Over the last few years the routine has either been 5-a-side once a week, or for a few months at the end of 2019 there were ~3 runs per week thrown in too (using Couch to 5k, which was great, until I got to 5K / 25-30 mins of continuous running, got bored and stopped).

A quick word about running, and boredom

A few months into my first foray into running (Couch to 5k in late 2019), once I was consistently reaching 5K, I found that the novelty wore off, the runs still felt pretty gruelling, and I quickly found I didn’t really enjoy it.

I was bored.

In fact the only part I enjoyed, that kept me going for those few months, was the feeling of achievement.

I wasn’t interested in the physical feeling of running itself, or in anything about my surroundings: in fact I generally tried to avoid these by listening to music, or running at the gym so I could use the TV as distraction, or thinking about anything other than what I was doing.

Turns out, the novelty + the feeling of achievement was just enough to keep me going for a few months. The achievement alone wasn’t.

What’s interesting is as I’ve been learning more about how the mind works, I don’t get routinely bored nearly as much. It turns out, boredom isn’t some unavoidable default state when nothing blatantly stimulating is happening.

So, what is it? (Or more generally, what is any negative feeling?) In short: you receive information about the current environment through your senses → that information enters your mind which heavily filters and distorts it based on years of preconditioning → thoughts about what you’re experiencing get formed, based on the result of the filtering; thoughts like “this is boring”, “we’ve seen this before” → those thoughts drive the feeling: in this case, restlessness and boredom.

By using mindfulness to turn down the dial on that filtering stage, the things around you can suddenly become immensely and spectacularly and wondrously not-boring.

With that new mindset in place, I gave running another try.

Rather than avoiding what’s physically going on during the run, I’ve started using running as practice at keeping the mind focused on the present moment.

I don’t listen to music: my primary focus will be on the step I’m currently taking or on my breathing, and my peripheral focus will be on my surrounding environment.

Just observing, without judging it: without giving any serious attention to any thoughts that inevitably jump into my head uninvited about how we’ve seen this same route before, how nothing about it is interesting, what I have to do for the rest of the day, and so on.

When those thoughts arise I notice them, smile at the marvel of how they show up seemingly out of nowhere, and bring my attention back to what’s going on.

Turns out if you can ‘just’ quiet that voice, suddenly everything around you is infinitely more interesting. I wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it.

All that to say: I like running now.

Ramping up my routine

With that newfound superpower, I was able to start thinking about what I’d actually like to focus my time on, without the cognitive biases and assumptions about what I don’t have any interest in.

And I quickly saw appeal in strength training.

It’s something positive to focus on, it’s good for the body, I believe it could really improve my posture (which itself has many positive knock-on effects beyond just being good for the body).

My initial plan, which I will evolve over time, is:

Routine

Mo: Strength
Tu: 5-a-side
We: Strength
Th: Run
Fr: Strength
Sa: Run
Su: Rest (pilates?)

Strength = warm up: jog to the gym and 1k on rowing machine; then work upper and lower body on the resistance machines (3x 10 reps on each), walk back

Run = 28 min run with 5 min walk either side; increasing to 30 min run once I’ve done 2 more 28

The part I haven’t decided yet: there’s a quick morning body workout a friend sent me that I would like to incorporate, but I’m not certain whether it’s sensible to do that every day before/after the gym/run, or whether (as I’m reading online) those muscles need a day in between to rest in which case I’d include it just on gym days. TBC.

(TODO: write up my thoughts on self-discipline re stricter morning routine. I’d removed a lot of it from my life over the years, running own business with flexible hours etc, giving me more ‘freedom’ - this experiment in intentionally bringing some discipline back in and the pros/cons of that will be interesting)