There is a particular flavor of suffering I fear: where something is not just unpleasant, but is requiring active effort from you to continue having the unpleasant thing happen, and so you have to not only suffer the suffering, but also the constant thinking about whether maybe you should stop right now—and so are also having to dip peripherally into questions of free will and will power and who you are and if you will ever do anything and if you are fundamentally bad, and all this while you are already quite taxed by the original suffering.
The epitome of this kind of suffering to my mind has traditionally been running. What everyday activity was less pleasant than running? Better to be lightly tortured by someone else, than have to do the inflicting as well. (No, I’m probably not a very athletic person.)
But that was years ago. These days running is often one of the most joyous things I do.
(I still don’t do it nearly enough, but often when I do I think “oh wow this is so good, I should do this much more often” rather than “can I stop? can I stop? I’m stopping.. no, oh god, when is it over?”)
What changed?
The first thing that happened—which I’d guess is not crucial but did help me get started—was that a person I had a crush on started inviting me to go on runs. This helped me get a tiny bit better at running, because I was willing to withstand almost arbitrary amounts of suffering to spend time with him. This probably got my running skill from “really wants to stop running within about twenty steps” to “can run for a block or two before hating it”. By the time he stopped inviting me (since he actually wanted to run far and fast) I think I still found running basically unpleasant, but had more of an affordance for doing it for non-negligible stretches.
The real change was from running alone and altering my running protocol.
Here is how to enjoy running, in my experience:
Get yourself some good running music. This is key. It’s like the difference between having fuel in your vehicle and not. Ideally you want a playlist consisting entirely of songs which if they came on at a party would send you leaping up and scrambling for the dance floor. My first playlist for this was called “corny”, and my most recent one is a variety of 90s pop punk.
Put on shoes. Put on music. Start running.
As soon as you don’t feel like running—even if it’s after five steps—walk.
As soon as you feel like running again, run. This may be because the music hits a bit that demands it, or the street is sloping downwards, or walking just feels a bit slow, or you regained your energy and bounding along in the sun would feel good.
As soon as you feel like leaping, or skipping, or balancing on a low wall with your arms out, do that.
Repeat steps 3-5 in any order until feeling like running stops occurring ever.
Wander home.
Repeat another day, and probably find yourself walking a tiny bit less, and enjoying yourself running a tiny bit more.
I guess the crucial elements are:
a) There’s a huge experiential difference between running when you don’t feel like it and running when you do feel like it.
b) Music is compelling, and in particular can compel you to move your body enjoyably (most classically observed in the phenomenon ‘dance’).
c) If a thing is enjoyable at least sometimes, then you can enjoy it 100% of the time you are doing it by just not doing it when you aren’t feeling it.
Some additional modifications that might help:
Be cringe. Dance at stoplights. Smile at strangers. Think grandiose thoughts.
Use a fitness device where you can watch your heart rate in real time—it’s somewhat compelling to control it by running when it drops relatively low (and that is coincidentally when you may feel like running again).
Use a fitness device where you can track general progress in amount of exercise.
End up somewhere you can buy a delicious coffee or something.
Instead of slowing down as soon as you feel like it, pick a tree a little way further down the road to make it to first.
If you aren’t feeling a song, aggressively skip it.
To be clear, I have not become so good at running as to give up walking for large parts of it. But going for a forty minute walk/run in which half of the time you are running and loving it seems like a huge improvement in my life.
I have no idea how well this is likely to work for other people. I might be unusually compelled by music or unusually horrified by using willpower. (I’m also aware there are many people who just naturally enjoy running.) If you try something like this, I’m curious to hear how it goes.
That was a delightful read, thank you!
