Running always made me feel good, but only after I was done. The running part itself was painful and I couldn’t wait for it to end. Even the run-up to the running was hard because I knew what was coming. So I enjoyed running after the fact but not during or before, kind of like bad tasting medicine.
This changed a few years ago when I got back into it. My days were very hectic at the time with work and a young son and I needed something of my own to bring more balance to my life and hopefully reduce stress too. On a whim I signed up for a half marathon six months in the future and started going for runs on Saturday mornings. The big shift this time was that I decided at the outset to run slow. I was only going to go as fast as I felt comfortable going. In other words, I was not going to push myself to go fast. I had no goal for speed or for time, but only to finish whatever distance I set out to complete on that particular day no matter how long it took.
I also need to mention here that six weeks before I signed up for that half marathon my wife and I had a stillborn child. I was devastated and confused. I felt directionless. I wanted so badly to feel some purpose. The thought of finishing a half marathon in honor of my daughter who passed away gave me that. So did the long practice runs in the dead of winter as the wind whipped and I chugged along through the snow with music blasting through my headphones. Those slow runs along the gorge were beautiful in and of themselves, and I felt like a bit of a badass just getting out in the cold and braving the elements. It felt like me against the world, and I was holding my own.
Then as the runs became longer I started going all the way to Niagara Falls and back. Four miles into the run I’d get to the top of a small hill and see the falls before me gushing endlessly over the brink, both ferocious and stunningly beautiful, and I’d feel for an instant that I understood the meaning of life as the runner’s high coursed through my veins. It was a spiritual experience that I doubt I could ever explain with words alone.
The simple change of going slow actually changed everything. I went from hating the runs to loving the runs, and I learned once again that going slow is oftentimes the key to doing something consistently, or well, or enjoyably, or in this case all of the above.
I finished the half marathon a few months later, definitely not as fast as I would have had I trained harder or trained for speed, but who cares? I crossed the finish line with my son cheering me on. A couple miles from the end I was running out of gas but then I thought of my daughter and found new strength to keep going. It was amazing, heart warming, life affirming. I felt hopeful about the future, even though life is so hard and filled with suffering. No matter what’s going on, there are always opportunities to transcend the pain and connect with the world around us.
I ran several more half marathons over the next few years and it became clearer and clearer that my time hardly meant anything to me. The thing that had always ruined my runs I now understood to be unimportant. What mattered was spending some alone time listening to music, getting my blood pumping, being outside, experiencing the stark, dark beauty of our winter weather. What mattered was just slowly and deliberately doing the thing I used to hate, because once you strip away the unpleasantness of pushing yourself to the limit it’s actually a lot of fun.
When you do something there’s no requirement that you give it your all. And since you have only so much energy, giving your all to any one thing means you won’t have that energy for something else. We need to be selective here because we should give our full energy and attention only to what’s truly important in our lives. If we spend too much energy on other stuff then we won’t have enough left over to do what our hearts are telling us.
Before I keep going I want to pause briefly to acknowledge that there are plenty of things in life that aren’t fun but are important and even necessary. We all have to suck it up in those situations and do what needs to be done. But most things aren’t like that, and there’s so much joy to be lost by taking things too seriously or putting too much pressure on them.
And sometimes going slow is how you get the best results. I’m thinking quality here, not speed, and specifically I’m thinking about my grilled, slow-cooked chicken, which we affectionately call “crispy chicken” in my house, and which simply put is absolutely amazing and the tastiest chicken I’ve ever had.
Cooking over high heat will get the chicken done faster so you can put it in your mouth sooner, but it won’t have the perfectly moist and tender meat with the delightfully crispy skin. Patience will get you perfection in this case, and it’s worth it to take the extra forty minutes. If you don’t you’re denying yourself something extraordinary.
And beyond that, even though it takes more time it takes hardly any effort at all. You just have to put the chicken on the grill earlier and let it sit there as the low heat does what it does best. On high heat you need to watch things closely, making sure the fire isn’t too strong, flipping the chicken now and again. Slow cooking is actually less involved as time becomes a meaningful ingredient. Now I just get out of the way as “low and slow” works its magic.
There are lots and lots of other things in life that are better done slow, including pretty much every long term project we ever take on. Mountains are climbed one step at a time, novels are written one sentence at a time, houses are built with single nails and wooden boards.
There’s no reason these projects can’t be done in little chunks instead of marathon sessions, and oftentimes that’s the only way they can get done at all. Sometimes you need to half-ass something until you can whole-ass it, you need to build momentum, you need to prove the case for devoting the requisite time to finish the job.
It’s also critical that you don’t judge yourself too harshly if progress comes slower than you’d like. When I started baking bread, I had to go through a long process of baking lots of bad loaves until I learned enough to start baking good loaves consistently. Part of going slow is giving myself the time to learn the intricacies, to steadily develop my skills, to make mistakes and learn how to account for them in advance next time around. If I create an expectation that I need to do something extremely well the first time I do it then I’m almost definitely going to disappoint myself and might not want to try again in the future. But if I leave things open ended, if my goal is to just bake a loaf and learn about the process, or to get a feel for the dough, then I’ll be focused on taking a step forward, on making progress, and I won’t get bent out of shape if my bread doesn’t taste like it was bought fresh from a French bakery.
Being a tortoise is much better than being a hare, at least from the way I look at things. And we all know that the tortoise wins the race sometimes. But even if a tortoise loses, they still enjoy their time more as they soak it all in, one step at a time, purposefully and slowly moving forward.