Coronavirus

I’ve never seen more runners starting over than I have within the last year. Many, like me, have had to start over after a bout of Coronavirus. Others have had to do so after race cancellations robbed them of motivation. Even outside of pandemic years, though, starting over is a common phenomenon in running. More often than not, injuries are the reason.

How to start running again

Endurance athletes of other types have to start over too sometimes, but running’s high-impact nature makes it special. Numbers don’t lie: Runners get injured far more often than swimmers, cyclists, rowers, cross-country skiers, and stand-up paddleboarders, and the comeback process is trickier. As someone who has been through this process more times than I care to remember, and has also coached many other runners through it, I know the do’s and don’ts. Here are my top five do’s for starting over with running:

1. Use the 48-Hour Rule

If you’ve gone more than three weeks without running, you can trust that the tissues of your lower extremities have lost some durability—a classic case of “use it or lose it.” To regain this durability, you need to expose your legs to repetitive impact, but you also must give them sufficient time to adapt to this stress between bouts. Hence the 48-hour rule. In the first two weeks of your return, limit yourself to every-other-day running. This will help you avoid shin splints and other issues that commonly set runners back when they’re starting over.

2. Lean on Cross-Training

If you limit yourself to doing only as much running as you can without undue risk, you won’t get fit very quickly. Thankfully, there’s a plethora of low- and nonimpact options for cardio exercise that you can use to supplement your running and accelerate your fitness development. These options include cycling, elliptical running, and uphill treadmill walking.

You can further accelerate your comeback by doing some work at high intensity. There’s a tendency among runners who are starting over to do everything at low intensity under the assumption that, when your fitness level is low, you can’t handle high intensity. This isn’t true. Research has shown that even elderly cancer patients can handle and benefit from high-intensity exercise. Sure, you might not be very good at high-intensity exercise when you’re just starting over, but that’s not the same as being unable to handle it.

In fact, in one sense, there’s no better time for high-intensity training than when you’re starting over, because a little goes a long way. A good starting point might be two light interval sets per week, such as 6 x 20 seconds in Zone 5 and 4 x 1 minute in Zone 4.

3. Listen to Your Body

It’s okay to have a plan for your running comeback, but know that your body is going to have the last word regardless. High energy levels and low levels of pain and soreness indicate that you can safely increase your training load, while fatigue and moderate to high levels of pain or soreness are cautions to take it slow. Don’t make too many assumptions about what your comeback will or should look like. Be willing to take the occasional step back in response to pain or fatigue to spare yourself from a greater involuntary setback.

When I was coming back from COVID in the spring of 2020, I went out for a 23-mile run that became a 12-mile run when I discovered it just wasn’t my day, and I’d be foolish to force my way through the planned distance. Four days later, I tried again and succeeded. Who knows who deep a hole I would have dug for myself if instead I’d forced it the first time. Let that be a lesson to you!

4. Focus on Now

Runners who are starting over after extended time away from training often get stuck in the past or in the future. Some beat themselves up by comparing themselves unfavorably to the runner they were in the past, while others fret over how far they have to go to reach their desired level of fitness. Both of these orientations drain all the fun out of training and lead to poor decisions. In particular, runners who fail to embrace where they are in the process tend to try to rush it, which never ends well.

When an athlete I coach starts looking back or ahead in unhelpful ways, I tell them this: “As long as you’re training, you’re either already fit or getting fitter, and neither is bad.” Those who take my advice find that, by focusing on the present, they are able to enjoy getting fitter despite being unfit just as much as they enjoy being fit. Now you try!

5. Keep it Fun

Speaking of fun, I strongly believe that enjoyment should be a top priority at all times in training. It’s hard to improve when you’re not having fun, and it’s equally hard not to improve when you are having fun. At the beginning of a comeback, many runners make the mistake of thinking, “If I can just get through this awkward first phase, I can start enjoying my training again.”

Wrong attitude! The first phase will be far less awkward and more fruitful if you make enjoyment a point of emphasis. Do whatever it takes to stay positively engaged in the process, whether it be by mixing up run formats and venues to running with people (or pets) whose company you enjoy.

Some of my fondest running memories are of times when I was starting over after an interruption. The same can be true for you if you practice the tips I’ve just given you.

In December 2011, Manhattan-based psychologist Bob Bergeron put the finishing touches on a book titled The Right Side of Forty: The Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife and Beyond. To mark the occasion, he posted the following cheerful announcement on his website: “I’ve got a concise picture of what being over forty is about and it’s a great perspective filled with happiness, feeling sexy, possessing comfort relating to other men and taking good care of ourselves.” Three weeks later, Bob Bergeron took his own life.

