If it's suffering, you're pushing too hard. I think that's the challenging thing for beginners to understand. At worst you should be bored, most days. You don't really need to push into uncomfortable territory until you've got some regular volume and want to improve race performance.

Every day it gets a bit easier. But that's the key. You have to do it every day.

- weird monkey from Bojack Horseman, paraphrased through my memory

The cheat code is to substitute it with something like rollerblading. But you'll need to practice it ~3x longer each time, and aint' nobody on HN got time for that.

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Consider picking up another language! I've found YA audiobooks (right now, Harry Potter) in my secondary language to be wonderful. It's interesting and engaging enough that I enjoy listening, and I don't feel like I need to "do" anything like take notes or whatever, because I know just the exposure is beneficial in and of itself.

Have you tried other forms of cardio?

Running never did it for me, I just couldn't stick to it, was always miserable and bored, etc. My main focus is strength training, but for my cardio cycling is what brings me joy. I would dread going for a run, but I excitedly look forward to my next bike ride.

Cycling, swimming, hiking, rowing, even dance will all get you the same benefits so if you're bored doing one, try something else - the important thing is to get moving, the specifics of the activity doesn't matter.

If you really want to get into running, and you have some green spaces or trails near you, give trail running a try. It's the one form of running I sort of enjoy - I get so bored on a treadmill or just in my neighborhood, but I love being out in the woods.

I

   - load chess problems (look at a diagram before getting out the door) and try to solve it while running. Sometimes, I solve it the first 5min, sometimes I get frustrated because it turns out to be too difficult.

   - practice polyrhythms. you have a dominant cadence while running, now impose  others on top of it.

My solution to getting bored is to run harder. Zone 4 heart rate is really the sweet spot for me. It's intense enough that I don't get bored - it's like all the energy that would typically make my mind look for stimulation gets sucked up and directed towards running instead. But, critically, it isn't that hard to sustain - I can do 30-40 minutes of Zone 4 and, while it isn't exactly a walk in the park, it's infinitely psychologically easier than full-out sprints.

Be careful to avoid injury, however. I wouldn't recommend this until you've already got a solid running base of miles to build upon.

It certainly sounds like you've tried a lot. One approach could be to (and I'm not being facetious) cultivate a mindfulness-in-boredom practice. Seriously. I'm not saying you will initially get onto the treadmill thinking "Boy, I can't wait to be bored." However, over time you might start to crave that time in your head. Alternatively (if that sounds absolutely unappealing), you might try another type of exercise. Running definitely isn't the be all, end all. I wish you luck!

> half the time I want to stop and take notes because the advice or information being given sounds really useful or seems worth following up on.

Like running, keeping notes in your head is something that gets easier if you do it a lot. It's also a really useful skill to have when talking to people in person.

Could try informative podcasts that just give you information, instead of wisdom or life practices - such as a history of philosophy, or some other topic. Or just history in general!

For audiobooks, something I've been wanting to try is to see if I can listen to an audiobook of a textbook for a topic that I'm interested in. But I'm not sure if it would work well, since often textbooks have diagrams and such.

Unpopular opinion: Maybe being bored isn't a bad thing. It allows for an escape from constant stimulus and eventually, your mind will learn to wander, introspect, and come up with new ideas.

This is how we ran before smartphones, anyway.

- Audiobooks: I love reading but I have a hard time getting into audiobooks. Same issue with podcasts, I often want to stop and research topics and that would take me away from the treadmill.

Sounds like you are only listening to non-fiction? You don't need to research topics to enjoy (say) a genre thriller, so listen to fiction.

One possibility is trying a different form of cardio. I personally don't enjoy running at all... but I love cycling. Running for 30 minutes is super boring, but I can go do a 4-hour ride no problem. If you can't go outside at all, then this won't really help you though.

Treadmills are boring, yeah. Not sure why you can't run outside but that's probably worth more interrogation than a single parenthetical comment.

Try biking. I can't run due to a hip issue and it has been very fun for me.

If you're on a treadmill, then you should try Zwift

> I tend to stop running just because I want to work on something more mentally stimulating and tangibly productive

Maybe accept that running, or perhaps exercise in general, is not your thing? You clearly have more pressing interests and there are other ways to maintain good health. My grandfather lived well into his eighties with nigh a scrap of fat on him and, near as I can tell, did no formal exercise after his army days ended. My mother is on the same track despite health issue severely limiting her mobility.

I say this as a guy who rides an indoor cycling trainer 3-4 times a week during the winter and turns in to a raging jerk if he doesn't get his workouts done. If you're not a "gym guy", "runner guy", "biking guy" or whatever, why waste your extremely limited free time trying to become one?

