How To Do It All By Not Trying To Do It All At Once

And the one essential tool I have now I didn't when I set my marathon PR back in 2013

Photo by Joshua Kettle on Unsplash

“I am old, Gandalf. I don't look it, but I am beginning to feel it in my heart of hearts. Well-preserved indeed! Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” This is how Bilbo feels at the start of the first volume of the Lord of the Rings.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks empathizing. The high mileage, combined with the increasing workout intensity, slotted in amongst a hectic work schedule, a flurry of business events, a late-night gig and plenty of family commitments, shone a bright light onto my various priorities and forced me to make choices.

I did manage to keep to my training schedule, work, make it to our events, feed the kids, get them to school, and play the gig.

I did not write anything here for the last two weeks. I let my French studies slip. I was trying to begin each morning by reading poetry (Rilke) with my coffee. Let that go. Instead chose mindlessness. Mindfully.

It was an interesting exercise in attempting to be absolutely present to the things I was choosing, and the people I was with, and acknowledging that I simply didn’t have the capacity for other things — even when I might arguably have the time.

A brain has a finite amount of discipline, attention, and processing power in a given day. I found myself hitting mine. For example, I’d developed what I think was a useful, efficient habit of spending the first 30 minutes of any run studying French. The last two weeks I simply had to let it go. Not for time reasons: I was still doing the runs so the 30 minutes was there and then some. But I’d hit the threshold on discipline and focus. It was either run or study French. Not both.

This Is Major Tom To Ground Control

An image popped into my head at some point last week: an astronaut running around shutting down all non-vital systems on his ship so it would have enough juice left to get him home. That’s what I was doing. The big challenge is deciding what are vital systems and what aren’t. Family. Work. Prayer and Meditation. Training for the Race. All vital. What can I power down, or put on half-power, or something, for a few weeks until the taper? Learning new music. French. Intellectually challenging reading. Non-essential digital input (scrolling). Etc. It’s not about saving time. It’s about saving brain energy. And it’s not about giving these things up entirely, it’s about acknowledging seasons. About acknowledging it’s okay to let some things move along more slowly than others.

The Cure for Fragmented

We all have pretty full plates these days. And at least for me, if I try and imagine all the things I need to do, all at once, I feel overwhelmed, fragmented, splintered into spiritual shards and strewn out into the cold blackness of an eternal void.

Without changing the number of things that must be done by a single iota, I’ve found I can relieve that overwhelmed, fragmented feeling by giving my attention in full to one thing. Whatever it is that I’m working on. Hopefully, it’s one of the essentials, but even if it’s not, giving all of one’s attention to one thing does something amazing to the brain. Becoming myopic allows you, counterintuitively, to see all things more clearly, and in context. And in their proper sizes and importance relative to an entire lifetime.

The One Thing

Which brings me to the essential tool I didn’t have when I set my marathon PR back in 2013, when I was 42 years old, which I think is part of the reason I might be able to beat that time in 2024, at 53, on 60 miles a week instead of 70.

The one thing (and I’m hearing not the popular Gary Keller book here, but Jack Pallance as Curly in City Slickers), is meditation. Twelve minutes or more, five days a week or more, of mindfulness meditation, as prescribed by Amishi Jha in her book Peak Mind.

I won’t get into the science, or a long discussion on meditation here. I’ll just note that it had a more profound effect on my focus, my mood and my general mental state than anything I’ve tried over a lifetime of significantly-less-than-splendid mental states; with the exception of running.

Running and meditation combined leave me, at 53, and under no less pressure than I’ve been at any other time in the last 30 years or so, but in the best mental condition I’ve ever been in. Sure, I still get overwhelmed, anxious, have moments that feel like I’m about to freak the fuck out, but my mind feels more limber somehow, and reorients from those times so far more quickly than it used to. And that shows up in all of the arenas of my life, including running.

Odds and Ends, And How’s The Training Going?

The training itself is going well. I’ve been at about 60 miles the past three weeks. Body feels good. Limber. The race is five weeks from tomorrow and today I ran 18 miles with 15 miles at 6:40 pace on the treadmill, with the baseline incline set at 1 and adjusted as I went to match the course hill profile. I won’t aim to run the race at 6:40, but probably around 6:46 or 6:47, but beyond incline, I feel like I need to compensate for the easy-factor of the treadmill. I did it on the treadmill because there were super high winds this morning and I wanted time at pace, not redlining into a headwind because I’m too stubborn to slow down and adjust for conditions. The pace miles were comfortably hard and I finished with plenty in the tank. Encouraging. I consider this workout, a key fitness test.

The race itself will not be Providence! They canceled it last week. We’d gotten emails a month or two ago saying the course would be changing — then nothing. They continued to promote the race, but no more word on the course. I was getting nervous because even if they announced a new course, there was no guarantee it would be as runnable. And I’m trying for a time, here. I had lunch with a race director friend a few weeks ago and he said he suspected it was going to be canceled. I took the hint and transferred my registration to the Maine Coast Marathon on the same day, an easy drive from here in Manchester. Good thing I did, because that race was sold out about five minutes after the Providence cancelation was announced. I was grateful to my friend for his insight…

Onward…