The tragic irony of this story is glaringly obvious, but for folks like me, Bob’s startling final act is also a stark reminder of how difficult it can be to practice what one preaches in the domain of self-help. Having learned about Bob from a terrific posthumous profile that appeared in The New York Times in April 2012, I’ve been thinking about him often lately in the leadup to the release of my new book The Comeback Quotient: A Get-Real Guide to Building Mental Fitness in Sport in Life. In it, I preach the importance of making the best of the challenges we face as athletes—and as humans—by facing reality fully. It’s a message that I genuinely believe in and try to practice in my own life, but doing so has never been more testing for me than it is in the context of my present situation.

It started with a single bad workout—a set of 600-meter intervals that I was forced to abandon because I just didn’t have it that day. But it didn’t stop there—not by a long shot. Within a couple of weeks I had completely eliminated fast runs of all varieties as well as long runs from my training schedule, leaving only “easy” runs that felt anything but easy, even at a pace that was 90 seconds per mile slower than normal. By then I was feeling lousy not only during runs but also at rest. The first thing I noticed was a persistent run-down feeling. This symptom was followed in short order by a host of others, including erratic pulse, shortness of breath, tremulousness, excessive thirst, headache, lightheadedness, numbness, sleep changes, brain fog, memory loss, and affective symptoms such as anhedonia, anxiety, and withdrawal.

It all started with a single bad workout…

Nearly two months have passed since that single bad workout, and I remain wholly unable to train in any meaningful sense of the word. Treadmill walking accounts for the majority of my exercise. I risk running outside only when I can’t bear another hour on the old hamster wheel. The last time I did so my heart rate climbed to 173 BPM at 8:40 per mile. My maximum heart rate is 181 BPM, and the last time I pegged it prior to unraveling was at the end of a 4:55 mile. I never know what I’m going to get on a given day. Last week I did exactly the same treadmill walk-run session on consecutive days. My heart rate was 40 beats per minute lower in the second session, yet I felt equally short of breath in both. It’s as if my autonomic nervous system has forgotten how to communicate with my cardiorespiratory system. In fact, I believe that’s precisely what’s happened—a phenomenon called dysautonomia.

Far from just sitting back and hoping the problem goes away, I’ve been pursuing a proper diagnosis as aggressively as though my livelihood depended on my ability to run, which it sort of does. My hunch is that I have post-acute COVID-19 syndrome, triggered somehow by exposure to wildfire smoke (which would explain the condition’s unusually belated onset in my case). The symptoms certainly match those reported by known PACS sufferers, and I was down with a very COVID-like illness for a full month after returning from the Atlanta Marathon in early March. Trouble is, I wasn’t able to get tested then, and by the time I got an antibody test in July the negative result meant little. Bloodwork shows nothing amiss, my lungs look good, and my heart checks out, and I now stand only one specialist away (neurologist) from perhaps being told—like all too many PACS patients—that there’s nothing wrong with me. It won’t be the end of the world if this does happen, however, because there’s little that doctors can do to treat the syndrome.

So, here I am, mired in the worst health situation I’ve ever confronted at just the moment I’m coming out with a book in which I tell other people how to deal with bad situations. As I said before, I earnestly believe that facing reality is the only way to make the best of any bad situation. That’s reason enough to practice what I preach in attempting to come back from this thing. But The Comeback Quotient gives me a compelling second reason, which is not being a lousy hypocrite!

3-Step Process in facing reality

In the book, I explain that facing reality is a three-step process. Here’s what the process looks like for me as I work to practice privately what I preach publicly.

Step 1: Accept Reality

It’s difficult to express how important running is to me. I’ve been doing it for more than 30 years, having started at age 11 under my father’s influence—a wonderful bonding point in my relationship with him. My two brothers run as well, and I could probably write an entire book (I promise I won’t) about all the ways the sport has brought us together over the years. I make my living by coaching runners and by writing about running, and remaining an active competitive runner myself has been a crucial source of the both experience and the sense of credibility I bring to these roles. Running is also my place of worship, the center of my spiritual experience, my prayer closet, where I feel closest to the divine. It is my greatest source of inner strength and self-discovery, without which I would literally be dead, as I’ve disclosed previously. All of this has been taken away from me.