Find a neighbour with an active dog and offer to take them for regular runs.

What about a particularly exciting book in audiobook form?

To get back into running I listened to some page turners, but I’d only listen to them when running. Sometimes I’d do an extra lap just to hear more. And I’d look forward to the next run.

Once the habit takes, I don’t need as much stimulation.

Another idea is political commentary slop or news. Don’t consume any during the day like you normally do (Reddit, twitter, news sites).

Instead consume it only through Youtube on your run. It’s usually stimulating enough to compel the run.

I'm not a doctor or any kind of expert, but I think consistency is pretty much always the best. A lot of people get stuck in a weird mindset of "it's only a mile why bother" ... but even just going for a walk every day is infinitely better than doing nothing.

From my own experience, after 2020 threw me into a bit of a depression I gained a bunch of weight for the first time in my life. I decided I was going to "workout every day" but gave myself a ton of grace about what the definition of "workout" meant. If it was bed time and I hadn't done anything yet I'd just do a couple sets of pushups to "check the box" and go to sleep. I tried to do as much as I could every day, but still gave myself a pat on the back as long as I did ANYTHING that I could call a "workout" ... I lost the weight shockingly quickly and felt a lot better even though most days I was only working out for 10-20 minutes.

> I started running a mile five days a week, and have slowly moved up distance and pace

Presumably more than a mile a day now

Try convincing them with incline walking - feels less daunting than running and has helped me get going! And now as it's gotten easier I'm starting to feel a natural running bug to up my intensity.

If you have the time I recommend working on distance first. Running farther is great for fat loss & cardio training and speed only really matters if you're trying to be competitive in races or have to squeeze your run into a confined time slot.

I also find that adding distance makes it easier to improve time. If I can only run 1 mile, it's pretty hard to run that same mile but faster. BUT if I can run 3 miles, it's a bit easier to run 1/3 of my normal distance but focusing on pushing the pace.

I was here about a year ago. Getting close to doing 5k 4 times a week, but the last 2k are more walk than run. I'm definitely more interested in getting endurance over speed, but both improve pretty steadily at this point. I guess once I'm doing 5k without walking I'll try to just increase pace. Pretty amazing how much better my quality of life is since exercising seriously for the first time in my late 40s.

I was you like 3-4 months ago. Part walking, part running. It was a tough start and I was extremely sore during many runs!

Keep it up though. All of a sudden it all sort of comes together. I just ran 9 miles straight last week! I was shocked and so excited.

The cool thing about running and lifting weights is that you see a lot of progress early on. The path to a sub 30 minute 5k is all about getting out the door and consistently running a little more. Pretty much everyone who starts weight lifting has a moment a few months in where they go to lift a random household object and are shocked by how light it feels.

Don't push yourself too hard, especially if you are out of shape.

I did the same thing but kept pushing harder because my muscles could keep up and I wanted to build up cardio endurance, but I didn't take into account my bones.

Shin splints are no joke and will sideline you for months without warning. It takes several months for your leg bones to build up the compressive strength to deal with continuous high impact running.

Even if your endurance can take it, take your time. Slow and steady wins the race.

Did you have the flu (influenza) or a cold? Because I had influenza once and couldn’t even walk from bed to the kitchen.

I’m asking, because in German, many people call a regular cold a flu here.

But the chance to catch real influenza is like once every 20 years or so.

What about COVID-19?

In the ultra running community, it's common to do a 1 mile "test" when you're feeling awful. You start your run, and if it still feels awful after 1 mile you walk on back home and try again tomorrow. Do this until you can just keep going again.

Did you not catch Covid? Even catching after getting the shots I still could barely move.

It was interesting today to discover the concept of "type 2 fun".

I often wondered why people did these self-evidently unfun things, purportedly "for fun".

I heard so often that it's outright dangerous to run when you're sick. Does anyone with knowledge know whether this is true? The general vibes of this thread gives me the feelings that it's more like a inconvenience than straight up dangerous to your heart and everything, which is what I heard and believed up until now.

I've had those days where a 10-minute shuffle felt more restorative than a full night's sleep

While I don't disagree that "team no days off" is probably not the ideal way to promote long-term health, I'd assert that most of the adult population in first-world countries are far more at risk from a lack of sufficient physical activity than from overtraining. Not dismissing your own experience (it sounds pretty bad) and I assume from context that you worked yourself into that hole, but we need to be encouraging people to be doing more physical activity rather than less.

Totally off-topic, but when did people start abbreviating testosterone to T? I noticed it a few years ago when TV commercials started airing promoting various snake oils to fix low T. But now I see it everywhere. Is it another idea that escaped body building forums?

