Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown

386: Are You Sacrificing the Wrong Things?

• Angie Brown

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This week we dive deep into the concept of sacrifice in running. We discuss the necessary sacrifices runners must make to achieve their goals and how to know if you're sacrificing the right things. We address common pitfalls, such as sacrificing the wrong aspects of life or overdoing the variety in training to the detriment of progress. Learn that real progress may require giving up old beliefs, focusing on quality over quantity, and embracing the right kind of sacrifice to ensure long-term success and joy in running. This also touches on balancing running goals with family and personal life, emphasizing that sacrifices should be sustainable and aligned with individual goals.


01:38 Understanding Sacrifice and Trade-offs

05:10 The Myth of Having It All

12:02 Short-term Wins vs. Long-term Goals

16:09 Sustainable Sacrifice and Mental Health

22:19 The Dangers of Sacrificing Sleep

24:16 Sacrificing Progress for Variety

31:34 Balancing Consistency and Joy

35:17 Making Room for What Truly Matters

36:49 Quality Over Quantity in Training

39:27 Defining Clear Goals in Training 


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Angie:

Welcome to the Real Life Runners Podcast, episode number 386. Today we're talking about sacrifice in running and how. So a lot of us know that running is going to require some level of sacrifice, but what are you willing to sacrifice? And are you sacrificing the right things to actually get the results that you want? Because there's a lot of people that are sacrificing the wrong things or they're unwilling to sacrifice the things that they actually need to make the progress that they want. So today in this episode, we're going to help you figure all of that out. So stay tuned. What's up, Runners? Welcome to the show today. Again, another one of those topics where really, we're talking about sacrifice? That doesn't seem very joyful or motivational.

Kevin:

I've been excited to talk about sacrifice. We've had this on the calendar to discuss for the last, I don't know, four, six weeks?

Angie:

Yeah, do you remember how it got there? I'm the one that put it there. But I was trying to remember, like, how I started thinking about this idea of sacrifice. Do you remember?

Kevin:

I'm sure you read a book, heard another podcast and it spurred you to be like, we should discuss that. But then we never outlined and discussed enough to get our own version of it going.

Angie:

I just think that, yeah, I'm sure that it was one of those things, but it was just an idea that I had about what are you willing to sacrifice to get the goal that you want? And I think that a lot of times. People can fall into different categories here where they're unwilling to sacrifice the things that are necessary. They are sacrificing, but they're sacrificing the wrong things. And then they're not actually doing the things that are moving the needle. And those are really the three areas that we want to talk about today because you probably understand that there is some level of sacrifice in running. The question is there? Are the sacrifices that you're currently making actually leading you to the results that you want?

Kevin:

Yeah, that's a big take. I think if you accept the opening idea that in order to get solid results, there has to be some level of sacrifice in other areas. I think most people can agree with that. Some people might not. Some people might push back and be like, I don't want these big results in running if it's going to make drastic changes in the rest of my life. And, that's the opening point is, to get any change in one area is gonna require a little bit of a pullback in other areas of your life.

Angie:

Yeah, and I think that, I think you're right. I think there are people that are just unwilling to sacrifice certain things for their running and that's totally okay So I don't want you to listen to this episode and think like we are telling you that you have to give up Anything because it's all your choice. All of it is your life. It's your choice Running plays a different role in everybody's life here, but you can really Take what we're talking about today and apply it to lots of different areas of your life. You can just take the word running out and replace it with something else. Like maybe there's something else going on in your life and the question is, do I want to go after that thing? Is there a goal that you're trying to chase or something that you're trying to accomplish? Is it worth the sacrifice? Are you willing to sacrifice what might be necessary for you to achieve that thing? And I think that a lot of times people do especially in our culture today people want results without All of the sacrifice like we're like how about I can get the results that I want but still do exactly the same What I'm doing in all the other areas of my life.

Kevin:

Yeah, no, that's not a thing. That's actually not possible to pull that move to simultaneously not change anything and get completely different outcomes in your existence. That's foundational to change is you have to change.

Angie:

Yeah. That's the definition of insanity, right? Of like doing the same thing and expecting different results. Like you, there are things that you're going to have to change the things. The question becomes, what is it? What are those things? And are those Things that you are willing to actually change and possibly sacrifice when we use the word sacrifice It's like I think that it has a negative connotation of like you're giving up something that you want or something That is good and you're causing this level of suffering. Do you agree with that?

Kevin:

I think sacrifice is really just a matter of trade offs. Of, you're choosing one thing and because you choose option A, you cannot also have option B. It's the old saying, you literally cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Angie:

You just can't. Can you? I think that's silly to have a cake if you can't eat it.

