If you've got the best intentions to make running part of your life, here's everything I absorbed to go from 0-100 (miles)
View in Sanity Studio2024-12-11
Over the last ~24 months I’ve taken up running. I work in an industry that’s not synonymous with fitness. And so I get asked on occasion by people who’d like to get into running, “How do I get into running?”
The following is my best effort to answer that question. This is everything I’ve learned in that time to get from where I was then to where I am now.
None of this advice is unique to developers. But picking an audience allows me to make a bunch of assumptions about you, dear reader.
On that last point, there are none. That's part of the challenge! Optimize your day job, not your life. Getting into running is enduring the physical and mental challenge of building something brick-by-brick. Something that cannot be cheated.
(There’s also going to be a lot of inspirational quotes in this blog post. I know they’re cheesy, but I eat them up.)
I'm no expert, but I've been asked this enough times—and have a long enough response—that I figured it'd be worth writing down.
Let's go.
There’s no avoiding it.
Running hurts, especially early on.
You’re going to be slower than you imagine and have to work harder than you wanted. It’s going to take longer to get fit than you thought. You won’t see results as good as you expected as early as you hoped. Better to know this up-front and prepare yourself mentally now than find out in a few weeks and give up all hope too soon.
But I promise you if you stick with it, that the day you can run for an hour at a “forever pace” and it doesn’t feel like work at all – it’s the best feeling you’ll have in your life. Runner’s High is real.
The fight is worth the feelings
You’ll need to know your “why” early on. This sounds a bit woo woo but it matters. It matters when you’re starting as much as it matters in mile 90 of a 100-mile ultramarathon.
If you don’t have a clear motivation to push through when things get tough. When you don’t want to get out of bed. When it’s raining outside. Your chances of quitting skyrocket.
I’m at a point now where starting my day with anything other than a run makes the rest of the day feel weird. So I don’t need daily motivation to get up and run, it’s automatic and routine.
But if I had to put a label on it, these spring to mind.
I want to know what I’m capable of.
We’re not physically tested very often in modern life, and we’re all far more capable than we realise. Running 100 miles sounds ridiculous. Impossible. But it’s not, and plenty of folks do it. Some run further. Some run it faster. I want to know just how much suffering I can absorb and overcome.
I want to show my kids we can do hard things.
I never really looked after myself until shortly after we had kids. My idea of normal was playing Call of Duty until midnight every night and dragging myself out of bed after they woke up. One morning, I realized that that was no way to live, and I needed to be ready for them. They should never have to wait for me. As they’ve gotten older, I intend to stay one step ahead. As of right now, I’m still fitter and faster than them. I know they’ll beat me eventually. I want them to.
I’ve got a chip on my shoulder.
Spite-based motivation works! I’m proving myself right. When I tell folks this, they don’t believe me, but I was a chubby kid in high school. You know, the one too embarrassed to do swim class. I grew up in a sports-mad family but I can’t catch or throw a ball. I told myself as a young person that I “wasn’t athletic,” and I’ve spent my middle-aged years showing that person he was flat-out wrong. Put one foot in front of the other, and repeat. That’s athletic.
Every new runner makes these three mistakes:
All without giving your body a chance to recover.
I first tried to become a runner in 2012. I would run 5k as hard as possible 5-days a week. I got injured, told myself I “wasn’t a runner,” quit and bought a road bike instead.
(Which admittedly was awesome. My first mid-life crisis was as enjoyable as this second one. Biking unlocked my joy of longer-form endurance exercise.)
When I started running again in 2023, I made the same mistakes again.
Running has a massive impact on your body. Your bones and joints. Even at a slow pace, if your body is not used to this damage, and you’re not giving yourself the time to recover, you’ll burn out way too fast.
This is why new runners get shin splints or forms of tendonitis. You’re pushing too hard – probably because you’re not seeing the results you want fast enough (remember, “it’s gonna suck”).
You don’t get stronger training, you get stronger recovering.
The impact of training has detrimental effects on your body. Without adequate recovery, rest, and to some degree diet you’re not giving your body the time and space to make the gains from all your effort.
I’m a big believer in “active recovery,” which is recovering from an intense exercise by doing a less-intense exercise. I run each morning, then spend time on my Peloton Bike, then walk the dog. Stepping down exercise intensity while still promoting blood flow.
(I’m over the top in a lot of things, you likely do not want to commit this much time. Stretching routines, yoga, etc can provide similar benefits.)
It’s no good going for a run and then immediately doing 8 hours sitting at your desk. Your joints will not cooperate.
Your Apple Watch’s hourly reminders to stand should be treated as a reminder to move around. Stretch.
Motion is the lotion
Get ready to get sick of hearing about “Zone 2.”
~80% of your running should be at “Zone 2” heart rate. That is, a moderate to low aerobic exercise that you can sustain for a long time. Any kind of fitness tracking watch can show your heart rate during activity, and will probably split up your current heart rate into zones.
When you first start running, a light jog might put your heart rate into Zone 3 or above! This is completely normal. And frustrating (see "It’s gonna suck"). You want to run but you really shouldn’t be spending all your time above Zone 3 unless you want to fast-track getting injured.
So in your first few weeks you may need to mix jogging and walking before you can get up into an actual run. But if you’re coming from a long way back you’re going to see huge gains in a shorter time than a very fit person who’s trying to squeeze out those last bits of extra fitness.
I don’t enjoy race events much. I’ve completed a few ultra-marathons and they involve a lot of planning, nervous energy and a few sleepless in the lead-up.
Weekly training I find to be much more enjoyable.
But I wouldn’t do that training if it wasn’t for an event.
