#48: Stop trying to run a marathon at sprint pace
Do you end every day feeling guilty and ashamed because you haven't done enough? It wouldn't have killed you to send just one more email, or spend just 30 more minutes on your writing, right? Well, sure, you could go flat out. But you wouldn't last long if you did. You need to pace yourself, which means you definitely shouldn't be dialling the effort up to 11 on a daily basis. Your mistake is expecting yourself to sprint for the whole marathon - and that's just bonkers. Crack out the headphones and let your imperfect friend here talk some sense into you.
Episode transcript:
I know you think you’re not doing enough. Here’s why you’re wrong.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, friends. Are you working hard enough? Have you done enough writing today? Are you sure you couldn’t have answered one more email before making that last cuppa? Did you shut your laptop yesterday having checked everything off your task list, and if so, are you sure you couldn’t have added a couple more items to it? If these questions are causing you to break out in a cold sweat, this episode is for you. There are lots of things that most of my coaching clients have in common, and a steadfast conviction that they’re not doing enough is easily in the top five, if not top of the list. They’ve seen the motivational posters reassuring them that they’re enough, and they know about work/life balance and self-care and all that sort of stuff. But none of that really matters because they have evidence that they should be doing more. Other people are doing more, after all - they’re writing more, publishing more, spending longer at their desk, and all the rest of it. Even ignoring other people, these clients of mine sometimes point out that there’s more they could be doing by the standards they’ve set themselves previously: they know they’re capable of knuckling down and working harder and longer, because they’ve done it before. I’m guilty of this one myself. Have I told you this story before? Decades ago, when I was a Masters student, I had to write 4 x 4000-word essays over the Christmas break. The deadline for the essays was in the first week of the new term in January. There was a 4-week break between the terms, and in that time I wrote one essay a week. I got into a routine with it, and it was almost effortless. I got top marks for all of them. One of them got published. And I’ve been haunted by that ever since, because I never again managed such a consistent period of flow and focus. I’ve tried and failed to channel that energy (or whatever it was) plenty of times. I’ve told myself, ‘I should be able to get this thing done, because I did it back then’ and ‘Obviously I could be doing more, because there was that time all those years ago when I was doing more’. There you are: evidence. Fuck your motivational posters and your affirmations, because my ‘I’m not doing enough’ isn’t just my deranged inner critic speaking. It’s a cold, hard fact, complete with citations. Or so I used to think.
I no longer judge myself by the standard I set for myself back when I was a Masters student, and it’s not because my positive self-affirmations have curtained off that super productive part of my history. It’s because I’ve realised that it’s simply not appropriate to expect myself to work like that. Why not? Well, because - and you know how much I enjoy running metaphors - that 4-week period of flat-out writing when I was a student was a sprint. What I’m doing now is a marathon. Longer than a marathon, actually. Longer than an ultramarathon, even. It’s my career, a race with no end in sight at all. Ignoring that detail, the essence of why it was inappropriate for me to expect myself to work at the pace I set over the Christmas break while I was doing my Masters is that it’s equivalent to expecting myself to run a marathon at sprint pace. You’re probably doing that too, and it’s ridiculous.
Why is it ridiculous? Let’s think about that for a moment. You probably know already that the world record for the men’s 100-metres was set in 2009 by the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who ran it in 9.58 seconds. That’s a pace per kilometre of 1 minute and 36 seconds. On the other hand, on 25th September this year, the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge broke the world record time for a marathon, when he ran the Berlin marathon in 2 hours, 1 minute, and 9 seconds. The marathon distance is 42.195 kilometres, which makes Kipchoge’s average pace over the course of the race 2 minutes and 52 seconds per kilometre. Now, what Kipchoge did in September was astonishing. Everyone was saying so. You probably caught wind of it even if you aren’t into athletics. But here’s something that nobody was saying. Nobody was saying, meh, Kipchoge’s pace of 2 minutes 52 seconds per kilometre is rubbish compared to Bolt’s pace of 1 minute 36 seconds. Is that the best he could do? Why wasn’t Kipchoge doing more? What a failure. What a half-arsed loser. And why was nobody saying that? Well, because it would be frankly bonkers to compare the fastest sprinter against the fastest marathoner on the basis of the pace alone - at least, it would be bonkers if you expected that by doing so you’re going to come up with any useful insight into how Bolt and Kipchoge compare as athletes. It would be bonkers to compare them while completely disregarding what sort of race they were competing in. I mean, yeah, they were both competing in running events, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Kipchoge didn’t have to concern himself with the sort of explosive power that the best sprinters develop. And Bolt didn’t need to worry about endurance, the way marathon runners do. If you encountered anyone who seriously claimed that Bolt was the better athlete simply because his pace in his fastest race was almost double that of Kipchoge’s, you’d laugh them out of the room.
