3 min readThere are two kinds of runners, and you can tell them apart even when they’re not running. There are those who wear their warmest coat on the first cold day of fall. And there are those who wait for the depths of winter to break out the heavy artillery.
I’m firmly in the latter camp. If you get all bundled up for Antarctica just because the temperature dips below freezing, you’ve played all of your cards—you have no more moves left for when things get really tough. I wear the lightest coat I can stand for as long as possible, then move to my next warmest one until it’s undeniably too flimsy for conditions, and continue through my closet as weather worsens. Following this logic has more than once led to not wearing my heaviest coat during a Maine winter.
In their running lives, people who wear a heavy coat on early brisk days are likely to listen to music or otherwise supplement the experience as soon as they get on a treadmill. Idiots like me hold off on diversions for as long as possible.
I call these two types of runners “soothers” and “seers.” Soothers seek to be as comfortable as possible in the present. They have music or other entertainment cued for the first minute of their treadmill time, as they do on long drives or flights. They often dress more appropriately for the first 15 minutes of a run than the final mile. They can also struggle to get themselves out the door to run or to regularly do supplementary exercises to help their running.
I’m a seer. We go through life seeing ourselves in the future and considering how decisions we make in the present will affect us later. As children, we would have excelled at the infamous marshmallow test. As adults, we imagine ourselves 30 minutes into a 90-minute treadmill run. We see ourselves already sighing about the remaining time. So we think, “If I hold off on music until then, I have something to look forward to. At the start I can deal with just listening to my footsteps. Then I can start counting down to the 30-minute mark. Then I get to hear some of my favorite songs. Six of them will get me to an hour. Then I’ll have only 30 minutes to go.”
These anticipatory mental machinations lessen the chance of later crises, or at least regrets. We seers can easily picture ourselves going to bed and being mad at ourselves for having blown off a run. So we tend to make it happen. The same goes for things like pushing ourselves as hard in solo workouts as we would with a group and regularly doing strength training. We view doing what we know we “should” do now as gifts to our future selves.
I’m not saying that a seer is more of a runner than a soother. My soother friends tell me that my penchant for pushing myself shows that I’m highly disciplined. Truth is, I’m a wimp. Yes, like most seers, I’m highly goal-oriented. But babying myself via chunking shouldn’t be necessary to get through routine daily activities. A really tough person would just hop on the treadmill and get ’er done.
Also, the soothers I know are generally happier people than seers. They’re certainly better at living in the moment. Life is hard enough. Why not be comfy now and deal with the next hour’s challenges when they arise?
As with so much of running, there’s no best way. The key is to figure out what makes you tick and to act accordingly.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go store my parka until next February.