Kevin:

But, the whole concept of that point is, once you eat it, then you literally do not have a cake anymore. That's the whole idea. Or, my favorite birthday card growing up had a picture of a cake, and then, the swimsuit model next to her, and at the bottom it said, this is Edith. But choose wisely, and then you open it up and it says, because you can't have your cake and Edith too. It was really funny to me when I was like 10.

Angie:

Okay, excellent. But it's, it reminds me of that saying of when you say yes to one thing, you're saying no to everything else. And I think that is a concept that I have pondered many times because I think that we. It all have been told by lots of different people in the media and social media and all over the world that like, you don't have to give this up to be a good mom. Like you can be a working, a career woman and also a good mother. You can do this and this. You can do this and this. Like you don't have to choose. You can be both. I do believe that you can be a lot of different things, but it is true that you do sacrifice certain things in areas like when you're trying to do multiple things at the same time. I own a business. I'm a mom. I'm a wife. All of those things are true. I think I'm doing a pretty good job at all of them. I do think that it changes like me being a business owner does change how I show up as a mom, because I have other things that put demands on my time. It shows, it just shows up in different ways. And so do I have to sacrifice time with my kids? Sometimes I do, like I try my best to make my business during the time when they're in school and, but there are some times where I do have to or choose to work when they're home or when. Other things are going on or, go out of town for a business trip when other things are happening in our life,

Kevin:

but the reverse of that also takes place. Like sometimes you will choose to do a thing with our kids and rework your work schedule. You have control over your work schedule so you can maneuver things around and it's not necessarily that you don't do things, but you don't necessarily do your work on the schedule that would have optimized you. Because you, you choose to not skip something of our girls at school or whatever the other event is.

Angie:

And then in that case, I'm sacrificing my personal time, right? Yes. I might be sacrificing time to just relax, or time that I would be spending with you after the girls go to bed, or something like that. There's still Going to be some sort of sacrifice to make those things work when you're trying to achieve multiple things at the same time,

Kevin:

right? Cause there's only so much time that can go around. That's the thing is whatever you're aiming for. And if you have enormous goals in some area of a lot of your life, the other areas are going to be diminished. There's only so much of you to go around. So this whole idea that you can be like 100 percent invested into multiple areas in your life. Not all at the same time, like you can, but at one moment, if you're simultaneously all in, in two different areas, I'd argue that you're not actually invested in either of them.

Angie:

Yeah, and I think that's one of those toxic messages that's been, that's being spread in society and in social media now is that you can do it all. And if you're. Aren't doing it all. Then there's something wrong with you. I think that's really what a lot of people take on and take it as it must just be me because clearly on Instagram, all of these other people are getting in their workouts and they are like building seven figure businesses and they have all of these loving family photos. And so clearly there's just something wrong with me. And I think that's really toxic of this message of yeah, you can definitely have it all. And then, behind the scenes, you don't see it. see that person that has a seven figure business also has 10 employees that are doing the work. Like they're still involved in their business, not saying that they're not, but they're, it's not like they're doing it by themselves and some of them, not all of them, but some of them. I don't portray it that way, but they portray it as I'm a self made millionaire. I'm, I built this myself and it's and no one really is a self made millionaire regardless of who you are or where you came from. There's some people that helped you along the way. Yeah.

Kevin:

Someone helped you along the way or perhaps the picture of all of their workouts. Maybe it's a workout and they're cause it's social media, so you have no idea. It could be a workout that they're changing clothes in regularly to make it look like those are seven different workouts over the week And it's just a photo shoot that beautiful picture of their family. Yeah, they all got together They all stopped fighting for 30 seconds said smile We're taking a picture because we're putting on social media and they all looked great in the picture But if you took the video of it What's that family picture actually look like because you're not sure and we can't get all of the details from social media

Angie:

Yeah And so I think that this idea of Being able to have it all and not sacrifice anything is definitely a toxic message that we need to start rewriting and understand that when you are, Chasing something, even if it's not a quote unquote big goal. Like you just said, if when you're chasing really big goals, I think there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that might be like my goal is not that big. And we could argue that point all day long, right? Like any goal is a worthwhile goal if it's important to you, but just if you're chasing any goal, it's going to require you to do things that you're not currently capable of doing. If you're, if it's not if you can just go out and do that thing now, then it's really not. A great goal because it's not stretching you like a good goal. You can, we can debate about what size goal it is, but a good goal is going to stretch you to be able to do things that you're not currently capable of doing. And to essentially become someone that you are not currently, you're going to have to do things differently. You're going to have to think differently and act differently and become a new version of yourself to be able to achieve that goal. And that's a sacrifice. Sometimes. It requires you to stop doing things that you used to be doing, that you might be very comfortable doing. Maybe it's going to require you to eat a different way. Maybe it's going to require you to train a different way. Maybe it's going to, Ask you to spend your time differently during the week. And those are all sacrifices. And so if you are unwilling to sacrifice any of anything and try to live the same life that you're currently living, that's fine, it's just going to be very unlikely that you're going to achieve your goal.