I mean, I can still run a bit, but not in the way that matters. For me, running’s true richest are revealed only through the testing of physical and mental limits, pursuing mastery. When I have a big race in front of me that I’m focused on and progressing toward, everything else in my life lines up in a way that’s impossible to explain, and when that polestar is lacking for whatever reason, I feel adrift. Dave Scott said it better: “When I’m on, and when I feel good about my exercise and I’ve been on a good wave, I feel invincible. I can handle any kind of hurdle and I can meet any kind of challenge head-on. And when I don’t have it, when I don’t have that morphine-like endorphin feeling that resonates throughout my body, it affects everything. It affects my personality, it affects my confidence, it affects my ability to interact with other people.” Amen.

Recently I had a phone call with Jordan Metzl, an eminent sports medicine specialist I’ve known casually for some years, who I reached out to after I saw a piece he wrote for The New York Times about returning to athletic training after coronavirus. He told me that, although I needn’t worry that exercise in general is exacerbating my condition, as I have feared at times, under no circumstances should I attempt to actively progress in my exercise regimen until I’m feeling better. This advice would be easier to accept if I perceived I was on any sort of trajectory toward feeling better.

Running aside, I feel crappy to some degree all day every day. In my best moments, I barely notice my condition—unless I stand up, or walk, or climb a flight of stairs, when shortness of breath hits me with a gentle reminder, “Still here!” Other times it’s bad enough that I just have to stop whatever it is I’m trying to do and lie down. Evenings are the worst. When I sit in the living room with my wife, Nataki, sipping Sleepy Time tea and winding down, it sometimes seems as if an invisible giant has placed a thumb on the crown of my hard and begun to slowly squash me into the floor. At night I sleep so hard that when I wake up in the wee hours needing to use the bathroom I can barely peel myself off the mattress.

The docs seem most concerned about the numbness I’m experiencing. They’ve ordered an MRI of my cervical spine, suspecting, I suppose, that there’s a tumor or something lurking in there. I myself am less concerned about this particular symptom, which appears to be common in those with PACS, except when it’s at its most severe, like when I woke up in bed a few nights ago to discover that my entire left leg “gone to sleep” with that tingling, pins-and-needles sensation, frighteningly intense.

Before the headaches and brain fog hit, I used to tell Nataki, “Well, I might not be able to run, but at least I can still work.” Ah, those were the days! Reported almost universally by PACS sufferers, the brain-fog symptom is almost impossible to describe in a way that anyone who hasn’t experienced it can appreciate. Sometimes I come to with a start having heard Nataki say something to me and discover we’re in the care together or out walking. It’s like returning to reality from a trip to another dimension. How the heck did I even get here?

The other day Nataki accompanied me on another visit to the hospital, where I got an echocardiogram, after which we decided to pop into Costco to pick up a few things. When I pulled into the Walmart parking lot, Nataki gently asked what I was doing. We haven’t shopped at Walmart in years, making a special point of avoiding the store. Such cognitive glitches have struck a devastating blow to my confidence. Lately I’ve been entertaining fantasies of retiring. They’re only fantasies, but if I could afford to take some time off I would. I can’t, though, so instead I’ve scaled back my work activities where possible, saying no to stuff I would have said yes to before. I dread Zoom calls and regular business-related phone calls and, frankly, any contact with people other than my family and closest friends.

On November 22^nd, 60 Minutes aired a segment about a special research and clinical-care division for so-called “long-haulers” that has been created at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Thousands of patients have sought treatment there already. At the end of the segment, interviewer Anderson Cooper asked Dayna McCarthy, one of the division’s staff doctors, who herself has PACS, how many of those thousands had made a fully recovery so far. The answer was zero.

All of this is enough to make a stronger man than I am feel a little sorry for himself. But I refuse to go down this path, because ultrarealists—the masters of facing reality I describe in my book—don’t. Among these ultrarealists is Jamie Whitmore, a former world champion off-road triathlete who came back from a horrific cancer ordeal to win a gold medal in cycling at the 2016 Paralympics. When I sat down to interview Jamie last summer, she said to me regarding the darkest days of her ordeal, “I would allow myself to feel sorry for my situation or be angry at it for 15 minutes a day. After that, it doesn’t get you anywhere.”

To accept a bad situation is to resist actively wishing that things were otherwise. The more time and energy you give to wishing for a different reality, the less time and energy you are able to devote to changing that reality. Jamie Whitmore understood this, and I figure if she could limit her indulgence in self-pity to 15 minutes a day in a situation far worse than mine, then I certainly have no excuse for playing the pointless “Why me?” game.

