Can You Stop Your Garmin at 4.98 Miles? - Coach Tip Tuesday

Can you stop your Garmin at 4.98 miles?

If you’re like the vast majority of the athletes I’ve worked with over the years (and I’m talking the literal vast majority here…as in 98% or more), you will not stop your Garmin at 4.98 miles.  You will keep going until it reads 5.00 miles.

What if your planned workout was 45 minutes long, and you had run for that 45 minutes?  Again, if you’re like most 21st Century endurance athletes out there, if you reach 45 minutes on the nose and your Garmin reads 4.98 miles, you’ll run over the planned 45 minutes and keep running until your Garmin reads 5.00 miles.

Why is this?  If this is something you do, have you ever asked yourself why you do it?  Or, have you blindly accepted it as something that you just…do?

After so many years of working with athletes (and therefore observing and studying athlete behavior), I have several working hypotheses about why such a large percentage of athletes engage in this specific behavior.  

1. Many athletes value distance, not duration.
2. We - as a collective species and society - do not value subtractive changes.

Athletes Love Distance

A lot of athletes prefer to think about their training in terms of distance, rather than duration.  The races that athletes are typically training for are set distances, so it makes a good deal of sense that athletes would be concerned about their ability to cover that distance.  Planning training workouts based on distance helps athletes gauge where they are in training relative to where they will need to be on race day.

That being said, while distance-based training definitely has some pros, it honestly has more cons for age-group athletes.  The average age-group athlete is balancing a lot of competing demands for their time and attention in their daily life.  Among other things, they need to work at their jobs, run their households, take care of their families, socialize with their friends, engage in hobbies that they enjoy, and more.  The days of our lives are based on hours, not distance.  Thus, planning workouts based on duration is advantageous since it enables athletes to plan better for those workouts to fit into their busy, full lives that are full of activities that are time-based.  

It is incredibly important for training to be planned to fit into an athlete’s life.  Problems abound the minute an athlete tries to do the opposite (to fit their life into their training).  Consistency is one of the most important things that athletes need to be successful, both acutely in their daily workouts and long-term over the course of an entire Annual Training Plan as they prepare to tackle their goals.  Planning for workouts to be duration-based is one way to help cultivate that consistency, and this only becomes more true as workout volume increases.

For example: Let’s imagine that you wanted to run 14 miles on a given day.  One day in mild, temperate conditions, running that 14 miles might take you 2 hours, 20 minutes to complete.  But on another day, in hot, humid conditions, it might take you 2 hours, 48 minutes to run that same 14 miles.  There is a 20% difference between these two scenarios.  The principle of progressive overload - which involves gradually increasing the frequency, intensity, or volume of an activity over the course of a training plan in the interests of stimulating desired adaptations in the body to help athletes reach their endurance sports goals - is a foundational principle of training and calls for long workouts to be slightly longer each week.  That being said, an additional 20% more than what is targeted is too much and dramatically increases your risk for getting injured because it imposes a load that likely exceeds your current capacity.

If you plan for a workout to be a given duration, it doesn’t really matter how far you go in the workout.  What matters is the time and effort you put in.  Using the aforementioned example, planning for 2 hours, 20 minutes would be better than planning for 14 miles, as you would know exactly how long the workout is going to take.  Because ambient conditions can (and do!) impact speed and pace so much, planning for distance effectively means you never actually know how long a workout is going to take, which makes it harder to plan for as a piece of your busy day.  In addition to being a good basis for fostering consistency because it allows for better time management and planning, the body only understands time and effort.  

Numbers are a Construct of the Human Mind

Numbers - including numbers that reference speed and distance - are a construct invented by the human mind.  Your body doesn’t care if you ran 13.98 miles or 14.00 miles; your mind is what makes that distinction and what values it.  Your body only understands that stress (in the form of training) was imposed on it for a given length of time.  This being said, the reason why humans invented numbers in the first place is that they are more tangible and are something more quantifiable that helps us understand the world around us.  Our minds (and therefore we as athletes) value having numbers like this - distance and/or pace - because it makes us feel like we are in more control over our training and the outcomes that we desire from it.