Kevin:

Yeah. The sacrifices we're talking, of, Oh, would you have to sacrifice time with your family or maybe you have to just put the phone down and stop scrolling from time to time like that.

Angie:

That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Kevin:

And, but that's the thing is so much, if you use the word sacrifice, people are like, Oh I don't want to get rid of these things that I truly value. How much do you truly value doomscrolling on your phone? Is that time that you could actually just get back in your life?

Angie:

And some people might not see that as a sacrifice, they might just see it as choosing something differently, and that's ultimately what sacrifice is. It is

Kevin:

simply choosing something different. Sometimes it's a thing that you're willing to get rid of, but getting rid of a thing, that's how I'm putting the definition of sacrifice, is it's changing your current way of being.

Angie:

Cause like ultimately when you sacrifice one thing for another, you're saying no to that thing so that you can choose another. And that's really what the definition of sacrifice we're going to use for now and the rest of this episode. So the other thing, okay. So that's you have to be willing to make some sort of sacrifice if you want to achieve a goal, whether that's in running or in any other area of your life. The problem that we often see a lot of people making though, is that there are actually sacrificing the wrong things. Like the things that people are choosing to sacrifice don't actually line up with their goals. And a lot of times this comes in the way of sacrificing Long term wins for short term wins like so they're so focused on getting these short term wins like weight loss or speed That they're actually sacrificing their long term progress in that process

Kevin:

Yeah I mean if you go on some sort of to go to the extreme if you go on a crash diet super Restrictive diet you will likely lose weight in the short term, but this has long term repercussions for your health. You've got that study that you read that like when you lose weight, you tend to lose in a short period, you lose muscle, but then it comes back in the form of fat.

Angie:

More yes.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Angie:

Yeah. It's like when you're losing weight via calorie restriction, 25 to 50 percent of that weight loss is muscle. And when you gain that weight back, 80 percent of it is fat.

Kevin:

So this is like you

Angie:

without strength training and proper nutrition and that kind of thing, right? If it's just based on calorie restriction.

Kevin:

So if you go on like a crash diet, you are likely to lose some pounds on the scale, but it's going to, that weight is likely very likely to come back because it's not sustainable if you're like I need to get really fast. Cause I have a 5k in a month and you just, double down on speed work, but you don't have the foundation of mileage or the foundation of strength, you might get faster for a little while, but it's unsustainable because you don't have enough foundation. You're likely to get hurt and then coming off of injury, you'll be slower than when you started. So it's sacrificing the longterm because you want to get the result right now.

Angie:

Yeah, I think that's what leads a lot of runners to getting injured. They're trying to jump into a plan before they're actually ready for it because they want that. Immediate win, they want to be able to run that 5k run that 10k run that half marathon whatever it might be and instead of taking the time to build up to that goal and Take the right steps to make sure their body's ready for it They just jump into a plan and they're able to a lot of times people are able to accomplish that thing but then They're hurt and not able to run for an extended period of time afterwards.

Kevin:

Or they don't enjoy running. And maybe they could have really enjoyed that half marathon. Maybe half marathoning could be like a fun thing for them. Yeah. But they jumped into the half marathon plan. It said 12 weeks. They were like, all right, perfect. I have 12 weeks. I can do this. Even though they really would have benefited from I don't know, four, six, eight weeks of just some base building before they were actually ready to hop onto that plan.

Angie:

Yeah. And I think that this kind of takes me to one of my other points of a lot of people think that they have to sacrifice everything, right? Like in order to achieve this goal, I have to sacrifice everything. Everything like I'm not gonna go out with my friends like say someone wants to run their first marathon ever and So they have this idea in their head that they're gonna have to just they have to do everything differently They have to eat differently. They can't go out with their friends. They have to stop drinking alcohol They have to go to bed super early. They just put Every habit on overdrive and they end up resenting the process and it, the process no longer becomes enjoyable. Now, don't get me wrong. Other people might make those changes and absolutely love it. And find a totally new way of life, which is fantastic. So I'm not saying that you have to go out with your friends or you have to drink alcohol or anything like that. I'm just saying that like when people sacrifice a lot of the things that they're currently doing. And like for the sake of a goal, they end up resenting the process and then really resenting the goal. And then when they achieve that goal, it's that wasn't worth it. Cause I had to give up everything that I enjoyed doing for the sake of that goal. When in reality, you actually don't have to most likely give up everything that you were doing before. You might have to change things, but also when you make changes more slowly and implement things more gradually, it feels better. Less of a sacrifice like it doesn't feel oh, I have to give up all of these things It's just like this natural transition into this new way of life versus like someone that's trying to do it all Right now super quickly, you know like a shotgun marathon

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean your unsustainable sacrifice is it's not gonna lead to any sort of long term goals I was trying to come up with his name as you were going through that but there's the You I want to say Norwegian speed skater, Niels, and I'm blanking on his last name.

