90 Day Running Reset: Mindset (Consistency)
1% at a time. That’s what this whole plan is about. Little incremental changes that add up to massive change down the line. Consistency day in and day out. It’s harder than it seems. Even at 1%. But for retraining my running weak points, it’s crucial that these changes take hold, and succeed.
Atomic Habits
I’ve been reading a ton lately. Mainly books on business. For about two months now I’ve been going through a book per week. Why? I got to a point in my business where I felt like I needed some refreshers on practices that I use. I also felt like I needed to mine some new resources for new ideas. The place I started was “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.
Over the course of the pandemic I’d seen this book circulate through a couple of different circles that I’m in. I read the summary and figured that I practiced the general idea of the book, so I didn’t need to read it. Something though kept nagging me about it. So in April 2023 I picked up a copy and got to work. Turns out, I was so wrong. While I did understand the general principles behind the book, I wasn’t practicing them well.
One of the main points of the book is the idea of making small 1% improvements in your behavior that add up over time. These "atomic habits" are tiny routines, rituals, and behaviors that over time have a significant impact on your life. I broke down my main takeaways as follows:
The Power of Small Changes: Clear asserts that making small improvements on a regular basis can have big impacts over time due to the power of compounding. This is the basis of the "atomic habits" concept – tiny changes that add up to significant results.
Habit Loop: The book describes a four-step process for habits: cue, craving, response, and reward. The cue triggers the habit, the craving is the motivational force, the response is the actual habit, and the reward is the end goal of the habit.
Make Good Habits Obvious, Attractive, Easy, and Satisfying: This principle is related to the four steps of the habit loop. Clear suggests making the cue of good habits obvious, the craving attractive, the response easy to do, and the reward satisfying.
Break Bad Habits by Inverting the Four Steps: Similarly, you can break bad habits by making the cue invisible, the craving unattractive, the response difficult, and the reward unsatisfying.
Identity-Based Habits: Clear advocates focusing on who we wish to become (our identity) rather than what we want to achieve (our goals). This is because our habits are closely tied to our identity and self-image. For instance, if you want to read more, instead of setting a goal to read a certain number of books, you should adopt the identity of a reader.
Habit Stacking: This is the concept of pairing a new habit with an existing one to make it easier to adopt. The existing habit serves as a cue for the new habit.
Environment Design: Clear emphasizes the role of our environment in shaping our behavior. By changing our environment, we can make good habits more convenient and bad habits more inconvenient.
The Two-Minute Rule: This rule suggests that new habits should be easy to start. If a habit takes longer than two minutes to do, it should be scaled down to just the first two minutes of the behavior.
The Law of Least Effort: People naturally gravitate towards the option that requires the least amount of work. Design your environment to make good habits more convenient and bad habits more effortful.
Never Miss Twice: When you miss a day of a good habit, try your best to get back on track as quickly as possible. Don't allow a single mistake to derail your progress.
The application…
After reading the book, I made 2 whiteboards for my office dedicated to personal habits and business habits. I made a third board on my iPad for running. I listed out my bad habits/weak points in running, and formed this 90 day program around them. To date, I’ve implemented 1% changes in:
Form
Cadence
Breathing
What I have left to do are:
Consistency
Diet
Now I know what you’re thinking. “Why is consistency one of the last things that you’re working on!?” Well, it isn’t! This whole reset is based around this “1% at a time” principle. Since the start, I’ve committed to a few things.
Blogging on Monday and Thursday (even if it’s late)
Applying new lessons each week into my training
Building the base for what consistency looks like by applying drills and breathing best practices
So now I’ve come to the point where I want to be more consistent with my actual running, in addition to applying what I’ve been learning. For the last 2 weeks now I’ve been struggling with getting out and running on days where I’m supposed to run. Inconsistent. It makes these little 1% wins harder to come by.
The plan…
5 days a week. At this point, I don’t care about mileage. I don’t care about time. Right now I want a solid, consistent platform that I can overcome these bad habits/weaknesses with. Running at least 1 mile 5 days a week is the goal. With that as the platform, I can more evenly measure my 1% changes with my nose breathing, my cadence, and my up and downhill form. The speed and volume will come with consistency. I’ll start with one week and turn it into 2. Then it’s just a matter of keeping the streak alive, not because I feel like I have to, but because I want to.
With nose breathing, I’m exclusively doing it for the first 30 minutes of every run before considering changing strategy based on effort. My goal at the end of this reset is to be able to do an hour. But I’m starting at 30 minutes/run, 5 days a week.
My cadence right now sits in the low 170s in my easy effort heart rate zone. I want to be able to run at 180 cadence in my easy heart rate zone for 30 minutes on easy run days at the end of the reset. This is the first week of 10 minute Rock Lobster drills, so this seems doable.
There is a hilly segment that I train on regularly. It’s where I work on getting my legs fully extended and improving my hill economy. My goal for my hill form is to be able to run this segment without going over heart rate zone 4 (170BPM), and without power hiking. This is going to be the toughest goal to hit because these hills are steep. It’ll be the culmination of all of these goals put together.
The only way to make any of this happen is through consistency. There has to be regularity to it, and I HAVE to hold MYSELF accountable for it.