The number one reason athletes tell me that they continue in a workout to finish with a distance metric such as 5.00 miles is that they need to finish with a “nice, even, round” number.  But I like to remind athletes that there are many other “nice, even, round” numbers that they could be valuing in a workout.  For instance, if you have a workout that is planned to be 45 minutes long, stopping the workout at 45:00 is a nice, even, round number.  The fact that it’s not good enough for a lot of athletes to stop at an even duration like this and that they have to continue to a nice, even, round distance number shows that they value distance more than duration.  (And this is true, even if the athlete isn’t conscious that they are prioritizing one thing over another.)

And let’s be clear: There is nothing inherently bad about numbers or trying to quantify our training.  After all, a good portion of my job involves having athletes quantify their training so that I can best help them reach their goals.  But there are many things to value in training.  So what is important is that we understand what we value in our training and to be able to say it out loud.  It is equally as - if not more - important to understand why we value it and to be able to articulate this out loud as well.

The Value of Subtraction

In addition to valuing distance, the human tendency to devalue subtractive changes contributes to us not wanting to stop our Garmins when we reach an odd distance such as 4.98 miles.  Humans are extremely biased toward solutions that involve adding to something, not taking away from something.  Humans - and therefore athletes - think that more is better.  As Coach Rob Pickels often eloquently quips on the Fast Talk Labs Podcast, we athletes feel that “anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”  Endurance sports such as running, cycling and triathlon attract people who are goal-oriented, driven, and who are inherently desiring to seek more and to better themselves.  It’s these very positive qualities that can - paradoxically, I know - work against us and send us into “overdoing” mode.  To illustrate this point, I’ll refer back to this same imaginary 45-minute workout that I was just referencing:

Let’s say you had a 45-minute run on your schedule.  Your Garmin shows that you have run 4.00 miles when you have run for 38 minutes.  If you prefer “nice, round, even numbers” when it comes to your completed workout distances and if you (like so many athletes) value distance during your workouts, why not stop here at 4.00 miles?  4.00 miles is a “nice, round, even” distance.  

I can say with an exceptionally high degree of certainty that the same majority of athletes who would keep going to run 5.00 miles instead of stopping their Garmin at 4.98 miles would not choose to end their planned 45-minute workout at 38 minutes and 4.00 miles.  Why not?  Because that 4.00 miles was completed in 38 minutes, and 38 minutes isn’t 45 minutes…aka it isn’t the full duration of the planned workout.  So, in that moment, the athlete is valuing duration and feels the need to keep going.  But by the time they get to 45 minutes, the distance on their watch isn’t a nice, round even number anymore.  So, they then switch their priorities and value distance more than duration in that moment (a mere seven minutes later).  Because of this, they feel the need to keep going until they hit the even distance of 5.00 miles, thereby extending their total run time beyond 45 minutes.

This - running longer than is planned - is an example of change via addition.  The athlete in this example modified the workout and exceeded the planned parameters by running a duration that took them longer to run than the planned timeframe.  Additionally, they modified the planned parameters of the workout by valuing and basing the workout on distance, when it was planned based on duration.  By contrast, stopping the workout at 4.00 miles and 38 minutes would be an example of a change via subtraction.  In that situation, the athlete would have still modified the workout, but would have done so by running less than the full planned duration.

Either of these - running more than 45 minutes or running less than 45 minutes - represents a change from what was planned.  But only one of these two changes feels “good” and/or “right” to most athletes…the option where you run more than 45 minutes.  For many athletes, running less than the planned duration doesn’t feel good enough, even when they might be ultimately completing the workout on distance (and not duration).  It’s important that we at least stop, acknowledge that this is going on, and consider why we might be engaging in such a behavior.