And yet, so often, we make exactly that sort of comparison involving ourselves and how hard we work without even cracking a smile. I certainly did. I thought that the pace I set during those 4 weeks of intense work back in my masters days was one that I ought to be able to keep up for an entire career - otherwise I was a lazy underachiever. I have clients who say things like, ‘I managed to put in x number of hours during the final days before I submitted my thesis, or in the run up to a grant application deadline, or on the night before a conference presentation, so why can’t I do it on normal days?’ And that’s not how it works at all. Let’s think for a moment about that feeling that so many of us have of ‘I could be doing more’. You shut your laptop at 6pm on a day when you don’t have any super pressing deadlines coming up, and you start thinking about dinner with a vague sense of guilt and shame, because would it have killed you to answer one more email, or put in an extra 30 minutes? Well, no, it wouldn’t have killed you. But we’re not just talking about one evening, are we? We’re talking about your entire career. And from that perspective, it’s far from clear whether pushing yourself that little bit further on a daily basis is a great idea. Would it have killed Kipchoge to dig a little deeper and run a little faster during mile 2, or mile 5, or mile 15? Probably not. But if he had done that, would he have been able to keep it up after mile 20? Would he even have finished, let alone finished in the time that he did? I don’t know, but maybe not. Long-distance running isn’t about speed, after all. It’s about finding a sweet spot between going fast and going long. It’s definitely not about going as fast as you possibly can at every stage of the race - at least, not if you want to finish or do well.
But, actually, if we’re comparing how hard you work to running, marathons are actually pretty short, at least if we’re thinking about your entire career. Marathons are one-off events, in the sense that they’re things that you train for and then do your best at and then afterwards you have a rest before you start thinking about whether you might like to do another one. They’re events where, typically, you decide before you start what your expectations are of yourself: do you want to finish in a certain time, or run consistently at a certain pace, or do the entire thing while dressed as capybara? If you’re willing to roll with me on this metaphor, that makes them kind of like doing a degree: a feat of endurance, sure, but still a single project with an end goal that remains pretty consistent throughout. Your career, on the other hand, isn’t necessarily like that. What we expect of ourselves and our careers develops and evolves throughout. You might start out with a certain career goal in your twenties, and over time as you change and grow, what you want from your career changes too. It might not be clear at all what working at a particular pace means over the course of a career. You might start out intent on climbing the career ladder to the top, and then later on decide that that’s not for you, and what’s more important now is work/life balance or making a difference or advocating for junior colleagues or some other thing that isn’t easily quantifiable or comparable. But even if your career ambitions remain pretty consistent throughout, it’s really not clear what working at an acceptable pace would involve. The question, ‘How do I best pace myself?’ has different answers depending on how long-term we’re looking. Take ultramarathons, which can be 50 kilometres, or 100 kilometres, or 100 miles, or even more. Like marathons, they’re feats of endurance, but if you talk to ultramarathoners about how they approach them, you find that the psychological challenge is different. The question ‘How do I complete this race without going mad?’ becomes relevant in a way that it isn’t even for a marathon. Ultramarathoners do things like stop for breaks, sit down, have a meal, have a sleep. They might run part of the race and walk other parts. That’s less common with marathon runners, and it’s unheard of with 100-metre sprinters. Are ultramarathoners who stop for a sit down or a sleep being lazy? Well, I don’t know, what would be an appropriate way to go about answering that question? Because what definitely isn’t an appropriate way to answer it is by comparing the way they approach their ultramarathon with the way sprinters approach their races.
What does all this mean for you and your career or whatever project it is that you’re invested in? One thing it means is that there might be value for you in reflecting on whether what you’re working on is more like a sprint or a marathon, or even an ultramarathon. Are you working towards an important deadline this week? If so, then sure, you can probably afford to go all-out, just as long as you take time to rest and recover afterwards. But if you’re working on something longer term, you can’t do that. You can’t run your marathon at sprint pace. You have to find a pace that you can sustain for the duration. That means that, on any one day, you could be doing more. You could put in an extra hour here, or answer another email there. Over the longer term, that’s what healthy progress is supposed to look like, because it’s about endurance. You need to hold back today so that you can keep going tomorrow, and next week, and next month. And if you’re working on something very long term or with no definite end in sight, then - like the ultramarathoner - you need to factor in the psychological challenge of getting through it. That might mean slowing to a walk, or stopping for a break. So, go ahead and spend the odd day in bed with a novel, or choose Netflix over working on your essay. And accept that you’ll probably never be able to say to yourself, with conviction, ‘This is the best thing for me to be doing in this moment’. The longer the race, the less of an exact science it is to find the right balance between pace and endurance. Could you have put in a bit more effort climbing that hill at mile 97? Maybe. Does it matter? Probably not. Is beating yourself up about whether you made the right call likely to be helpful? Almost certainly not, but that’s just what we do - and learning how to do it just a little bit less is a long game, too. Take care, everyone.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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