyone putting forth the effort to cheat in a road race for social status. First of all, running a road race isn’t getting you much social status in the first place. Second of all, winning a road race doesn’t get you that much more than merely running one without winning (which is, again, almost zero additional status). People who run don’t even look like they want to elevate their social status.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that nobody does distance-running for social status, and nobody cheats at distance-running for social status, either. People run mostly because they think they’ll give it a try. If, like me, they decide they have the right stuff, they keep running for many years after their first time. If they have the wrong stuff, though, they’ll do almost anything to make it stop. They’ll cut corners, turn around early, skip workouts, give other people their race bibs, and avoid the hard work of distance-running at all possible costs.

“I don’t run unless chased, hyulk hyulk hyulk!” is what people tell me.

True enough.