The Backwards Law of Running: Why Pursuing Joy on the Road Leads You Away from It
Advanced 5k Training tips + Is the race worth winning?
TLDR of What You’ll Learn
⏮️ The Backwards Law of Running
🤨 Is the race is worth winning?
⏮️ The Backwards Law of Running: Why Pursuing Joy on the Road Leads You Away from It
You know the feeling — That hunger for a new best time and the general excitement of pushing yourself harder. But somewhere/somehow along the way, that thrill turns into a weird frustration.
Why do you think that is?
Alan Watts might say it’s because you’re chasing too hard. The backward law says that the more you strive for happiness, the less you feel it. You push to beat your best time, and the joy that was once there slowly fades into pressure and expectations.
He also said, “The purposeful (focused) life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless (unfocused/going with the flow) life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
If you don’t know, Alan Wilson Watts was a "philosophical entertainer" known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy to a Western audience. Sounds right up my alley!
I did this by chasing my 15:59 5k a few years back. I have been sitting at low 17 minutes for a few years and thought 40 seconds would be easy. That’s 10 seconds a year, 2.5 seconds per financial quarter. HOW HARD COULD IT BE?! Well, I caught a case of overtraining syndrome (It’s not a virus — I just ran stupidly) and had to back down my training to easy workouts for three months. I then had a conversation with myself that I didn’t really love the 5k distance and took a year off racing.
Mark Manson, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, puts it even more bluntly: “When we care too much about something, we give it power over us.”
We want to feel good on the run, so we focus on the end goal, lagging measure—miles, pace, and finish times. But all this does is make us hyper-aware of how far away that happiness seems. It's ironic, right?
After the year-off of racing, I realized that I still didn’t love the 5k, but I surprisingly missed it. I did a 3k track race and trained differently for that. I had no pressure and was doing more top end high aerobic, speedy stuff in my training. I loved it and was excited to train again. I’m now okay with doing a 5k here and there and am looking forward to pacing a runner I coach to a sub-3-hour marathon in the next few months.
Challenge the notion of finish times and metrics. Run just to see how it feels when no one’s keeping track, not even you.
🏃♂️Advanced 5k Training Tips For Faster Marathon Running
Do you want to run a faster marathon? Great. Maybe you should train for a fast 5k for a year or two beforehand. Sounds crazy? Well… maybe not.
I’ll be doing more content on this accidentally novel approach to my marathon training. I focused on running a faster 5k for years, and now that I’m doing bigger runs, my body is responding extremely well. The not-so-hidden secret? Consistency. Running a fast 5k develops that consistency muscle, allowing you to run a faster marathon later.
Whether you’ve just done your first or you’re a serious athlete looking to shave a few seconds off your 5k PR, this episode tells you about advanced 5k training and what you need to do to run that 5k distance faster.
🤨 Is The Race Worth Winning?
Before you worry about how to win the race, figure out whether the race is worth winning.
Not a pro that wins races? Replace “winning” with “finishing.”
Most of us have been there - eight weeks into a sixteen-week training block asking ourselves, “Why the hell did I sign up for this?”. I see the memes online about it, so it’s got to be true.
But why do we go, “Why did we sign up for this?”. I think the answer lies in that before we decide to commit to something large, we don’t take enough time to asses if this gets us to our bigger goals. It’s easy to say yes to something but much harder to say no.
Here’s a fun paradox I use as a framework for small and large decisions:
Say yes to something — say no to everything else.
Say no to something — say yes to everything else.