Angie:

Boer? No, that's like a physicist. That's a physicist. That's,

Kevin:

yeah. I think it's like Vanderpoel, but I'm just guessing on that one. But anyway, he won the two, he set a world record in the last Olympics. And, He trained ridiculously hard. No one would question the amount of training that he put into it, but he took his weekends off.

Angie:

Oh, this is the guy. Yeah. You were telling me about him.

Kevin:

He took his weekends off and he didn't just take his weekends off. He like would go out, stay up late, head out to the bar, go out partying with his friends, like he wanted a full blown, exactly what his peer contemporaries were doing who were not training to be world class athletes. So that's how he spent his Saturday Sunday or his Friday Saturday. I don't know how his week went down, but five days out of the week was all in training for 10 ish hours a day. And then on the weekend it was all in no training at all. I'm going to eat whatever I feel like I'm going out with my friends. This is what was available to eat. Great. That's what I'm eating. But then it started on Monday morning and he was completely locked in on training top to bottom nutrition, strength training, everything. So he found that this was the most sustainable way that he could train. He had done it. the prior Olympics and had good results. I'm pretty sure he meddled in the previous ones, but this time he came back with this new I don't know, extremely polarized training of all in and then completely not all in training. And it led to two world records. It was the more sustainable process for him.

Angie:

I'm guessing he was probably like 25

Kevin:

gotta be

Angie:

okay. Cause that's not what we would recommend. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're like, Oh, maybe I should try that. Especially if you're over 40, not recommend it. Like you're going to need some help. Some time to recover from that weekend. If you, I'm

Kevin:

Just giving a specific counter example. Oh my word. Yeah, no, there's no way that I could go out and do what I did in my early twenties. I would not require, I wouldn't recover in this calendar year. That's just not going to happen.

Angie:

Yeah. So that's but the point is, and I think that I don't know details about this training. Kevin just told me about this the other day as well, but in my mind, what that's telling me is that. Before he felt like he was sacrificing too much and he wasn't willing to sacrifice that. And I think that there's a huge mental component to that of if you feel like you're just giving up everything for the sake of this goal, especially if he didn't get the same level of results that he wanted, right? Versus this time around, If you looked at his physical training side by side, I'd be curious to see what his physical training actually consisted of and how similar it was or how much more or less he did.

Kevin:

It was comparable number of hours per week, but on the first time he split it up over seven days and never had the off day where he recovered. So he literally referred to this as, Much more sustainable, a much more enjoyable process and felt like he could continue to do it. Whereas like exactly what you said, he felt like he was missing out on too many things. The first time he resented the training because he never got to do other things. He may have gone a little too far, but

Angie:

I think, but that's arguable, right? It doesn't seem like it seems like he was able to enjoy his training and set multiple world records. The outcomes were great as well, but I think that's that mental part of it is I enjoyed the heck out of this process and therefore when he got to competition, he was in a much different mental space as well, but he was like, I love this process. It went really well. Now let me go out there and kill it and show what I've been doing this whole time versus and obviously I'm just making this up because I don't know what was in his head, but the first time around like he probably got there and was A lot more drained, just entering the Olympics than this time around. Oh,

Kevin:

surely you like, you had to be more drained because the process was it was like, look at all these things that I've given up for the past multiple years, I better get the results. There's so much more pressure when you feel like the process involves all of this sacrifice. You're going to be super nervous. If there's a race at the end of it, you're going to be incredibly nervous because what if the results don't work out the way that you want? Then all of those things that you've been sacrificing. just doesn't seem like it's been worthwhile. You gave up all this stuff and you didn't get the results.

Angie:

Yeah. And I think that is what happens to a lot of people when they go on diets as well. Like when we talk about things being sustainable, people think that in order to lose weight, I have to give up all sweet treats. Like I have to just give up all sugar and I'm never allowed to have any sort of sugar. And if you're someone that. Like sugar and that you enjoy, birthday cake or ice cream or other things, right? If you are going to have to give that up, quote unquote, have to give that up, right? That's what you've told yourself that you have to give this up and you can't have any of these sweet treats because sugar is bad for you, quote, unquote, bad for you. I'm not saying that this is just an example of sugar. The way that some people think that's going to be a lot more unsustainable because every time you look at something sweet or something that has sugar in it and you desire that or want that, you're going to be like reminding yourself that you can't have that. And the human brain doesn't like that. The human brain does not like being told that they can't have something, right? Even if you think that is what's best for you. to achieve your goal.

