Recently my buddy Sean sent a text message that said, “Been running a lot of 9–9:40 miles early. It feels pretty nice at that pace.”
I replied, “Oh, man. Easy runs can never be too slow. That’s floaty heaven right there.” It is. Though, maybe not for me.
Let me explain. But, first, I want to make clear that I’m not pace-shaming anybody here. I think all running speeds are relative, and we all have our moments of “fast” and, well, “not.” For so long, my “easy” pace has generally hovered somewhere around 8 minutes. That dates back to when I was a kid in the late 1900s (as I’ve been told the younger generation refers to it). You find the rhythm that just feels so darn good, so effortless that you’re confident you could hold it all day without ever tiring. The numbers on a watch don’t matter, right?
But it’s the numbers part that’s killing me. On days that I craved “floaty heaven,” when I was rundown from marathon training Health - Injuries beers the night before, I’d find myself pushing too hard because I knew when I uploaded the run to Strava, The Best Running Music to Add to Your Playlist.
Would they? Doesn’t matter. In my head, they were/are. And no matter how I tried to talk myself into anything else reasonable, I was always going to have some internal pressure to scoot down the road just a bit faster.
I couldn’t change my relationship with the number. It was clear that I had to change my relationship with Strava.
I started questioning my use of the social network when I moved to Easton, Pennsylvania, a few years ago. I’d long overshared details of my every workout; my earliest run on the platform is from May 2007, even though Strava didn’t launch until two years after that. (When it did, I uploaded my Garmin Connect history.) Back then, I lived in a big city where there were dozens of apartments near my start and end points, so I felt anonymous to a certain degree. Easton is a much smaller city, and my location data gave away a little more than I felt anybody truly needed to know. I tightened up some privacy settings, those with which you, too, may be familiar, but the seed had been planted: Why do I still share all this stuff in the first place?
Part of the reason is the same allure of any social network: Some of us want large followings of people patting us on the back and telling us we’re great. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to rack up kudos—but is that what we’re hoping to get from this sport? I didn’t want to whack Strava completely. I like seeing my friends jogging in really cool places or turning in incredible race performances. So the simplest thing to do was to stop wearing a watch. This wasn’t new territory, as I got my start in track well before GPS running watches were invented. For my first decade as a runner, I didn’t own any watch.
I replied, “Oh, man cheap Casio that had nothing more than a stopwatch function. Afterward, I’d enter “45 minutes” into my other training log. (I coded my own online training log, one that can’t go belly up if some outside market forces or circumstances drive changes to somebody else’s business model—see Daily Mile, Athleticore, Strands.) I didn’t really need to know the distance, because my 4.2-mile town loop wasn’t going to get longer or shorter just because I didn’t measure it that day, and I generally know where every mile mark is anyway. And, I didn’t really need to know the pace because, when jogging easy, it’s largely meaningless. Or it should be.
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But then I feared that my silence on Strava just made it look like I wasn’t running at all!
Oh, boy, I’d messed up doubly.
I changed my account to “followers only” and purged 750 followers. Yes, I sat there late into the night clicking the gear icon next to each name, one by one, then on the “remove follower” button. (Sorry if you were one of those folks.) My intention was that my log would be seen only by the runners I know personally, the locals I share roads with, the speedy masters I’ve raced against over the years, and even a handful of people I’ve never met in real life but who I have formed relationships with in places like Instagram.
I felt an immediate relief. I believe the people who actually know me don’t care how fast I run. Heck, many of them have been at this game for as long as I have and are There are thousands of miles ahead of me to kick around that internal debate that I am. I’m having a whole lot more fun these days every time I head out the door.
A few times a week, I get a follower request. I’ve been convincing myself to ignore them for now. As I grow and get comfortable with the runner I am today—and how much I want to share—I may widen that network again.
Or I might just go back to a paper log.
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RW+ Membership Benefits Runner’s World and the director of product testing. He has tested and reviewed running shoes, GPS watches, headphones, apparel, and more for nearly two decades. He regularly tests more than 100 pairs of shoes each year, and once had a 257-day streak running in different models. Jeff can usually be found on the roads, racing anything from the mile to a marathon, but he also enjoys racing up mountains and on snowshoes. When he’s not running, you’ll probably find him hanging from a ladder making repairs and renovations to his house (he’s also director of product testing for Popular Mechanics).