I’ve followed a similar trajectory from ‘eugh plz no’ running to ‘joyful’ running via that same insight: “if a thing is enjoyable at least sometimes, then you can enjoy it 100% of the time you are doing it by just not doing it when you aren’t feeling it”. I grew up extremely unathletic and thought I hated running. As it turns out, I was confused. To give you a sense of just how confused: next month, I’ll be ‘competing’ in a Backyard Ultra in which I’ll run+walk the same 6.706km (4.167 mi) loop every hour, on the hour, until either (a) I quit, or (b) everyone else quits first. I expect I’ll enjoy the entire thing greatly. More importantly, despite it being a supposedly ‘gruelling’ endurance event of unknown distance and duration, I’m confident that I will at no point ‘force’ myself to do anything I don’t ‘want’ to do in any moment. I’ll just discover how many hours I have in me that day. Years ago, I thought that this kind of activity was for impossible Other People—people much better at inflicting suffering on themselves—and that all “I enjoy it” claims made about difficult/‘painful’ things were necessarily lies.
[At the risk of turning this comment into a long essay on a hobby-horse of mine,] I suspect that many LW-ish folks would benefit a lot if they started running/walking (‘wanning??’) and took your approach to it seriously. Two big reasons:
First, there’s a set of skills related to wholesome motivation that people can and should develop—something like how to cause yourself to do things that your brain has tagged as ‘hard’ or ‘unpleasant’ or ‘hardcore’ without ever relying on (or allowing) self-coercion or self-deception as psychological ‘tools’—and learning to “run when you feel like running” is an unusually cheap and accessible way to acquire the fundamentals of this skillset. Basically, I think that “being ambitious without habitually coercing/deceiving yourself in incoherent ways” is underrated. Many rationalists and LW-adjacent people I encounter don’t really seem to understand how to do this in any deep or reliable way; insofar as they do cause themselves to do things that they personally think of as hard or superficially-unpleasant, my impression is that they often rely on mental moves that are vaguely toxic. When I ask them about “using willpower” in detail, it often sounds to both of us as though they’ve taken harmful interpersonal mechanisms—guilt, shame, fear, dishonesty—and then weaponised these mechanisms against themselves. I claim that this is a bad strategy, and unnecessary, because “wholesome motivation” is a learnable alternative skillset. (Past Me was worse at this than Present Me is.) And while you can acquire basic “wholesome motivation” skills in many ways, going outside for a run gives you access to many tight feedback loops, which makes it easy to both
engineer your own tiny private mind motions (ie “Instead of slowing down as soon as you feel like it, pick a tree a little way further down the road to make it to first.”), &
discover small changes to attitude (“be cringe”, “think grandiose thoughts”) and context (specific music, a fitness device with real-time heart rate display) that work for you.
At least some of this stuff transfers. You can discover robust, you-specific alternatives to being subtly (or not-so-subtly) mean to yourself in the confines of your own skull for doing all sorts of things! I have been surprised by how much ‘run but only in a fun way’ has generalised for me.
Second, conditional on sticking to a “run when you feel like running” / “run iff it feels fun and flirty” rule, running/walking is relatively safe in a specific sense: it’s difficult to do this activity in a very unsafe way without realising it. This is not true for many kinds of exercise that have the ‘learn about your moment-to-moment motivation mechanisms’ property! Free weights are great, for example, but
(a) compound lifts require good form to execute safely,
(b) most adults have bad form by default [and need to unlearn many subtle things with the help of an experienced teacher],
(c) going close to failure often results in dangerously bad form, &
(d) even when you’re not ‘close to failure’, momentary lapses of attention can have catastrophic consequences. [I’m looking at you, deadlifts.]
While you can have harmfully bad form when running, it tends not to ‘feel good/correct’ in the moment, and the results are almost never so catastrophic. I paid a running coach to help me improve my form a few years ago, but I quickly realised that almost all of the best cues for maintaining optimal running form are variations on “do you feel bouncy and fun right now?” and “what movements & cadences make you feel like you want to keep running?” More importantly, the “stop when it doesn’t feel good” rule is itself a huge protection against overuse injuries etc. As a mate of mine likes to say: “There are two kinds of LSD. Both are serious drugs, and both can lead to transformational adventures., but Long Slow Distance running has a much better safety profile than The Other LSD, because you can end the experience the instant you don’t like what’s happening.”