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I depend on routine, regiment, standard operating procedures, step-by-step plans, and rituals. I am not a naturally organized person, although you wouldn’t know that by observing my daily work routines or my half marathon training logs.
All my life, I’ve struggled to pay attention to anything for long enough. That landed me in remedial reading and math classes in elementary school. I had no trouble reading, nor with arithmetic; I just wanted to read the books on the other shelf or solve the more interesting problems in my own head.
I learned to love routine not because I enjoy it for its own sake, but because of how it sets me free. When I work from step one to two and on to the end, I am able to use my active time creatively, paying attention to the parts of my day and the tasks that I do enjoy, while the rest of it just kind of…filters into place.
This applies to my work, where I begin the day with the same step one and end it with the same final step while climbing the ladder the same way in between. Doing so, my mind is released to wander to beautiful places and my hands made available to build beautiful things.
Those places and things sometimes become the foundations of new menus or stories very quickly and publicly. Other times they quietly become new business plans or book proposals or other things that may never see the light of day. Sometimes, they never do anything but make me think about something new. Sometimes they become one of the best new restaurants in the country. Without my routines and rituals to rely on, I wouldn’t have time for any of these things, and I’d still be toiling in some rich guy’s basement kitchen under the fluorescent lights.
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This is all true for race training too. I am a new runner—I just finished my second racing season—and it is really just a hobby. Experienced runners know routine. There are logbooks and checklists and scenarios that read an awful lot like the if this then that statements that keep my restaurant programs humming along each day, week, and year. Shoe changes, base miles, carbohydrate ratios, mile splits; all rolled into a program that focuses on standard progression and managed expectations.
For about three months, I worked a training program like this around my many restaurant responsibilities. Beginning at step one and finishing at the half marathon starting line, I knew what to expect each day when I either laced up my sneakers or slipped on my clogs for work. I climbed from an average weekly mileage of about 18 to a peak of 36 and I dropped my average pace from 10 minutes per mile to eight-and-a-half. On race day, I left even that pace quickly in my past. That whad been my plan.
Not everything can be planned for, and that is basically the point of routine. In my work life and in all my life I succeed by knowing the basics are done right, always right, leaving me ready to take on something new or respond to something unexpected. There is a lot of unexpected.
Two things happened that I didn’t expect. The first was on race day, when I broke into uncontrollable tears as I ran through the underpass that marked the end of mile two.
The second was to finish my last day of training four days before the race and skip a shower to hold my cousin’s hand as she held our grandmother’s, and told her it was ok to die. Earlier that day, as mile two became mile three, I could barely breathe through the tears and the effort to do so left me sounding like an underprepared part-timer that signed up for this race to impress a new girlfriend. The sort of runners that are likely to vomit on themselves just before the finish line, misjudging the final effort, which they haven’t rehearsed in training. Just a few days earlier, My grandmother was barely able to speak anymore and was unable to move around on her own. However, during our visit, she raised her arms vigorously over her head in an exclamation of support when I reminded her about the upcoming race and noted my recent record-setting 10k “practice race” a few days before that.
“Go! Go!” she exclaimed.
I was ok. I had trained 340 miles for this hour, plus a little more on a Sunday morning. I had a plan to cross that finish line at maximum effort while setting new records, even if just for myself, along the way. My logs were completed and my checkboxes checked. One of my grandmother’s last acts, knowing she would never see me run this race, was to exert all of her available energy to encourage me forward.
I stood tall as I took a deep breath and shook my head no at the outstretched hand offering water. My legs were strong from months of effort and my mind was ready to handle a little sadness along the way.
I ran the next ten miles at an even pace, and faster than initially expected. A little off plan. I had intended to take it easier through mile seven, picking it up at seven through ten. I ran so far out in front of expectations early on that I had trouble increasing the pace as I rounded the corner of the seventh mile.
Any good routine has contingencies and I set a new goal for those three miles. A goal that I decided on by understanding the process and my abilities and how to respond. I chose to forget about trying to increase the pace for now and to just focus on maintaining an even speed, one-half mile at a time. By mile ten, I was still out in front of where we were supposed to be, and I could feel the finish line long before it was anywhere in sight.
I ran faster. It was really just a 5-kilometer race left at this point. I’d already run ten miles and I couldn’t give them back. I had run a lot of 5K races over the previous year and it had been months since even a casual training run was only 5 kilometers long. I ran faster again.
Things got difficult by mile 12. I glanced at my watch and was surprised by the low numbers I saw. Ten miles after, a bout of tears nearly sidelined me before this race even really started, I was running faster than I ever had.
Grandma had always encouraged full effort. One thing she was fond of saying, though, was that winning or losing didn’t matter. That’s not the same as feeling non-competitive or easily accepting of loss. What she actually meant was to focus only on the effort and the enjoyment of the process. Maximum effort in everything, though, that’s where winning starts. Winning is not always easy to define.
I was back on plan. I always try to finish with the last step of the plan, regardless of what happens in between. This plan ended with a sprint, at full effort, no matter what pace I had managed on the way to get there. I lifted my head and moved my legs as fast as I could, prepared to leave nothing behind before the finish, but always in control.
I passed a few runners, and a few passed me and I crossed the finish line at one hour, 43 minutes. I had set three goals for this race, like I always do; the real goal, plus two more. One is a stretch and one is really just a dream. My dream goal, in this case, had been 1:42. A few days ago I would have been perfectly content with a 1:52, elated with a 1:45. It was all according to plan. The routine had set me free.
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