But the daily mile is not what will push you into overtraining. It’s just 7 miles a week. Training hard in calorie restriction is IMO a horrible idea though. You would need to make sure to burn as little carbs as possible and not do any workouts. Basically dedicating a block to losing weight instead of improving your running. Might still get faster, weight is a factor in running

I've also seen how easily well-meaning habits (running, dieting, etc.) can tip into something detrimental, especially when the metrics become the goal. There's a fine line between dedication and depletion.

But how would you loose weight without calorie restriction?

Maybe this amount of running was excessive, but how did you even run such distances with T so low? (Ie how did you recover?)

wait what? you get morning erections when on low testosterone?

Rule 0 of training as an athlete was: you do not train when sick

Rule 1 of training as an athlete was: you do not train for N extra days after N days of fever

You do not want a heart infection.

Keeping track of you morning resting heart rate will tell you exactly what is going on.

I came here to say this, running while being sick is incredibly stupid, more so for men.

Respectfully, if this guy has been doing it for ten years, it’s obviously not so bad as you make it out to be. It’s not a grind set mentality, it’s just one guys choice to exercise in a certain manner.

I am a runner. I train at what is probably the 80th percentile for longer distances, so I am by no means an expert. But I do understand that if you are running 7 miles a week, most of the time, your body isn’t going to be that beat up, especially if you are taking it slow.

I (still!) have an uncle who had a similar mindset, broke his leg half way through a race and only realised when he stopped at the end, that he couldnt walk any further

finally when they had to (successfully) defib him during a race, that shook him into assessing his health not running for the sake of running

There's a mindset with distance runners that I have seen over and over, just sometimes way too much of a generally good thing

Just gonna say, as a fellow excessive exerciser... exercise doesn't make you stronger. It's the recovery afterwards and the resulting growth/adaptation that makes you better.

Don't let rest feel like weakness. It’s where the real progress happens.

I don’t feel strongly on either side, but I do want to point out that “I am not proud of running when I have the flu” immediately suggests a course of action that could make you more proud. It seems that not-running when sick would make you happier? Is it really worth doing just for the completionism?

I have also done a couple longish run streaks, but would have rested if ill.

Why do you run with the flu of you feel bad about it? What is the point of fulfilling the "rules" of run streaking?

For me the by far biggest positive effect of run streaking was that I knew every morning when I woke up that I would something i enjoy that day. The training is too low intensity and volume to really matter and doing it for the rules would have felt pointless.

If you "know better" are you a "run-streaker" because of some innate need to not break a streak? Is the streak the thing that keeps you motivated?

I can see how you might worry that if you take off one day when you are sick that somehow you'll start taking more and more "sick days" out of perhaps laziness. But I also feel like someone with such a level of dedication would not be in much danger of doing that.

Did he ask them?

It may come as a surprise to you, but doctors don't have any means of "letting" people do anything. They can, at most, advise.

The author sounds as though they still do.

My dumber version: Just multiply by 1.5. It's fine unless you are using a treasure map.

Ha! That’s nice.

I never realized 1.609 miles/km is close to the golden ratio (1.618)

Hey, this is very smart. The golden ratio... Wow!

Yeah but Fahrenheit still feels super alien and unintuitive if you haven’t used it much. I have like three or four approximate values that I think I know what they feel like, but most of the time I really have to stop and think.

If you go for a run at 0C with a T-shirt you'll probably be OK. Gloves and ear coverings would be nice.

If you go for a run at 0F in a T-shirt, you won't be running for very long. That's like -18C.

0 = freezing

“Frigid” would perhaps be less confusing “Freezing.”

I always use minutes as percentages of hours to convert miles to km, 30min is 0.5 hours so following that 30miles=50km.

Yeah! Please do

Zoom way out, the usual area is a bit “south”.

I haven't encountered this scenario yet, but I would just substitute with running, stationary bike, etc. The whole point of rowing is to minimize impact and encourage consistency day-to-day. If we need to deviate on rare occasions to stay on track, it's not a big deal.

Not overthinking the exercise is a big part of not falling off the wagon. If you wrap yourself around that post it can really discourage you. Perfect is the enemy of really, really good things.

I really enjoy the philosophy of the 80/20 rule for running (Book from Matt Fitzgerald), which says that 80% of your training should be at level 2, where your heart rate is much lower. It's made it a lot easier to actually go run every day, as it doesn't leave me feeling exhausted and it changes the psychology from feeling like I need to run faster to actually needing to slow myself down, which is really transformative for me in particular. YMMV, pun intended.