Kevin:

All right. I'm going to go to another one that that hits personal for me. I live for a while into the idea that as long as I was exercising, I was living a healthy lifestyle and I was willing to sacrifice my sleep in order to make sure that I was getting in the required amount of training at a very nice, rounded training. I was just making sure that in order to get it all in, I would either get up extra early or stay up extra late, or sometimes Both because I needed to make sure that I knocked off everything on my training plan, that was the best way of doing it. And it turns out that just giving up sleep when that is always the first thing that you're willing to sacrifice is also not a very good long term sustainable plan. I was mentioning that the other day in class I was teaching and someone's Oh, I'll get to that. I'll get to my homework later. I just, maybe I just won't sleep tonight. And I was like, that seems like a great plan. I had the same plan, but. Eventually that whole, I'll sleep later. It led to three seizures in a calendar year for me. And there were like several kids in the classroom that didn't know my background. I had jaws dropped. It was really a train entertaining because I said it so casually, like I'm so comfortable with like my backstory now that I was like, it's just, it's not really a good, healthy, sustainable plan. So I would suggest that maybe you have a different plan, like use this class period to do your homework. Now it was just a suggestion.

Angie:

Yeah. And so in your mind at that point in time, you were, it was a good idea for you to sacrifice sleep for more workouts.

Kevin:

And because then I could still spend time with the kids because that's when the kids were younger that I was like if they're awake, I should be able to spend time with them. So I guess I'll just stay up late. Later or get up super early and go for a run,

Angie:

right? So going back to our first point of you are unwilling to sacrifice time with the kids and you are unwilling to sacrifice your workout. So you chose to sacrifice sleep instead, and that kind of goes to this point of people are willing to sacrifice the wrong things a lot of times, like overall. Those were not the choices that you needed to make for you to be the long term healthy runner like it led to Very good short term results, and I always want to point that out to people to like you won a marathon Operating on that until you had a seizure six weeks later,

Kevin:

right? That's the thing is If you only got the start of 2017, like 2017 seemed like a really good fitness year for me right up until the first seizure and then it went downhill from that, but not even strongly downhill because I had a good race in between seizure one and seizure two. So it still, it was short term results, but leading towards real longterm bad issues.

Angie:

Bad. Yeah. So like another one that I see people. Doing a lot as well is sacrificing progress for variety. So when we talk about, sacrificing the wrong things there and they don't realize that they're doing it But people have this idea that like I just need to mix it up I need to be doing the next best thing like they see something. It's like the shiny object syndrome and like sometimes feeling bored Is okay. And sometimes feeling bored with your workouts and with your exercise is necessary to make progress. Like progress is merit many times due to consistency and sometimes consistency is boring. Like being a runner and training for a marathon, a half marathon, even a 10 K or a five K, a lot of your runs are going to be like, go out and run at an easy pace. And then sometimes like once or twice a week, you get to throw in some speed work. And then you've got some strength exercises and people. Um, talk about strength workouts all the time, and they're like pulling up exercises on YouTube or on Peloton or like all these different apps, and they're just like picking random workouts because they want their workouts to entertain them. And But when they do that, they end up missing on a lot of the necessary exercises that are actually going to help make them a stronger runner.

Kevin:

There's something we said for variety of making sure, what's the thing? Muscle confusion is the popular term. It's bologna. Oh yeah no. That's what I was setting you up for was actually, I was not sure what word you were choosing, but bologna is a good one. Yeah. But. We'll keep it

Angie:

PG for this one. Yeah.

Kevin:

Perfect. But the whole idea of I got to keep coming up with new exercises. No, you don't. You could probably do three different speed workouts just on loop continuously and get yourself in phenomenal running shape you could probably pick one workout and just vary the intensity and the recovery of it and Cover all of your different training intensities. I don't know you could probably come up with what two different 30 minute weight routines and cover everything that I would need to cover and not ever really need to cycle out of that over the course of a year.

Angie:

Pretty much. Yeah. Like you definitely can because there's multiple exercises that can work the same body parts like this, but ultimately there are certain exercises and certain movement patterns that you have to incorporate in your weightlifting, in your strength training, because Those are foundational movement patterns that we need to strengthen pretty much as humans, but then also as runners, like a squat, like you can't get away from squats. There are different ways to do squats. There are different ways to incorporate squats in your routine, but if you want to be strong, you got to do squats like that's people might argue with me on that, like deadlifts. That's another important one. Like you have to do some sort of hinge movement, like deadlifts help to. Improve your horizontal force. Squats help improve your vertical force like there's lots of different ways. You can incorporate those types of movements into your routine, and that's what a lot of people are like. I can. We just mix it up all the time like you can. But are you willing to sacrifice your progress? Most people will make more progress by doing the same exercises For a minimum of four to six weeks. You can even stretch that out. You can even do that more like eight to 12 weeks or even a little bit longer, depending on your experience with strength training. If you go to talk to any like bodybuilder or any of the muscle guys in the gym, they do the same things over and over. And they've got very big muscles. So they are proof. That the same things work, they always do a chest press, they always do a squat, they always do a deadlift, like there are these foundational movements that We all need as human and it has runners. I would argue single leg exercises are a part of that as well. We should all be doing some sort of single leg strengthening and balance types of exercises like it's just foundational to help with lots of different things, including decreasing your risk of injury,

