Gettin goin again

and trying to understand discipline

Howdy friends,

my name’s Sam and I’ve gotta problem: it’s been more than six months since I’ve posted here. Originally, the idea behind TRTM was to take the discipline I’m practicing with running and create a narrative framework to transfer that discipline to my writing. Along the way, I was gonna knock out some papers for my master’s degree. Here’s how the running part of the of the program has been going:

It’s taken a while to get back up to the monthly mileage I was hitting before I broke my toe in January ‘21, but the last two months have been great fun. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to increase the training volume early and consistently enough to hit 2021km in ‘21 without goin very hard this month. Fingers crossed that I can be kind to a burgeoning peroneal tendon issue and still hit ca. 400km for December ‘21. Actually, I oughta uncross those fingers and rest a bit. 1000k in 90 days is probably a bit much just yet (have I mentioned that I wanted to write about virtue? This would be a good place to cite Plato on temperance).

So, pseudo-bragging aside, what’s the problem? It turns out that I’ve confused discipline with obsession. It’s easy to do any given thing with great regularity when it becomes an obsession¹ (in this case, I’m merely turning a different shade of green). Discipline, in contrast, seems to be a quality of behavior that is displayed when I regularly perform an activity that is necessary or at least advantageous, particularly when I’d rather be doing something else². It’s practicing self-control by choosing how to use my resources (time, attention, energy), rather than mechanically following the strongest momentary impulse. Which isn’t as straight forward as I’d like it to be, so I wanna take a step away from the abstract and examine a concrete situation where I feel like I can say I practiced discipline.

To start, go here and set the metronome to 180bpm and let it play quietly in the background while you read.

If I wanna find out how fit I am on a given day, I have a 10k loop through the forest with which I’ve become quite familiar. I can display fitness by jogging/running the whole way through. The trick is to find the right speed at any given point, such that I push my limits but don’t over exert myself, which would lead to me needing to break my jog with a walk. There are different metrics to help me measure my effort levels and have a good guess about how hard I can push and still maintain the effort for the whole run: on a track, it’d be pace; on the trail, I could use heartrate; but mostly, there’s a feeling of how hard I’m working and an estimation of how hard I’ll be able to work.

For the loop in question, the moment of truth starts around the middle of the eighth kilometer and ends when I hit the final kilometer on the flats behind the Urmersbacherkopf. Here’s an overview of the loop:

This run was a pretty good one for me. Discipline in this context means coming out the gate and using the speed of the downhill without gassing myself, picking up the pace again after the technically tricky serpentine into the valley and then refusing to slow my running cadence for the climb at the end of the run. Cadence is how I keep myself accountable. Reading and listening around the web, I’ve gathered that I wanna keep my running cadence at around 180 steps per minute. The beat you’ve been hearing for last few minutes is the sound of discipline (you can turn it off now). Here’s what my cadence looked like during that run:

The blue line shows how fast I ran and the pink line shows my cadence. Depending on the kinda footwork I need to do, my cadence fluctuates a bit, but it’s really my speed that varies to match the conditions on the ground. More specifically, it’s stride length³. I’ve recently aquired an additional sensor, so for future runs I’ll be able show how my stride length decreases on climbs. And that’s the nature of the quality that I’m calling discipline: the ability to display constancy in output under varying conditions by moderating different kinds of exertion in the service of some particular goal. And before you get to thinkin that I broke around 5.4km, I have to cross a rickety, rotten old bridge there. Running across it full-tilt would probably leave me, at best, soggy.

When I listen to the sound of the keys while I’m typing here, I wish they’d take on the same beautiful steadiness of a good run. To figure out how to get there, maybe it’s worth thinking about all the work that went into to gettin that pink line stretched flat. The discipline of the moment, as much as I need to romanticize it, is dwarfed by the mass of little decisions that make it possible to hammer out 180 steps a minute for 53 minutes straight. Not rolling and smoking that cigarette, gettin down on the ground for the core workout, going to bed early to rest, gettin up early to squeeze in a few kilometers before work, stretching my calves while I’m standing in a line at the supermarket, each of the nearly 2 million steps I took on all the runs this year leading up to that one, it all adds up.

The Run is always sitting there in my thoughts, occupying my mind. My Youtube algorithms reflect it, my search engine history, Garmin and Strava and Komoot. The obsession’s made my media diet a bit one sided and it’s taken a light case of peroneal tendonitis and couple good friends to remind me that running is how I get places, it’s not where I’m going. If Discipline is a virtue, then she’s the daughter of Temperance and Fortitude. In the next post, I wanna meditate on something my dad told me about temperance and I’m gonna be very disciplined about gettin that out before this year comes to an end. We won’t be having any fireworks here in Germany, so I’ll have to light it up here instead.

Before I close out, you might have noticed that I’ve got some brilliant collages up for The Run’s substack. They are the work of the most excellent and virtuous Jan Peter, an educator, philosopher and artist. With any luck, you’ll get to know him better here through some guest posts on anyhing and everything from aesthetics to sexy AI. Go over to instagram and bandcamp to give him and his collective some of yall’s collective love!

1. Pardon the footnoting, but this got me wondering about the relationship between obsession and possession (in this case, the infernal, pea-soup projectile vomiting kind). A quick and dirty look tells me that they’re both just different ways of sitting, which is amusing since it’s running that’s doing the sitting in my mind.

2. This time I’m footnoting to take you on a tangent about how I think my way through things. I just proposed a rough definition of discipline, but I’m not satisfied, in particular because I haven’t checked any dictionaries (A big thanks here to the inimitable Michael Stubbs for reinforcing my love of dictionaries). It turns out that my intuition differs significantly from the definitions I’m finding online. In particular, the aspect of regularity is an addition which I haven’t found elsewhere. Interestingly for me, discipline as I’m thinking about it can be subsumed nicely under temperance.

3. Appropriately, Germans use the phrase “kürzer treten” (literally: step/kick/tread shorter) to talk about moderating exertion in all sorts of contexts. If your colleague thinks you might be playing with burnout (in the case of “burnout” Germans are happy to use the English word rather than invent their own), then they’ll advise you to “step shorter”. Bonus points if you saw the relation between “treten” and “tread” and immediately went to find the PIE root.