Do the Thing by Doing the Thing

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is this importance of doing the thing you really want to do instead of doing things adjacent to that thing. At the risk of this blog slowly turning into a running blog, I have a recent running story that exemplifies this idea painfully well. One of my bingo board goals this year was to run a 5k in 24 minutes. My last 5k was in October, and I ran it in 28 minutes and some change. Shaving off 4 minutes would be a pretty significant improvement, but I wanted to get serious about running this year and it felt like a good challenge. There would be a 5k in July that I ran every year with my friends and family, so I set that in the back of my mind as the race to aim for.

The year started off strong. I focused on increasing my weekly miles and ‘easy’ runs to build my aerobic base, as the internet recommended. After completing my first half marathon in May, I was feeling pretty good about my chances for the 5k. Never mind that I hadn’t actually run a 5k for time since the previous October- surely all this endurance was contributing to my overall running ability.

In the last two months before the race, I ramped up my training even more. I added interval training, where I would run a few fast 1kms with rest between. I saw my 1km time improve from 5:30 to 4:30, comfortably below the pace I would need to maintain to hit my goal in the 5k. I also set some PRs for 1 mile runs, and I was still getting in plenty of easy miles each week. Between the speed work and the endurance work, I felt hopeful going into the 5k, despite the fact that I still had not attempted an actual timed 5k. The July race would be the proof of my efforts.

I ran a 29 minute 5k in July. Slower than my last 5k in October. How did this happen? After months of training and seeing good improvements, it was a frustrating result. Luckily, the year is far from over, and I began thinking about what I needed to change in order to reach my goal.

One thing stood out clearly during the race itself: running a 5k is hard. My fast 1km did not matter in the grand scheme of a 5k, and all my easy miles had not helped me build endurance under intensity. Despite my efforts, I had accidentally avoided training for the particular challenges of a 5k. Or maybe it wasn’t an accident… I think some part of me knew that a fast 5k would be hard, and I thought I could avoid facing it directly by approaching my training piecemeal. Work on speed here, endurance there. I’m sure that all this training was good for my running in general, but it is clear to me now that I did myself a huge disservice by not facing the race head on. It turns out that training for a 5k requires running some 5ks.

I have caught myself doing something similar in other parts of my life. There are a few big, scary goals that I have thought about for a long time, but I always find other, smaller projects to work on instead. I tell myself I need to practice writing or drawing, that the small projects will prepare me for the bigger projects. There might be some truth to this, but ultimately, I will never be able to prepare for something by doing other things. I have to do the thing itself to get better at it.

Having a goal requires an uncomfortable vulnerability. You have to look at yourself honestly and acknowledge the gap between where you are and where you want to be. It can be easier to avoid the gap by doing more of what you’re good at, or doing the easy parts of the challenge without ever facing the difficult parts. In the weeks since my failed 5k, I set a new 5k PR- just a few seconds faster than my October race, but the time is finally moving in the right direction.

To be honest, I don’t know if I’ll hit my goal this year. But I know that I’ll be running more 5ks in the next few months than I have in my life, finally doing the hard thing and improving as much as I can. In the end, working toward closing the gap matters more than reaching a particular finish line, and I’ll be enjoying the journey and progress along the way.

Thanks for reading! How are your goals going this year? Have you had to make a mid-year pivot or reconsider your approach?