Consistently Irregular

secrets of a fitfluencer?

It’s late summer - time for some reruns! This is the first essay I posted on Substack way before many of you were subscribers. It’s also one of my favorites. As I do my own consistently irregular trail run training this summer ( semi hoping to do a trail half marathon in October??) I am happily rereading my own words for inspiration - dare I say #fitspo 🤔

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I love to call bullshit on people who say they do the same thing, every day, no matter what.

This is a big wellness thing - this 'every day' thing. Yoga every day, running every day, water with lemon every day, cold showers every day. You name it, some wellness person swears that their entire life comes down to this magical regularity. I literally just don't believe it. Life is too complicated, full, and (hopefully) exciting to permit 'every day'. You are correct, I'm saying they are lying (or are very boring people).

Instead I have found that the more 'advanced' a person is, the less dogmatic they become. The more skilled, the less they rely on structure. Jazz, after all, is being so highly competent at your instrument that you can literally improvise in the moment and create beautiful music. That is mastery. The rest is just practice (and maybe being a bit uptight).

This suggests that a lot of these 'every day' people are not really masters at anything. I'm not saying their achievements aren't laudable. 'Every day' is how you get good at lots of stuff, from marathons to crochet, many standing ovations have been earned on the back of 'every day' hard work. But mastery takes resilience. Mastery requires imagination. Mastery depends on experiencing being down and coming back up. Mastery is not simply a pre-programmed week of 6AM alarms.

I think 'every day people' are just really good at being regular.

An injury or illness to an 'every day' person can be devastating. The routine is revealed to be all about, well, the routine. Not about meditating, not about craft, but about order. Without it, there is no resilience. There was no depth, just adherence to repetition. Throw the repetition off and out the window with it goes the skill it was linked to. (this is also a good reason to stop tracking every single thing you do - what exactly is that measuring but sameness?? is endless sameness a goal?)

Currently I am obsessed with Courtney Dauwalter. She is a 38yr old ultra marathon runner who just ran three 100 mile races within about a month of each other and won ALL OF THEM. Also she beats all the men which is a big reason I'm obsessed. She's on the fore front of research coming out that female athletes, particularly runners, get BETTER with age and that the longer the distance the more the gender performance gap closes. She beats the dudes not just by minutes but hours if not days. Very exciting.

She also has no training plan and no special diet. She is my hero.

​In a recent interview she said she plans each of her runs by checking in with how she's feeling mentally and physically then laces up with a very loose idea of how long and how far she'll go. As she runs she lets herself be taken by the moment, logging more or less miles, up or down trails, fast or easy depending on whatever comes up along the way.

Courtney seems to be running Jazz. She is un-followable. You can't do her running routine, you can't copy her diet. You can't try to be like her except, and herein is the magic, by being yourself. She inspires me to listen to my own mind and body and 'lace-up' as I see fit. Today that meant laying in bed, down with the latest Covid booster, reading about 300 of these 600 scary story posts. Thursday it was running hill repeats on the sandy beach in front of my Coney Island building. Courtney lets me know its ok for me to be me, and that whatever that looks like, as long as I'm listening to my body and mind, it'll get me where I want to go.

During the races I ran this summer I was inspired by what Courtney says she tells herself during her races ' it's gonna hurt and then it's gonna hurt more.' I would repeat that to myself when the miles started to feel like suffering. There's a wonderful simplicity to that statement. It helped me to commit to what was, and not wish it to be anything else. With this little mantra of cold-hard-truth, the miles lost the existential suffering of wishing things were different. I didn't judge my experience or shame my feelings. I was just hurting and that was it. The miles would pass and I'd cross the finish line. The sensation of having overcome a challenge would spur me to sign up for another and another, the cycle repeating, the miles coming and going, some harder some easier.

This not my favorite season. I am part of the small minority that does not like fall. On top of that I am overstretched and all together too busy. Some times being a solo business owner just means being in the weeds trying to get everything done. I'm repeating to myself, this is just a challenging time, a building time, not an exciting, achieving time. It doesn't have the same easy rhythm of 'its gonna hurt and then hurt more', but the effect is the same. Let go of the judgement. Let go of the existential dread. I'm just gonna be really busy. I'm just not going to be able to focus like I would like. That is just life sometimes. This is the race. One foot in front of the other. The practice is how we respond; uphill or down, hard or easy.

Today I took a gentle pace, tomorrow, who knows? I'll check in with my mind and body and lace up. I'll step out hoping I too, can run Jazz. With no regular, this my 'every day' practice. With no routine, the only thing I can truly be the master of, is myself. This is where we run our races, this is where we play our music, not in repetition, but in connection, to ourselves.

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