Everything Is a Volume Game

Some months ago, I did what any good thirty-year-old would do and decided to train for a half marathon. This may be, like, the fifth time my friends have had to hear me say Yeah I’ve been getting back into running lately, but for some reason – perhaps due to that strange mental alchemy that takes place around the end of your third decade of life – I’ve stuck with it long enough to be able to run for a few hours at a time (!) for a low double-digit number of miles. This is a cause for celebration, and for reflection.

In the broader community of endurance sports, there’s an almost cultish obsession with zone two cardio. These zones are ranges of heart rates, with zone two being about 60-70% of your max heart rate, low enough that you should be able to have a conversation while doing your workout.

Zone two cardio is not some magical realm of aerobic performance. Rather, its primary importance to endurance sports is that it’s not particularly fatiguing. It allows athletes to get in a lot of mileage and build strength and endurance while still allowing you to feel pretty fresh the next day. Tadej Pogačar, five-time winner of the Tours de France, says he likes to train in zone two for five hours at a time. For running, you’ll still have to mix in specialized training like speed workouts or very long distances, but you can do much of your mileage at a less fatiguing level so that you learn to recover while you run.

More importantly for me, zone two is helpful because it’s not a slog. The reason I stopped running so often in the past is that the first few weeks were constantly miserable, and spending the rest of my day feeling like I got trampled is not particularly inspiring. When I’m running now, I give myself the cue: What would it be life for this to be easy?

(For the physical embodiement of ease in motion, I keep going back to watching fantastic dancers like Majid – effortless.)

In creative work, there’s an oft-repeated story from the book Art & Fear about a pottery class in which half the students are tasked with producing a single piece of high quality while the other half is tasked with producing a high volume of pieces. At the end of the semester, all the highest-quality pieces came from the quantity group. By producing a lot of work, they inevitably practiced more, made more mistakes, and learned a lot, while the quality half was paralyzed by perfectionism. Or take Ray Bradbury’s suggestion of writing a short story every week for a year, because in his own words, “It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

These are all true, but many people (read: me) take this to mean that they should knuckle down and grind out their work until they reach some point after which it will Become Good. It’s tempting to see a number like 10,000 hours or 52 short stories and to try and burn through them as quickly as possible. The sooner I get through these, then I can do the real work!, you think.

But those are the real work. There’s not a finish line after that, you’ve just worked hard and get to keep working. What you’ll have done, at the end of that time, is realized that you were doing it all along.

Your first run and your hundredth will be different, but they’ll all be a part of this same life. If you rush through the work to Get to the Real Stuff, you’ll never make it to the “real stuff” because that was the very thing you rushed through before. It’s all just zone two cardio for the soul. In Haruki Murakami’s half-running, half-writing memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he puts it succinctly:

Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.

You cannot skip to the punchline of a cosmic joke. Life is a series of moments, one after another, and you can choose what you make of each one of them. But at the end of the day, you are made up of the culmination of each one of those moments stacked on top of each other.

You become a better runner by running more, and you run more when it’s fun. Same for writing, or pottery, or life. Rushing through the early stages only teaches you to rush. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Everything is a volume game.