Why Endurance Athletes Need to Cultivate Self-Awareness

Why am I choosing to write about and to dive so deep into this behavior?  The simple answer is that I want to help any athlete reading this develop a better sense of self-awareness.  Awareness is what we notice in life.  In short, awareness is paying attention.  It’s the details you pick up as you move about and observe the world.  It’s the information you gather and process as you go about your day.  It’s how you are experiencing your life and the world around you.  A tremendously huge part of my job as a coach is being aware of what athletes are doing; being aware is what enables me to make safe, pragmatic, individualized training recommendations for them.

While awareness refers to outward observations of the world, self-awareness turns this gaze inward and is about focusing your awareness - aka paying attention - to yourself.  Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand your own physical sensations, thoughts, feelings, actions, reactions, and behaviors.  It requires bringing automatic behaviors and thought processes to a conscious level.  Yes, this is difficult (especially because we may not like what we observe about ourselves).  However, as I’ve talked about so much over the years, a high degree of self-awareness - aka athletes paying attention to what they are doing and understanding why they are doing it - is necessary for any endurance athlete to have the best probability of successfully reaching their goals.  

When I am working with the athletes I coach, I am holding up a metaphorical mirror to them so they can see, observe, and acknowledge their habits and behaviors.  Yes, ALL of their habits and behaviors: their strengths as well as the behaviors that may not be as attractive.  One of the best ways to hold up this mirror and to help athletes cultivate self-awareness is for me to ask questions.  I ask the athletes I coach questions all the time, but the ultimate goal is to have athletes get comfortable with the process of asking questions of themselves.  Over time, this helps them develop a high degree of self-awareness.

So this is what I’m doing in this article; I am holding up the metaphorical mirror and I am asking you to stop and ask yourself some questions about some of the behaviors you engage in so you can understand them.  Yes, stopping a Garmin at an odd number may seem like a minor and ridiculous thing for me to write so much about.  Does it really matter if we always add something to our workouts?  It’s only a little bit, right?

Wrong.  While the quantities might individually be small, the behavior itself is not a minor thing.  This seemingly insignificant behavior indicates a viewpoint and approach to training that is unconsciously held and implemented by athletes, and the fact that they aren’t aware of it is precisely why it’s important that I write about it and draw attention to it.  Whenever we do something without asking ourselves “Why?” and knowing the answer to that question, we are lacking self-awareness.

Specifically, the fact that we are inherently biased toward the “more is better” mentality is something we need to be aware of.  Only by being aware of it can athletes “fight” or evolve their thinking on it to ensure that they do not impose loads in their training that exceed their current capacity.  Doing this - ensuring that they are making wise choices and imposing proper training loads - is the most significant thing an athlete can do in their training to reduce their risk of injury.  The ability to hold yourself back and impose the correct amount of load or stimulus - not just more stimulus - is the mark of a mature athlete.  Some days the correct amount of load may in fact be a little bit more than was originally planned.  But on an equal number of days, the correct amount of load is probably less than what was planned.  We need to understand that there’s value in changes via both addition and subtraction.

Additionally, understanding when we are changing the planned parameters of a workout (such as changing when we stop a workout from duration to distance) is very important.  Based on my conversations with athletes, most athletes who engage in this behavior will tell you that they are not changing the planned parameters of the workout when they decide to stop a duration-based workout at a particular distance.  And it’s this - the fact that they are not even aware that this is what they are doing - that makes this deserving of our attention.  Only by being self-aware about your choices and behaviors can you make the best choices in your training to set yourselves up for success when it comes to reaching your goals.

The Bottom Line

Continuing to do a workout until you hit a nice, round, even distance may seem insignificant.  But this behavior opens a window to a whole host of underlying mindsets, decisions, and mentalities about training.  Understanding this and becoming more aware of your own behaviors, habits, feelings, and choices when it comes to training is incredibly important.

The next time you get to the end of your workout, I challenge you to stop the watch, no matter what the distance reads.  Face and confront the Discomfort Dragon by doing something hard that makes you feel unsettled and uncomfortable.  In addition to helping to build your mental toughness in training, it will also help you develop the self-awareness and the behaviors that can help you become a smarter, stronger, and more successful athlete.