There have been some encouraging results from my running recently, including new parkrun course PBs and times that show things are continuing to move in the right direction. I’m pleased with those, particularly because I remember how much harder simply getting round felt a few months ago. But somewhere among the improving times, I’ve also changed how I approach the run itself, and that is becoming just as valuable as the result at the end.
I’m spending considerably less time looking at my pace. For somebody who enjoys numbers as much as I do, that probably needs a little explanation.
I’m lucky enough to be able to run with my wife. There is a fairly significant difference between our running paces, so our opportunities tend to depend on when she is heading out for an easy run. Her easy run can be quite enough for me, thank you very much. Having her alongside me has helped enormously, though, and some of the most useful things I’ve learnt haven’t come from a training plan or anything particularly technical. They’ve come from listening to her about how she runs.
After my earlier effort on the running track, she paced me through another 5km. Her ability to judge pace is remarkably consistent, with very little intervention from her GPS watch. She settles into the effort and seems to know where she is, while I’ve been far more accustomed to checking a number to tell me whether I’m doing it properly.
As that run progressed, we were getting quicker. By the final kilometre, which turned out to be the fastest of the five, she advised me not to look at my watch. We were finishing strongly, and she wanted me to keep running rather than get distracted by the pace on the screen.
That small piece of advice has stayed with me. I could feel that I was working, but I was still doing it. Knowing the exact pace at that moment wasn’t necessary to keep moving. Letting her take care of the pacing gave me the chance to concentrate on running, and the result was a useful lesson in how much attention I had been giving to something that didn’t always need it.
Since then, I’ve started adopting her way of thinking. Decide what effort the run is supposed to be, run to that effort and see what comes from it. If everything lines up, there may be a good time at the end. If it doesn’t, I can still have completed the run I intended to do without spending the whole thing trying to negotiate with a target pace.
I’ve made a fairly simple change to help with that. On my Garmin Instinct 2X, I now leave the running display on the Zone screen. That gives me a reference for my heart-rate zone alongside how the effort feels, without putting a constantly changing pace figure in front of me. The watch announces the pace for each completed kilometre, so I still know how I’m progressing. I just receive that information once the kilometre is finished, rather than repeatedly checking it while I’m trying to run it.
What surprised me was the difference that made to my head.
I hadn’t really appreciated that watching my pace was causing a small amount of stress. It wasn’t anything dramatic, but it was another thing to assess: am I going quickly enough, have I slowed down, should I push a little harder? Those questions can occupy quite a lot of a run when you keep giving yourself a fresh number to react to. Taking the pace off the screen has quietened some of that down.
My mantra now is to run at the effort I want to aim for and let the pace be what it will be. I still care about the result, and I’m still interested in looking at the data afterwards. During the run, though, I’m finding more room to settle into what I’m doing. There is less checking, less second-guessing and more headspace.
Encouragingly, the times are improving alongside that change. The estimated monthly best 5km figures on my progress page have moved from 35:58 in August to 35:56 in September and 34:25 so far in October. That is around a minute and a half over 5km, or roughly 19 seconds per kilometre, since August. Those figures are estimates calculated from recorded workouts rather than official parkrun results, but they give some context to the improvement I’m feeling.
The parkrun course PBs have provided their own encouragement. There is something satisfying about returning to a course and completing it faster than I have before. It gives me a comparison with my own previous efforts, and another reason to believe the work is adding up. I don’t want every Saturday to become an obligation to beat the last one, but I’m certainly going to enjoy the occasions when it happens.
I wouldn’t attribute all of that improvement to changing a watch screen. My fitness is developing, I’m getting more running behind me, and my weight is continuing to come down. At the latest update, the progress page showed a weight-loss trend of around 1.4% per week across the previous four weeks, with 41% of the overall journey towards my weight goal completed. That is encouraging progress, and carrying less weight is part of the changing picture when I run.
There are also signs of it in places that don’t need a watch or a graph. I’ve been clearing out clothes, getting rid of some and bringing other things back out of the wardrobe. Among them are items that qualify as both old and never worn, which is quite an achievement for clothing. They’ve been waiting for their opportunity, and some are finally getting it.
That has been a satisfying part of the process. The changes become quite tangible when something fits that didn’t before, or when clothes I’ve been relying on are ready to move on. It gives me another way to recognise what is happening, particularly when day-to-day changes are easy to overlook.
I’ll try to do better at keeping the updates coming, because there is plenty happening that I want to record. The course PBs deserve their place, as do the quicker kilometres and the clothes coming back into use. But the thing I particularly wanted to capture this time was how running is beginning to feel with a little less scrutiny.
My wife’s advice in that final kilometre was simple: don’t look at the watch. I’ve taken something useful from it into the runs since. I can choose my effort, pay attention to how I feel and give myself a bit more space to enjoy being out there. The watch will still have plenty of numbers for me when I get home.
