I Hate Running and You Can Too

1. Start Small, Start Now

Alex Honnold is famous for climbing the sheer face of Yosemite's 3,000-foot El Capitan without a rope. He is significantly less famous for gently, perhaps even unintentionally, nudging his mother, Dierdre Wolownick, from running zero miles per week at age fifty-five to becoming a marathon runner. In her memoir, The Sharp End of Life, Wolownick recalls her evening walk spontaneously turning into a mile-long run with the family dog. She arrived home to tell her son about it. He shrugged and said, "Cool. If you can do one, you can do one and a half." A few nights later, after she reported to Alex that she and the dog had just run a mile and a half, he responded: "Cool. If you can do a mile and a half, you can do two."

After progressing to 2 miles, then 3, she ran her first 10K in jeans and a flannel shirt. Just over a year later, after training for twenty weeks, she ran her first marathon. Wolownick, with no intention to run really long distances in her fifties, started small and eventually went big.

More than half a million people in the United States finish a marathon each year. Almost none of those people do it without running a bunch of miles in the months beforehand. At some point, every person was running zero miles per week. And then they ran one mile a few times, and eventually decided they could run a mile and a half. And so on. A long race, whether your definition of "long" is 6.2 miles or 100 miles, starts with running (or walking) a much shorter distance, one time. And then doing it again. And again. You do a small thing once, twice, three times, and you start stacking those small things on top of one another, or depositing them in a metaphorical account, and they start to add up.

Human beings generally suck at keeping New Year's resolutions because we often make them too big and too abrupt, and after a week or so, we hit a bump in the road, get discouraged, and abandon our big new change altogether. We find that our extreme new diet is hard to stick with, or our new exercise routine increases our time at the gym 1,000 percent over the previous year, or that as it turns out, eating raw kale three times a day, seven days a week, just isn't bringing us happiness after all. "New year, new you" is a ridiculous, almost always unattainable concept (unless you're in the FBI's Witness Protection Program, in which case you have reason to be way more optimistic about the idea of a 100 percent "new you"). "New year, gradually improving you" is way more realistic—and it allows you to slowly grow into something and keep going, as opposed to taking on a difficult, complete transformation, and giving up after a few weeks.

So wherever you're starting on your progression to running some irrational distance, whether it's 6 miles or 26.2 miles, start with something rational. As Leo Babauta, creator of the Zen Habits blog, puts it, "Make it so easy you can't say no."

2. Walking Is Running

In preparing to run my first marathon in 2006, I made a promise to myself: No matter what, I would run every step of the race. It didn't have to be fast, but I wanted to get to the finish line knowing I had actually "run a marathon."

And I stuck with it. Until mile 5, when I tried to jog through a water station, grab a 6-ounce cup of water, and drink it without breaking my stride. About half of the water spilled onto my face and down my shirt. I amended my strategy: I would run every step of the race, except when drinking cups of water and/or sports drinks, which were served every 5 miles.

From then on, I ran every step of the race, except for the 100 feet or so when I was grabbing a cup of water from an aid station. This strategy worked a lot better than my original plan, as I was able to actually consume fluids instead of dumping them onto my shirt, where they could not be absorbed into my body.

About 3 miles from the end of the course, when everyone in the race had spread out and I was running mostly alone and wondering if the finish line would ever appear, a runner passed me. About 150 feet ahead of me, she stopped jogging and slowed to a walk. I caught up to her and passed her. A few hundred feet later, she passed me again, and a while later, slowed to a walk again. We continued this pattern for a while. She was walking and running, and I was still determined to run the whole thing.

Who was right? Both of us. More than a decade later, I can't remember if she finished ahead of me, or if I finished ahead of her. How much either of us walked or ran didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now.

I didn't know it at the time, but walking is a big part of a lot of people's marathon strategies. They run three minutes, then walk one minute, then repeat. Or they run four minutes, then walk one minute, then repeat. Or they run one minute, walk the next minute, and continue until they're done with the race, or some other version of this strategy, which was popularized by Jeff Galloway, Olympian, coach, and author, and has since been used by thousands of runners.