In November, 11 miles was a pipe dream

The Whole Dad · Sunday Letter #8

This week's principle

Yesterday I ran 11 miles at an 8:49 pace.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because on its own it is just a number. Some of you run 11 miles before the house wakes up. Some of you have never run three. The distance is not the point.

The point is that in November, 11 miles was a pipe dream. I was just getting into running. If you had told me then

that I would run 11 miles on a Saturday morning and describe it as a breeze, I would have assumed you were talking

about somebody else.

Yesterday I did it and it was a breeze.

That gap, between November and yesterday, is the whole letter. Not because it is impressive. Because of how quietly it happened.

Here is the strange part about building capacity: you cannot feel it happening. Strength you can feel. You add ten

pounds to the bar and you know. Endurance does not work like that. It accumulates underneath you, session after boring

session, and it gives you no signal at all. There is no morning where you wake up and think, ah, I can go eleven now.

The only way you find out is to go out and find out.

Which means the whole thing runs on faith in a few unglamorous inputs. Here is what I actually did.

1. Consistency. The obvious one, and the one everybody skips.

I ran when I did not feel like running. Not heroically, not every day, just enough weeks in a row that it stopped

being a decision. Nothing here happened in a session. It happened in months. If you want the single reason a pipe

dream turned into a Saturday, it is that I kept showing up while nothing appeared to be happening.

2. Zone 2. The boring one.

Most of my running is easy enough that I could hold a conversation the whole way. It is slow. It feels like it is not

doing anything, which is exactly why most people skip it and then wonder why every run hurts. Easy running is what

builds the engine that makes hard running possible later. You have to be willing to look slow for a few months.

3. VO2 max work. The one you really should not skip.

A small slice of genuinely hard work. Short, uncomfortable, over quickly. This is the piece I see dads leave out most often, and it is the one that raises the ceiling. Easy work builds the base. Hard work raises what the base can reach.

I cannot tell you which of the three did the most. I did all three, and the pipe dream became a Saturday morning.

What I can tell you is that none of them felt like progress at the time. That is the part worth keeping. The work that changes what your body can do is almost never the work that feels impressive while you are doing it.

So if you are somewhere in the middle of a stretch that feels like nothing is happening: nothing feeling like it is happening is what it feels like when it is working.

Go out in a few months and test it.

Train this week

1. Start small. Smaller than your ego wants. If three miles is your ceiling, run two and finish able to talk. The first job is not distance, it is enough weeks in a row that it stops being a decision.

2. Set an actual goal. Not "run more." Sign up for an event, or put a date on the calendar and a distance next to it.

I have a 10K in October and a HYROX in December on mine, and I plan to sign up for the LA Marathon in March 2027. That

is what turned running into training instead of something I did when the mood showed up.

3. Go do it. Stop talking about it. I talked about running for a long time before I ran. The talking was the slowest part.

If you want the shape of the week: most of your running easy enough to talk through, one session a week that is genuinely hard and genuinely short, and one longer run that grows slowly.

Tell me what you thought of this week's standard, whether you held it, started it and quit, or there's something else on your mind. Just hit reply.

Session of the week

Saturday long run. 11 miles at an 8:49 pace.

Worth your time

Closing thought

The work that changes you is rarely the work that looks like anything while you are doing it.

It all counts.

Tony.