Kevin:

but You could come up probably, I'm not gonna put you on the spot on this, but if I said come up with a list of good single leg exercises, you could probably rattle off 10, but you don't necessarily need to then work your way through all 10 because you could probably find one that is good for you and just ride that out now to go back to the idea of everybody needs to do a squat. There are different ways and forms that you could do a squat. Is there a negative of just putting a standard back squat into your strength routine and just having that always be a component?

Angie:

No.

Kevin:

Okay, great. So that's one of the things maybe if you want variety and a couple of the other things, because I bet it's probably easier to come up with a list of single leg exercises than to come up with variations off of a squat. Just for crying out loud, go squat.

Angie:

There are, there's. There are different ways you can do a squat, right? There's a barbell back squat, you could do a front squat, you could do a goblet squat. There's different ways that you can do squats.

Kevin:

But once you pick one, could you just ride that one out? It's okay, I've got like my standard loop that I do when I'm doing an easy run. And sometimes I have a little extra time, and so I add on a little extra to it. But I basically, on my personal easy loop, is going to be somewhere between six and a half and eight miles. Because that's the time I have in the morning. I don't change it and be like, Ooh, I wonder if I turn right instead of left. It's just, it's the same loop every time and I'm getting the benefit out of it. To me, that's like squat. Just pick the variety that you like the best and just do that.

Angie:

And I think that it actually. Is very beneficial to do that as well because it takes away some of the decision fatigue that a lot of people have of like good one trying to figure out like, Oh, what am I going to do today for my strength training? And then you have to spend time to find a workout and then look at the workout and then follow the workout. Do I have the equipment? Do I know how to do these exercises? Because if you've never done the exercise before, maybe you're not quite sure if that's If you're doing it correctly, and if you don't have someone there watching you, you're not a hundred percent positive do the exercises that you're familiar with that you already know are going to give you the results that you want. And if you need variety, I shouldn't say need, if you want variety, like you definitely don't need variety. You can do the same exercises because there's a lot of different ways you can change your workout to change the stimulus, right? So for example, squats, you can lift heavy. Say five repetitions, five sets of five, right? Do it like lifting heavy. Then there's other, then you can mix it up and you could change like the speed and the tempo. Maybe you work out at home like I do. And I don't have access to infinite, Number of weights like I have certain number of dumbbells and the dumbbells that I have right now are not the heaviest like I can definitely lift heavier because when I go to the weight room at school at the high school that we coach at like I can lift way heavier than what I currently do at home, but So at home with my lighter weights, I have to change the way that I'm squatting. So I do it slower. I do it like where you can, you squat down and you hold it at the bottom and then you come up slower, you lower slower. So playing with the tempo and the speed of the workout of the movement, that changes what you do, like changing exactly where you're holding the dumbbells can change, like the forces on the body. So there's ways that you can. Mix it up, but still be doing the same movement that you're talking about.

Kevin:

All right. It sounds excellent. The next one I want to bring up, I think might be the counter to it is some people sacrifice joy for the sake of consistency, which seems weird because we are very big on consistency over almost everything else. We're

Angie:

also very big on joy and like bringing, making sure that you have joy and you're running as well.

Kevin:

Boop. I think one of the biggest reasons for making sure that you always have joy in what you're doing is because it encourages consistency. So if you're sacrificing joy because your schedule says I've got to go out and run five miles. Oh, I've got a long run 12 on the weekend and I've got to go do it in. You don't have any desire. Like it goes back to our motivation podcast that we did last time, two times back, I don't know, recently. If, yeah,

Angie:

I think it was last time.

Kevin:

If you were just mentally drained and you have to drag yourself out the door every single time you've lost the joy, maybe just take a couple of days off in that you're, I know it seems like that's awkward coaching advice to be like, Ooh, but you're going to lose your consistency. What if you lose some of your training momentum? What if you detrain, you're not going to detrain over the course of a couple of off days. And it might just allow you to have a little spark of enjoyment when you get back into it. And that's where. Variety might be helpful. Okay. If the whole idea of doing the same workout on the same loop, every time sounds just mind numbing and awful, one, make sure that when you sign up for a marathon, that it's not like a super repeat course, because that might not be the good choice for you. But. Find something that allows you to still enjoy most of the days that you're going out there. You don't have to be like sunshine and rainbows and super smiling after every workout. Some of them you do have to just get through the workouts, but most of them should be enjoyable

Angie:

in some way, right? I think that's the little asterix, that little caveat that it should be, there should be some sort of joy. And sometimes that joy is the long term joy that you're getting, right? You, that like you're acting and becoming the person that you want to be sometimes that's the joy because there are lots of days and that's why I'm glad that you said this and I just want to reiterate it that. Every day is not supposed to be joyful completely, but like the idea of who you're becoming or that goal that you're working towards, that could be what's driving the joy. Like even if the exact workout on that day is not bringing you a ton of joy.

