When running habits go bad, don’t despair
This Christmas, an annual tradition went totally off the rails. And I’m OK with it. I’m a person usually grounded in habits. If I start something and ingrain it as a habit – a daily, weekly, or annual practice – I stick with it.
So, yes, that’s probably why I run most days. Not because it’s a habit, as such. But because carrying out the (almost) daily ritual of running makes me feel everything is OK(ish) with the world.
One of the stranger traditions in our house is, when wrapping the Christmas presents each year, my wife and I will have the movie Castaway on in the background. I can’t remember exactly when or how it started but it’s the perfect movie to have on as a distraction from the annual nightmare of wrapping.
After you’ve seen it the first time, you don’t need to be watching every single frame intently to be carried along by the story: the narrative arc is time-honoured (our hero, played by Tom Hanks, is the perfect sympathetic character who encounters a complication when he is stranded on a deserted island, and the movie follows his efforts to overcome that complication). Once you’re into the meat of the movie there is virtually no dialogue you need to concentrate on.
And, so, for years, we’ve had it on as we cut paper, snip sellotape, and remember whose gift is whose. The only scene we stop for every time (spoiler alert) is when Wilson the volleyball floats out to sea. The drama!
Anyway, this year, for some inexplicable reason, we got to present-wrapping night and realised we didn’t have
Castaway easily available. In a radical decision we went with Netflix’s alternative suggestion:
Forrest Gump. (Cue running joke I’ve heard yelled at me hundreds of times – ‘‘run, Forrest, run!’’)
Anyway, it wasn’t Castaway, but the world didn’t end and the presents still got wrapped.
Sometimes running is like that, too. You’ve got your heart set on a goal and, for some reason, it doesn’t work out.
That might mean you’ve had to cancel before the race even begins – been there, done that, for injury reasons or family commitments.
Or it might mean you have to withdraw during the race itself –
been there, did that, for the first time ever, last year. I’d reached a point in a race when I realised I just wasn’t having fun any more, and if I wasn’t having fun, why was I even doing it?
So I stopped.
After decades of running I’ve also figured out that, for me, it pays to think a bit more about what races I enter.
I’ve been guilty of being impulsive in the past. It usually happens immediately after races, but for others it’s around New Year’s.
I know this because a listener of the Dirt Church Radio podcast, Chris Hope, is the brains behind the NZ Running Calendar that lists races and events all around the country (he also has an Australian version, too).
A couple of weeks ago when co-host Matt Rayment and I talked about how, immediately after the Kepler mountain ultra we’d found ourselves on our laptops late at night desperately searching for our next event, Chris got in touch. I could picture him nodding knowingly, thinking, ‘‘there, there’’.
Because traffic on his website after events shows that there’s always a spike the evening of a major event.
Take the Auckland Marathon, for instance: ‘‘There’s a big spike the day of the event, and then it continues to stay high for a couple of days afterwards.’’
A ‘‘big spike’’ is about double the number of visitors.
‘‘I also get a big spike at the start of the year as people come back to work in the first and second week of January.’’ And, again, the data don’t lie: graphs show his visitor traffic surging (interestingly, more pronounced in Australia).
So, if you’re one of the people contemplating signing up to a race in the New Year, you’re not alone. But have a think about the reasons you’re entering, and try to ingrain it into your life so it’s not just about the event itself, but about the process of getting there.
And if it all goes wrong, don’t panic. Not all race plans have a Hollywood ending.