The most surprising thing I’ve learned about health and fitness this year shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Training plans work. You just have to follow the plan.
Historically, that’s been my problem.
I’ve always been deeply competitive with myself. If I was going to do a thing, I was sure as hell going to do the thing.
Intervals and long runs were particular nemeses of mine - if I wasn’t hunched over and dying by the end, then did I really go for a run?
Effort was the point. Exhaustion the receipt. Cramps, tightness, soreness - the cost of entry.
At the start of the summer, I bought a Stryd power meter for my running. For the first time, I realized that my “low heart rate zone 2 runs” needed to be nearly two minutes per kilometer slower than I thought they were.
Meaning that for the last few years, my long, slow runs were redlining like a race.
And yet, I still spent most of my summer running like I could escape the voices in my head.
I’d run until my knees hurt. Until my shins felt ready to tear themselves apart. Unable to walk for the rest of the day, and unable to run for two or three more.
Then I’d do it all again.
I did set my best-ever half-marathon time this year: 1h53, nearly five minutes faster than the year before.
It felt like it should have been an achievement.
But it wasn’t the sub-1h45 I’d been expecting.
Commitment & coach
Next summer will be my fifth year of taking running seriously - and my last summer of being under 40. I don’t expect anything to get easier after that.
So, being an idiot, I’ve signed up for the full 42.2 km in October.
But I haven’t completely outgrown all my old habits. If I’m going to do a thing, I want to do it properly. I don’t want to just finish… I’m going to go sub-4 hours. Casually doubling my longest ever run… without slowing down.
Committing to a marathon comes with the quiet realization that it’s way too far to just cross your fingers and turn up.
I’ve recruited ChatGPT as a full-blown running coach, building a near-professional plan, and soliciting feedback on my sessions for the first time.
Having a coach, even an AI one, explicitly say, “No. Recovery matters more here” has been a genuine shift.
Consistently telling me a gentle zone-two run tomorrow, and building time on feet, matters more than falling out of bed on wrecked legs today.
None of this is revolutionary. But after a month of being called stupid, I finally stopped negotiating and started listening.
Restraint, it turns out, is the name of the game.
The cliché is that life is a marathon, not a sprint. I’ve heard that a thousand times, nodded along, and then “dialed it back” to a 95% sprint. But actually training for a marathon forces the metaphor to become literal. You start to understand that pacing isn’t a nice-to-have - it’s everything.
Sure, if you reach the final three kilometers and you’ve still got something in the tank, go for it. That’s earned. But the sensible thing - the thing that actually works - is the negative split: finishing the second half faster than the first.
You don’t prove anything by going out too hard early. You just make the rest of the race harder than it needs to be.
With feedback from my coach, I’ve changed my running technique - increasing my cadence significantly - and added targeted strength work to build muscle in the right places. Gradually, deliberately, the knee pain, shin pain, and hip tightness disappeared.
Small, controlled effort.
Applied in the right places.
Learnings apply broadly (condensed)
Once you see consistency and leverage so clearly in your body, it starts bleeding into everything else.
I’ve started thinking about my relationship with my wife differently. Not as chapters to grind through or months to survive, but as seasons in a much longer game. The goal isn’t to win any particular stretch. The goal is to keep playing the game… An infinite game.
The same shift has shown up in my work. I’m learning - slowly, imperfectly - that a few deliberate steps in the right direction every day are far more effective than grand gestures.
Heroics are seductive.
Consistency is effective.
We tell our kids the story of the tortoise and the hare as if it’s a quaint moral fable. But that lesson doesn’t get easier with age - it just gets more expensive to ignore.
I don’t have a dramatic conclusion here. No transformation montage. No final boss defeated.
Just this:
The work is the work.
And when you do it consistently, it speaks for itself.
If you can put aside the need to empty the tank every day - in training, in relationships, in life - and focus instead on pacing well enough to keep going, everything gets better.
Not all at once.
But one day you look back and realize how far you’ve come.