Similar to having a “why,” you’ll need a “what.” It can be something as short as a 5k. Putting your money and time on the line to commit to something is a great motivator to keep chipping away every day to get ready for that day.
(Note: Making sure you have a few nights of quality sleep in the lead-up to an event is sufficient, should you have a sleepless night immediately before an event. That puts my mind at ease somewhat.)
If you’re fortunate enough to live near a Parkrun, you can do a free, timed 5k every week and see how your results improve over time.
Otherwise, make sure you track every run you do on something like Strava.
Measure in months, not moments.
Give yourself time when it comes to seeing improvement. We're a numbers obsessed bunch and running gives you a whole new set of numbers to optimize.
But the pace you ran today isn't as relevant as the average pace you've run this month compared to last month.
See also your average number of hours of sleep, and your average resting heart rate.
Focus on getting 1% better every day.
Comparison is the thief of joy
At any given point in time, there is only one person on earth who is the fastest and fittest runner. It’s not you. It’s not me.
It’s you vs you
There is always going to be folks on Instagram who are far faster than you. Some will be slower. Neither of those groups matter. What matters is how you’re doing. Do you feel better than you did a month ago? Are you getting measurably faster, or going further? Are you having fun?
If you’re reading this blog post, you probably know me as this web dev educator guy that runs ultra-marathons and makes videos talking about work. I couldn’t always do that. I couldn’t run between two sets of power poles without stopping to take a breath. I couldn’t run without feeling sore for two weeks.
You probably can’t do that day one. There’s a lot of things I can’t do 24 months in. But I’m better than I was, and that’s all that matters.
The Apple Watch activity app can be set to a certain number of calories burned every day, and you get a little dopamine hit when you do this multiple days in a row.
As someone who is quickly addicted to such things, I set mine to 1024 calories a day and hit a 150-day streak. Feeling wrung out, I lowered it to 720 calories and continued another 250 days before breaking the streak and completely losing motivation to pick it up again.
“Streaks” are easily (read: lazily) gamified metrics from app developers. They reward non-stop work with no rest.
You should instead be focusing on gradually increasing your fitness, pace and cumulative distance run each week.
Rest isn’t a reward for hard work, it’s a part of doing hard work.
For me, goal setting works long-term, but chasing streaks does not.
We all learned to walk. It seems logical we all know how to run. Right? Wrong.
When I first tried running I would be sore for weeks after one hard run.
While I won’t claim to have a perfect running form, I will say that the biggest difference between feeling rubbish after a run and feeling fine was fixing my form. The way I did this was by taking the Peloton Outdoor classes, where the instructors will call out form cues during a run.
Lean slightly forward, tall posture, relax your shoulders, strike with your mid-foot…
This might not be something you need to consider early on, but if you are finding the physical impact of running has far-too-long after effects, consider checking your form and running with some audio guidance.
Once you’re in a rhythm with a better form, you won’t have to consciously think about it.
The only thing you “need” to buy to get into running is good shoes. And you should get good shoes. It’ll make “It’s gonna suck” suck a little less.
If Helvetica is “what letters look like,” the Hoka Clifton is what a modern running shoe is. Soft without being too soft. Cushioned without being unstable. I don’t wear them all the time, but I’ve worn through several pairs now and I always come back to them. A good all round shoe.
Don’t buy “super shoes,” they’re for super-humans and neither you or I are one.
Don’t buy cheap shoes, you’ll hate them and quit running.
You also don’t need to buy heaps of other gear. You’ve already got a smart phone, you probably have a smart watch. Record your activities on it for now.
But also, anything you can buy to keep ramping up how good you feel running is worth it. Just don’t buy anything in advance to convince yourself that “if I only had this, then I’d run more often.”
The following are optimizations that may be too much to consider early on in your running journey, but if you want to get better, you should keep in mind and take increasingly seriously.
Don’t stand if you can sit, don’t sit if you can lay down
Avoid situations where you’re going to be in a sedentry position. I don’t sit on the couch, I lay on the rug. And that’s where I have a foam roller on hand to turn watching YouTube into more active recovery.
There are a lot of gadgets and supplements you can buy from influencers. None of them are as good as sleep. Maximise the amount of high-quality sleep you’re able to get regularly before spending any money.
There are an infinte number of resources about how and why and what to eat.
I think it’s relatively straightforward:
You can get lost extremely over-analyzing every food. However, to some degree I believe that deep down, if you're honest, you know what you should be eating. You know an apple is better than ice cream. It’s not worth getting cautious about the carbs of an apple. Maybe there are better things than an apple. But also you shouldn’t eat ice cream every day. Keep it simple.
(If weight loss is your goal for running, be careful. Cardio racks up a huge appetite which can easily have you cancelling out the effects of exercise. I’m also not a good guide in this area as it’s not been a goal of mine. Consult other literature.)
Sure, I have regrets about not getting into running earlier. But there's nothing I can do about that now. Finish reading this blog post (you're almost done) close your laptop and go for a run. Just around the block. Doesn't matter how far or how fast. But you can start today.
You won't do this when you've "got free time," you need to make time. Put it in your calendar. Prioritise it. Block out other events for it.
I have my alarm set to 4.30am every weekday. This is my favourite time to run because there's nothing in the world that needs my attention from 4.30-6.00am. That's my time. The rest of the day is family, work, responsibilities, etc.
If it matters to you, you will make time
I can't answer that for you. All I can do is give you the list of things I never thought I'd be able to do.
These all hurt like crazy. I mostly remember the suffering and the joy of finishing.
But with those behind me, I started taking on the ultra-distance
And after that for some fun thought I'd try and break 20 minutes in the 5k.
Running’s fun (eventually, I promise). Stick at it. Don’t overthink it.
I’ll see you out there.