In fact, I’m going a step further and resisting even hoping I get better. That might sound crazy to you, but think about it this way: When you’re 23 miles into a marathon and suffering like a dog, how much good does it do to hope the last 3 miles are easy? Less than none. You’re much better off accepting that it’s only going to get worse going forward and finding a way to cope with your suffering. Likewise, although I certainly do want to get better, there’s no telling how much longer I will continue to feel crappy, so instead of actively hoping I wake up one morning and don’t immediately feel short of breath on standing, I’m trying to be as okay as possible in my present state.

Step 2: Embrace Reality

Embracing the reality of a bad situation means committing to making the best of it. What stops a lot of athletes from embracing realities they have at least managed to accept is an all-or-nothing attitude toward their goals and wants. If their original goal falls out of reach, they struggle to muster the adaptability needed to come up with a fallback goal.

Ultrarealists can. Jamie Whitmore told me that her most satisfying athletic achievements were those she achieved after cancer because they required more of her. For ultrarealists, the true goal is always to make the best of the situation; hence, surviving in a bad situation can be every bit as satisfying as winning in a favorable situation.

I am embracing my current situation by looking at it as an opportunity to raise my level of mastery of endurance training. How much fitness and enjoyment of the process can I preserve despite my severe limitations? Doing my very best to stay as fit as possible and to enjoy exercise as much as possible for as long as I remain the way I am will demand degrees of creativity and resourcefulness that were never demanded of me in better times. In this effort I again draw inspiration from Jamie Whitmore, who in an interview she gave in the midst of her own travails said, “If someone tells me it’s impossible, I refuse to believe there is not another way to do things. . . Maybe I will not be able to get from point A to point B in a straight line anymore. But I will still get from point A to Point B.”

One of the ways I’ve found to get to Point B is indoor walk-run sessions. By walking 4 minutes for every 1 minute I jog, I get the emotional boost of knowing I haven’t abandoned running entirely in a way that doesn’t set me back. And by doing it on the treadmill, I can read as I go, and if there’s one thing I enjoy more than running, it’s reading.

Perhaps this seems rather pathetic, but what’s the alternative? I have faith that there is real satisfaction to be had in watching myself grow in other ways even as I regress physically.

Step 3: Address Reality

The well-known expression, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” is all about the three-step process of facing reality. To admit that life has given you lemons is to accept reality. To commit to making lemonade from those lemons is to embrace the reality. And to complete the process by actually producing lemonade from those lemons is to address reality.

Two things are needed above all to succeed in this final step: effort and judgment. In sports and elsewhere there tends to be too much focus on the role of raw effort and not enough on the equally important role of sound decision making in overcoming challenges and setbacks, and in my book I take pains to correct this imbalance. Nevertheless, if in the present context I could share only one element of the approach I’m taking to addressing my ongoing health woes, it would be the motivational element that fuels the effort I’m putting into it.

Every athlete, every human, is capable of great efforts. All it takes is the right motivation. The more it matters, the harder you’ll try. In the depths of my battle with coronavirus in the spring, I couldn’t wait to get back to training and racing. I wanted it for myself, and I was motivated enough to go from my first tentative test run to a 2:54 virtual marathon in just six-and-a-half weeks. (Here’s where the troll-minded decide I brought this thing on myself by coming back too quickly, to which I say, not so.) But this time is different. This time my will to overcome is fueled by a heartfelt desire to help others. At least 10 percent of people who get COVID-19 and survive will be left with long-term effects, and a certain percentage of this percentage will be fellow athletes. In coming back from PACS, I want to create a road map for others to do the same.

What I’m going through right now has caused me to reassess a lot of things on a deep level. In various past writings and interviews I’ve been candid in admitting that I’ve been driven by a desire to impress people for as long as I can remember. Earlier in my career, I much preferred being told that something I’d written was good than that something I’d written had done somebody some good. Lately, though, I feel myself letting go of this compulsion—or perhaps, better said, I feel it letting go of me. I do hope—in principle, not actively—that I get my health back, but at the same time I hope that I don’t go back to being the same person I was before. Whether I achieve the first hope is largely outside of my control. The second, however, is up to me, and I am determined not to let myself, or you, down.

There’s a runner I coach, we’ll call him Jeremy, who’s concerned about his weight. It’s not that he’s overweight and worried about developing type 2 diabetes or heart disease. Rather, Jeremy is light and lean but just not quite as light and lean as the elite trail runners whose ranks he aspires to join—and it bothers him.

