Back when I first started "running", my father gave me his beat-up copy of The Self-Coached Runner. There's one line in there has stayed with me for years about how your mental endurance will run out before your physical endurance. I suppose it's a variation on coaches telling their athletes that winning a game is more mental than physical, how players "psyching" themselves up is at least as important as warming themselves up. But specifically knowing that your mind will try to get you to quit before your body gives out just kind of fascinates me. Sometimes it's simply a matter of resistance disguising itself as boredom. That got me to thinking about a silly pattern I often get into where I try to reach a new milestone every time I exercise. Last time I did two 9-minute miles, so today I have to do three. That kind of thing. That's not training. That's keeping myself from getting bored. It's much easier to go out only a few times and make it a big (for me) outlandish challenge. The trick is to go out on the easy training days. The LSD (long slow distance) days. All the in-between days. I realized that I want the "hallelujah" runs. The ones where I'll call up Alex or my dad afterward and tell them what new marker I passed or the ones where I'll look around the gym and think to myself as I watch people schlepping along with their 12-minute-miles, "That, people, is how it's done!" (Yes I am aware that making this statement, even silently to myself, automatically qualifies me for membership in The Flat Earth Society.) But the point is that the little tests give me a boost of excitement, an adrenaline rush. I do the same thing in writing, in motherhood, in many areas of my life. I push hard for short bursts of time to avoid real discipline. Trying for a 7-minute-mile is like having four projects due in the next week. It's like taking Wally to the aquarium then meeting friends for lunch in the park then stopping by an environmental fair then riding on the carousel then meeting up with other friends for a concert on the river and making zucchini bread. (Then being exhausted the next day and doing nothing at all.) Tortoise and the hare stuff. It's easier to go out and do the "look at me" runs than it is to run five easy miles without fanfare, the run that will actually strengthen your muscles. It's more fun to impress people by sight-reading a new song than it is to practice it daily and eventually get it right. It's the story you write in a flash of inspiration, not the daily task of writing pretty terrible stuff, and working it over and over. It's the whirlwind day with your kids where you report later, "Look at everything we did!" (even just to yourself) rather than the quiet hours of sitting next to a toddler while he pokes one little finger into a dirty spot on the floor and says, "What's that? What's that?" In the beginning of The Ladybug Principles manuscript my dad and I wrote, he recounted an episode from his days of college track where he went from first to last place when running a relay. He lost all the time in a tunnel. The trick, he said, is not to run fast when the crowd is cheering you on. It's to run fast when it's dark and you're alone. The same is true for most things in life. All those little tests are a way to keep from the real task. It's wanting enlightenment without chopping any wood. It's wanting to be on stage at CBGBs on a Saturday night, but walking out on a rehearsal that's too hot and frustrating and tense on a song you've already played a million times. The trick is not jumping over these imaginary hurdles, the ones we invent to satisfy our adrenaline addiction, to keep ourselves from getting bored. It's jumping over the real one, the resistance to pacing ourselves, to going little by little, to making a real commitment to the things and people that are important to us, not to how good it feels when someone says, "That's amazing" about something we did. The trick is in staying with a task when there's no reward other than doing it. When we do it not to feel great today, but to feel good about the way we live our lives. To--when it's dark and we're alone--know that we're doing our best to be dedicated runners or writers or whatever else we want to be. To be good parents, without fanfare or excitement. To be good people.