Kevin:

Yeah, sometimes you just don't want to squat. Sometimes you're doing quarter repeats and you're like, I can't do another quarter. And it might not be the most joyful at that exact moment, but you can see joy over the longterm. And like I said, every workout doesn't have to be enjoyable all the way through. Maybe if that's the work that you have to get through, the next one might be an easy day. And maybe you have a whole lot of fun with that. Or maybe the reverse. Maybe you have to get through the easy days because you enjoy the speed work.

Angie:

Yeah. And I think that, you just said sometimes people are sacrificing joy. For consistency, but then it could, it can go the other way around as well, which is what I was talking about, like you're, you sacrifice consistency for joy or for a variety thinking that you have to be mixing things up all the time and keep it, keep yourself entertained when the better thing for you to do is just go out and do the same darn loop again, or do that same set of squats again. So yes, we literally did just say the same thing, the opposite thing of each other. And that's because. It's not like there's one thing that's always right. There are some people that do one thing and there are some people that do the other thing. And then there's one person that does both of those things at different times in their running or in their week or in their training cycle.

Kevin:

It would be really nice if this is all just so clear cut and black and white, and we could all just take a really strong opinion on it, but unfortunately it's all nuanced and living in the gray area.

Angie:

Yeah. Alright, now we talked about so far we've talked about people that are unwilling to make sacrifices, which we now understand you have to make some sort of sacrifices. You just have to decide which sacrifices you are or are not willing to make. And then the fact that people are sometimes sacrificing the wrong things to get the, to, and that are actually not leading them to the results that they want. And then there comes down to this principle of Just make room for what you want and forget the rest. And I know that this seems very oversimplified, which is why I think a lot of people won't do it because they, they hear it and they're like I can't just drop everything else that I'm doing because all of this stuff's important, but is it like, there's a lot of people that believe it can't be that easy, but there's many things that we do in our training that, That might not actually be moving the needle. That might not actually be necessary for you to make the progress that you want to make. I think that when I have this conversation with people of like, when I see, get a new client in. And I do the, look over their intake form and I see what they're doing and the answer is, I think you need to do less. People have a really hard time with that and it's funny because so many of us have been conditioned to believe that more is better and if I just, if I want different results, I just have to do more and I can, I have to work out every single day. Otherwise I'm going to gain weight. Otherwise I'm going to lose speed. Otherwise I'm going to lose endurance and that's simply not true, especially as we get older. It's true. As we get older and we move, past the age of 40 into our fifties and beyond the it's much more a quality over quantity thing where. You, it's more important for you to do the right things versus doing all the things. And you can often get much better results if you focus on doing the right things versus just trying to add more and more to your workout schedule.

Kevin:

This comes up with a big issue, especially for people who have been training for a while, is They were doing a certain amount of things and they stopped getting results. They hit a plateau. So they added a few extra things and it allowed them to break through that plateau. And then they hit another plateau and they're like, Oh now I should do this thing. And anytime you get a new stimulus, it is going to help encourage you to break through. But if you keep adding new stimuluses, new stimuli without taking away anything without, it, Is it a sacrifice to remove part of your training plan to be like I have to cut this part out because I'm going to bring in this new thing. You might not need all of them anymore. You might have God, I tried to figure this number out the other day and the answer is it's too big. I have so many years of running experience that how much more just, easy mileage. Do I really need to get in? Would I benefit from taking an extra off day? Would I benefit more from removing an easy run day and putting it onto a bike or an elliptical? So there's less wear and tear. There's less pounding, but I still have this like underlying like running background. Some people, when you're getting into running, it's helpful to go out and run because your body has to get used to the pounding forces. I've got 20 plus years of getting used to the pounding 25 plus

Angie:

close to 30.

Kevin:

I have almost 30 years of pounding forces. My knees are fine. My knees are like, yeah, we get it. You're going to run. It's going to be some impact. This is how we handle it. So is it necessarily beneficial to continue putting out all the runs on every single day? And I think that I'm getting the point where we, Might need to get some truck crustering equipment in the garage.