In our most recent weekly call, Jeremy was out of sorts because he had just hopped on the scale for the first time in several weeks and discovered his weight hadn’t budged despite an increasing training load and consistent healthy eating. At one point he asked me, “Do you think there’s any way I can get to their level [referring to the top trail runners] without getting down to their weight?”

I explained to Jeremy that he was looking at it all wrong. “The question you should be asking is whether you will ever become the best runner you can be,” I said, “and the answer to that question is an emphatic yes, because it’s almost entirely within your control. If you just focus on the process, training right, eating right, progressing sensibly, and learning and adapting as you go, you will realize 100 percent of your God-given ability. Whether you will lose a few more pounds along the way is unknowable and beside the point, hence a complete waste of time worrying about.”

Okay, I might not have said “hence,” but the rest is pretty accurate, and my message was well received. Jeremy understood there was no rational reason to be anxious about the uncertainty surrounding whether he would need to lose weight to achieve his goals and whether he even could lose weight if he did need to. I had reminded him that there is no uncertainty whatsoever about the process a runner needs to follow to become the best runner they can be, and that a runner who simply follows this process without looking ahead is all but guaranteed to realize their full potential. There is no more reason to presume that success in this effort depends on attaining a certain weight than it does to presume that it depends on attaining a certain VO2max, running economy, respiratory exchange ratio, lactate threshold—you get the idea.

The importance of maintaining a process focus in the pursuit of athletic ambitions is well established, and yet most athletes struggle to do so with any real consistency. Jeremy is by no means an outlier in this respect. A huge part of my job as a coach is to herd athletes back to the path of process focus when they stray from it, seduced by the bright, shiny object of outcomes. It is for this reason that I see the current Coronavirus pandemic not as a good thing, certainly, but as a bad thing with a silver lining, at least.

The near-total erasure of the 2020 race calendar has all but forced athletes to focus more on the process of getting better than they are normally wont to do. Some have adapted to the situation better than others, and by and large, few athletes have adapted better than the pros, who tend to be very process focused at all times. It hasn’t surprised me at all that a number of great performances have been achieved by elite runners during this strange period, including Donavan Brazier’s PR 3:35 1500 meters, Keira D’Amato’s breakthrough 15:04 5000 meters, and Shelby Houlihan’s stunning 14:23 5000m American record.

I myself have found the lack of normal racing opportunities oddly beneficial. By nature I love to compete, and in normal times I am, throughout the training process, constantly looking forward to my next race. One might have expected, therefore, that the present moratorium on mass-participation events would deal a blow to my motivation, but what I’ve found instead is that, without conscious intent, I’ve simply transferred the anticipation I normally direct at races to my training. Whereas previously I looked ahead to workouts primarily as stepping stones toward the real prize, I now look forward to workouts as ends in themselves.

This has turned out to be a very good thing for my fitness. Honestly, I’m astonished by how far I’ve come since missing an entire month of training due to illness between early March and early April. When I ran the 2017 Chicago Marathon at the tail end of my fake pro runner experience, I consciously viewed my PR performance as a swan song of sorts. At 46, I fully accepted that my best days as a runner were now surely behind me. Now, three years later, I find myself as fit as I was then, possibly fitter, and in less than two weeks I’m going to take a crack at setting an unofficial marathon PR in a solo time trial. Certainly there is more than one factor playing in to the fitness renaissance I’m experiencing, but this enforced process focus is, without a doubt, a major one. Take heed!

Runners are goal-oriented by nature. It goes without saying that the pursuit of goals requires planning and a certain degree of control. It’s difficult to pursue the goal of, say, lowering your half-marathon PB if you don’t have a specific half-marathon event on your calendar and if it’s beyond your power to put one there.

The ongoing COVID-19 (aka coronavirus) outbreak has placed runners all over the world in a position where they are unable to do much planning and they have less control over their path forward in the sport than they are accustomed to. This semi-helpless situation is the source of a great deal of anxiety for many. As a runner myself, I am in the same situation, and not only that, but I’ve been quite sick (and yes, I’m about certain it’s COVID-19, though I’ve been unable to get tested) for the past three and a half weeks, hence even more helpless and unable to plan. To cope with my unhappy circumstances, I’ve been channeling my inner Kenyan, something I’ve done when dealing with setbacks and uncertainty ever since I spent time in Kenya five years ago, and I encourage all runners to give it a try—starting today.