I don't think 1mi per day is dangerous by a longshot but pushing through injury and sickness is wildly dangerous. heart infection is a thing, especially for men

I don't run as much, and never more than 1h, yet it happened several times to me that my phone battery died on me while running. (I'm obviously not carrying a powerbank with me, and my phone is many years old). It would also expect that Strava or the network would fail from time to time (no need to go as far as antarctica for that - I've been living in germany for less than a year and I have lost track already of how many times the 5G/4G network has been out of order for hours). I guess strava has a good networkless mode. Or maybe my experience with tech has been particularly bad and I'm an outlier?

You are always the neurotypical of someone, I guess :)

A lot of runners (me included) are data nerds and record every runs date/time, distance, pace, weather, shoes worn, how we're feeling, temperature, elevation gain etc.

why? Give me 10 minutes and I could tell you the exact dates of each training program I've done since I was in University 18 years ago.

I wanted something minimalist but high contrast, and enough variety so charts would not be repetitive. I have a thing for data visualization, so I pulled inspiration from the pile of books I have on my bookshelf.

As someone with severe OCD my entire life... Trust me its a bad thing.

Notably not on the tectonic plate Australia is on (which is mostly although not entirely just Australia in terms of land), though, if someone is going by that definition.

Eh, that doesn't really count. Sounds like a good excuse for a trip ;)

There’s a movement called “barefoot shoes” / “barefoot running”. Very different gait from usual running and all the cushioning is in the muscles/ tendons. You can find some brands that have coton + rubber shoes (rubber is from a plant whereas plastic is from petroleum, don’t know if that works for you). And hemp or wool insoles. Probably not very durable but softer and more flexible than leather.

> I’m roughly around 40bpm at the moment, down from ~60bpm 10 years ago

To put that into perspective for other readers: I've been running for about 10 years also, but typically 2x a week (10k mid-week, 15~20k weekend), I have no real data on my heart rate from when I started, but at rest I'm now typically at 60bpm.

I measure almost daily due to medication and having a minor heart defect, and I have noticed that if I skip a week of running, it'll slowly go up, averaging at ~62bpm, but when I train for a (half) marathon I typically increase my distance a bit and try to train every other day (~3x/week) then my heart rate a rest goes down a bit to be consistently below 60bpm (58bpm avg).

40bpm is very low, for non-athletes this would be considered dangerously low, but I guess daily running at OPs distance would classify OP as an athlete. Also keep in mind that heart rate differs per person, some people just naturally have a low heartbeat.

Compared to letting your body fully rest during that day (perhaps in between longer runs).

The focus is usually on the increased impact during running, but arguably when averaged over the time it is actually somewhat equivalent to walking, the 'air time' of each joint means you are effectively under no load with some form of decompression.

It is effectively a higher load with a lower duty cycle. versus walking with a lower load at about 50% duty cycle.

Joint 'damage' is a misnomer. Joint surfaces are under load/impact and friction while running, that is just biomechanics.

Other mechanical parts like bearings have a load capacity and lifetime. It is not a stretch to model the same for articular surfaces on your hips, knees, ankles.

I agree, and I've heard the same. In my experience, knee problems always disappeared with moderate running. Of course, you have to allow yourself time to recover after running. But as far as I know, the science is that joint lubrication in your knees needs activity to function properly.

How so?

Yeah, 16 hours is crazy long. I would add that I found the best thing to do on both sides of a lengthy flight (say 6-8 hours) is exercise.

I ran on the Queen Mary II, every day, across the Atlantic :)

Much easier than a plane, though.

I like your friend's rule. If a guy literally runs every day, through stress fractures, flu, winter snow, thunderstorms, etc, I'm going to cut him a break on an international flight and continue to celebrate his streak with him.

Speaking for the US stations, in the summer you can run outdoors. I don't want to say many people do, but there are always some.

Here's me from a few years ago, to give an idea of the clothing required https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/life-at-the-pole/2021/01/week-...

Even at the South Pole, we have a 5k "Race Around the World" at Christmas, and a marathon shortly after New Year. In 2022, someone did an ultra. It's compacted snow/ice. Not easy terrain, but doable in your average pair of running shoes (with wooly socks). For the race events we normally ask someone to drive round the route a few times to compact it a bit more. On the coast at McMurdo there are routes that are more like traditional trail running - dirt/gravel, hills. I assume other stations are similar.

The more intrepid folks gave up when it got to around -50C and then it's treadmills until sunrise and it warms up again.

There's also a more pay-to-play marathon: https://www.icemarathon.com/ ($22k)

Those might've been some of the treadmill runs. Also looks like they were all one-milers.