Angie:

Yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think that there's a lot of people that get to this point after the age of 40, where you have to convince them to pull back on their mileage because they genuinely like to go out for their run. Number one, or number two, they just believe that if they pull back, they're going to automatically decline. Like they have this belief that they can't do less because they've been doing all of this and they've probably. that maybe their times are getting a little slower. It's so I can't do less. What are you talking about? I have to do more because that's how we've been conditioned. And then there's the other piece that I often see a lot too, is that there's a lot of people that don't actually know what they want. They know they want to get better, but they have a hard time getting specific. And so they're just trying to get. Go after all of it at the same time. Like they want to achieve that. I want to improve my speed and my endurance and my strength. I want to do all of it. I want to do all of it right now. And it's that's another big conversation that I have to have with people. It's You can do all of these things, but if you're trying to do all of them at the same time, it's not going to go that well, and your progress is going to be much, much slower. You can, it's just going to take a lot longer, and you're going to feel a lot more tired during this process. The process can be much more enjoyable if we focus on one, we still don't ignore anything else. Nothing ever gets neglected, totally. We just decide that this is going to be the focus for this training cycle, or for this year, or for this six months, or whatever it might be. time. And then we go all in on that, and Use like the rest of the workouts to support that goal.

Kevin:

Yeah, but it goes down to deciding which aspect you really want. And, like you said, there are people who can't figure out which thing to truly chase. They enjoy all of the paths.

Angie:

I've fallen into this trap so many times, believe me.

Kevin:

Oh yeah, no I'm, I've done this one so many times, because apparently I've been running for almost 30 years. So I've done this path repeatedly. I've, I have worn a steady path down this road. But if you know what it is that you're going for, then you have a better chance of actually. Getting the thing if you just take an overall approach This is what happens sometimes when I'm grading math papers a kid gets to a problem and they don't know what to do And so they solve it in four different ways get four different answers and then don't circle any of them and they'll be like I don't know. He'll figure out which one's right. No, you don't know what you're doing like that What they showed is they don't know how to answer the question. That's essentially what happened. People do the same thing in their training. They're not sure what the goal actually is. And so they do a little bit of speed and they do a little bit of extra endurance and they add in a new strength thing. And then they hit YouTube and added an extra strength thing. They're doing all of the things and maybe they're improving general fitness, but they're not striving towards any goal. So how do you know if you're actually like when you get there?

Angie:

Yeah. If you don't have the goal defined, it's going to be very difficult to know. So yeah, sacrifice. So I think that's, those are essentially the points that we wanted to discuss in this podcast. So hopefully you guys have a better understanding of, this idea that sacrifice is necessary. Make sure that you're sacrificing the right things for your goals and also understand that you could be. Sacrificing things that you don't need to that you could actually be training less and getting better results and like you could Just decide to make that choice and let go of the rest of it as well. Like sacrifice isn't always The way to your goals like or I should say like it's a different type of sacrifice. I guess it's in a way giving up and sacrificing that old belief system that a lot of people have of more is better and I just have to do more to improve like we might have to you know, put that On the altar and let that one burn down.

Kevin:

Yeah. That might be the way to sum all of this up is sacrificing your old belief system actually allows you to achieve brand new change to create a new person yourself. Ultimately you have to sacrifice your previous belief. Beliefs and that's how you change and that's how you get a breakthrough

Angie:

and that ultimately and this is the scary part is that You have to sacrifice your old self,

Kevin:

right? And that's well That's the terrifying part because no one everybody feels safe and secure with themselves Because you're not sure what that new self is going to be. That's where the fear shows up

Angie:

Yeah, and that's one of the, that's one of the reasons that like, just taking those little steps, step by step can really help you and then all of a sudden you turn around and you look at where you were a year ago and you realize, oh, I'm a different person now.

Kevin:

You're like, oh look, I did, I just tiptoed my way and I'm no longer in the cave and now I'm all the way out here.

Angie:

Yeah, which is a good thing. Alright you guys, if you have not yet, If you enjoyed this episode, we would love it if you were to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. All you have to do is pause this. If you're listening to us on Apple Podcasts, just hit pause, hit the button that says Real Life Runners with Kevin and Angie Brown that will take you to the main episode, the main show page, scroll down a little bit and you'll see a section called ratings and reviews. You'll see some stars. Just tap that five star button. Tap on the thing that says, write a review and take 30 seconds to tell us what you enjoyed about this show. We would love that and appreciate that so much. And if you're listening to this on Spotify, you can still go over to Apple podcasts and leave us a review. And cause you can just leave us a star rating on Spotify. But not actually a review,

Kevin:

but feel free to give us five stars on Spotify. Also five stars all over the place.

Angie:

Yeah, absolutely. And then also if you screenshot Just send it to a friend, share it on social media, help more people find the show so that we can help more runners to feel good in their training and understand how to train better after the age of 40. So as always guys, thanks for joining us. This has been the Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 386. Now get out there and run your life.