Runners in Kenya

During my time in Kenya I was profoundly struck, and ultimately quite humbled, by the easygoingness of the people. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that nothing ever rattles or worries a Kenyan. Throughout my two-week stay in the country, few things happened on time, just about everything that could have gone wrong did, and no one minded. I was most impressed by Francis, the driver who was hired to transport my group from place to pace. One night, on our way back to Nairobi from Iten, we hit a traffic jam caused by a tractor trailer and a bus that had gotten stuck side by side on a narrow bridge, creating an impassible barrier. Smiling his ever-present smile, Francis hopped out to join the scrum of men discussing possible solutions to the conundrum, a discussion that was remarkably devoid of acrimony. From my distant vantage, they might as well have been talking about the weather.

Eventually we made it to the other side of the bridge. But the next day, our van broke down in a remote area. Francis’s smile never faded as he went through a multi-hour process of trying and failing to get the vehicle repaired so we could complete our journey. Eventually, the leader of our group hired another driver and Francis was left behind to continue dealing with the situation, still smiling.

The rest of us had been back in Nairobi for 24 hours when we saw Francis again, looking like he’d just won the lottery. I asked him how his misadventures had ended and he proceeded to explain that he never was able to get the van fixed, or at least not properly, and he got home by driving 30 mph the whole way—the highest speed the vehicle could sustain without falling apart. I pictured myself in the situation he’d just endured, and what I pictured was a wild-eyed man pounding the steering wheel, barking four-letter words, and visibly shaking from an endogenous cortisol overdose.

Kenya’s runners share the broader culture’s laissez-faire attitude. This attitude is well captured in Tait Hearps’s and Matt Inglis Fox’s little book Eliud Kipchoge, which describes the authors’ experience inside an elite Kenyan running camp in the summer of 2017. The authors were shocked by how every run was loosely scheduled, few began at the originally scheduled time, and many were compromised by rain, poor roads, and other vagaries of the environment. And yet, they write, “None of this inconsistency and unpredictability appeared to perturb the athletes. They were habituated to it, and it appears not to be a part of the culture to be stressed or rushed in Kenya. Whenever they received bad news about new developments they never complained. They would pour another cup of chai, and keep chatting amongst themselves.”

Hearps and Fox go on to note, “This relaxed attitude and loose structure, although somewhat difficult to work with from our point of view, is quite refreshing once one adjusts to it.” I would add that, not only is the mellow Kenyan disposition refreshing for the openminded outsider, it’s also extremely healthy for and helpful to those who possess it. Their near-total immunity from anxiety enables the runners of Kenya to cope more gracefully with setbacks in training than most runners do, keeps them from wasting time and energy on vain efforts to control the uncontrollable, is a major reason they almost never choke in big races, and makes the whole athletic journey more enjoyable and less stressful.

When I left Kenya, I did so with the conscious intention of taking a piece of the country with me, on the inside. In moments when I catch myself slipping into a state of anxiety in response to some contretemps affecting my running, I make a conscious effort to call upon my inner Kenyan—to essentially do what Eliud Kipchoge would do in my place. Never have I needed this tool more than in the present COVID-19 crisis, not only because I’ve been stripped of my ability to plan out my running future but also because I actually have the virus (or something very much like it), and have been stripped of my ability to exercise, my fitness, and my health. It sucks, but after a brief initial pity party, I’ve been coping with a fair degree of poise, and I’ve done so simply by refusing to allow myself to worry about the future, as the people of Kenya seem to do instinctually.

As chance would have it, I’m currently reading the autobiography of Katherine Grainger, a legendary British rower. There’s a particular passage in the book that has supplied me with an additional tool to use in my effort to handle my present situation like a Kenyan, and I highly recommend you give it a try as well. Katherine herself learned this tool from Chris Shambrook, British Rowing’s team psychologist. In a meeting between Chris, Katherine, and her coxless pair crewmate Kath Bishop ahead of the 2003 World Championship final, Chris offered the rowers an image to use to keep their thoughts in the present moment during the race. Katherine writes, “Chris described having a trampoline at the finish line, turned on its side so that any thought that jumped to the finish or the outcome was immediately bounced back to the present moment we were in.”

I love this image, which an athlete can use whenever future-directed thoughts cause worry or frustration. So, the next time you catch yourself feeling anxious about the uncertainty of your immediate running future, do two things: Picture a tipped-over trampoline and ask yourself, “What would Eliud Kipchoge do?”