After the Pop; or, How to Develop Habits.

I remember the moment when I heard the pop! sound and felt a sharp pain in my groin area — I had been running around the indoor track in my school's massive gym, when, on one of the last corners, I heard this pop! sound and suddenly my body was doubled over in pain and I was limping around the gym.

It didn't feel like a sprain or a break or anything that I'd ever felt before — it just felt like a muscle that wasn't used to so much strain on it had basically given in.

Over the next few years, I would go to multiple doctors, physical therapists, specialists, and masseurs and use every variation of over-the-counter medicine that I could ever find to try and solve the problem.

Almost all of them would say the same thing, even after extensive scans and complaints that, uh, it still hurt like hell — "We don't see anything... just stretch more."

Eventually, I just got used to the pain.

A light sensation of warmth would wash over me when it really started to act up.

My upper thigh muscles might start to go slightly numb if I hadn't been drinking enough water or if my body felt especially tense.

In the winter, it would get especially painful as I wore pants and the tightness of my muscles would seem to wrap around it.?

My relationship with running has never been the same — since that?day, I almost always associated running with pain.

Even though, before that day, running had always been a cathartic act — I'd take my MP3 player and headphones, flip on the latest jam — sometime hip hop, rock, techno music, who knows — and lose myself in a feverish sweat.

Afterward, I'd almost always feel better.

But in that moment — A time I will now refer to as, ATP, After the Pop! —?my?relationship with running shifted rather dramatically.

Instead of viewing running as an enjoyable, cathartic experience, I almost always viewed it through the lens of pain.

It wasn't until late last year that my relationship with running shifted back to the way it formerly was.

...

Towards the end of 2019, while at my parent's house out in?Long Island, I decided to go for a run one morning.

I was tired of always waking up in a fog and never having a great outlet for easily clearing that feeling aside from chugging lots of coffee and swiping through endless pages of social media.

I decided that, instead of starting my morning off with coffee, I would instead start it off with running, and reward myself with coffee.

(A far more critical detail than I knew at the time.)

So, even though running was painful, for me, the reward of generally feeling good, and, most importantly, coffee, often outweighed the pain that was often associated with running.

For the first few weeks, it hurt like hell — I remember, even just 5 or 10-minute runs would leave my legs totally wrecked for a few days.

Like my calves and thighs had all but given up on my body.

Even after spending the last few years consistently biking, and in and out of gyms and other variations of exercise — running always killed me.

And so, after a day or two of recovery — even if my body wasn't quite 100% and I still had some low-level pain in my legs, I'd go again.

This time a little bit further.

Within a few months, I was taking up running everywhere I went — later that fall, while spending some time with family in Iceland, I would don my heavy rain jacket and go running out in the freezing morning.

At the end of those runs, my snot would be glued to my face like an icicle, but I won't ever forget those moments — running along the water, looking out towards the beautiful hills off the coats of Reyjaviik, rewarding myself with a delicious breakfast and perfectly mediocre coffee at the hotel we were staying at.

Now, not only had running become a cathartic form of exercise, but also a means of adventure.

I was now using my feet to explore parts of the world that were entirely new to me.

Upon returning to Denver after my trip to Iceland, I took that to its most logical conclusion: every other day, I would pinpoint a new coffee shop that I'd never been to in the Denver area that was ideally around 1.5 or 2 miles away from my apartment, and I'd run there.

So, at the midway point, I'd be rewarding myself with coffee, and at the end, I'd be rewarding myself with a, uh, much-needed shower.

As a result, there are few coffee shops in the Denver area that I haven't been to — many of which I'd traveled to on foot.

Months later, while running around Kyoto with a new friend, we'd broken the half-marathon point in our run and I'd barely even broken a sweat.

There were no coffee shops in sight.

Just the beautiful, crisp, clean air of Kyoto and the mountains in the distance.

My legs were tired, but the pain that I'd normally associated with running all of those years ago had ultimately subsided.

How to build a new habit.

Habits are a by-product of these three things — a trigger, a routine, and a reward.

Every app that you routinely use on your smartphone has these features in spades.

Let's take LinkedIn, for example.

Step 1. You feel lonely.

Step 2. Maybe one day instead of endlessly scrolling through it, you decide to post something, like, "I'm looking for a job!"?

Step 3. Maybe a few people in your network?like it,?and that sparks an actual relationship.?

Rinse, repeat.

Let's say you're a book nerd, for example — during normal times when the world isn't completely falling apart, you could start your own book club.

You could invite people that you know?to join your book club — this would naturally provide an automatic filter for some people, especially if reading books is an important criterion for you in your business relationships.?

Let's say you spend a few hours a week curating your selections, creating a great book club experience, and personally inviting a handful of people in your network to join it.

Boom! ??

Now you can invite that person to get to know them for coffee or lunch one day and?blam!?A real relationship is sparked off of a network site that's often completely devoid of original ideas or content, where people routinely plagiarize things without crediting the original creator.

(But, hey, you got a relationship out of it!)?

Regardless, instead of wasting hours every week on something that is effectively zero-sum?you are instead actively curating a fulfilling network of relationships.

You can take this same approach and apply it to anything you're interested in, but the logic is the same: in order to create new habits you must first look at your current habits and the things you're spending time doing and think, how can I break this down in a way so as to make it more fulfilling personally, and more rewarding.

In my case, running was never going to stick unless I made the habit and the ultimate reward of running that much better than not doing the thing.

It needs to be exponentially better — if the reward, for example, for you starting a book club is simply that you read more that's likely not going to move you to take that much action. You don't need a book club to do that, either — you can simply learn how to read faster or build the habit of reading into your day-to-day.

But if the reward is instead that, you will build more fulfilling relationships with interesting people who will help you fulfill your dreams, then that is perhaps significant enough for you to do something about it.

The same can be said of writing, starting a new career, developing a habit of weight loss, and so on.

If in weight loss, for example, the outcome is simply, to lose weight you likely won't really give a shit about that end result within a few days or at most a week.

If the outcome is instead, to feel healthier, more energized, and significantly happier, then the likelihood that you'll continue to be interested in that is much higher.?

Add some form of accountability, even higher.

Everything you do should be attached to an outcome or a goal that is intrinsic — i.e. that will help you and bring you more joy and fulfillment in life and is not designed to appease others.

Running has done just that for me — in the last few years or so since I've continued actively running, I have had the opportunity to explore dozens of amazing coffee shops, ran along some of the most beautiful stretches of land and sea in the world, and developed a morning routine that has me feeling refreshed and happy and productive before anyone is even awake.

That is a radical change from feeling blah, spending the morning swiping on a dating app, and generally feeling groggy before twelve o'clock and unaccomplished.

That is how you build a new habit — it isn't by saying something like, I want to read 20 or 30 books over the next year just because.

If, instead, you want to read 20 or 30 books over the next year surrounding the topic of screenwriting because you want to become a fantastic filmmaker, then, BOOM!

That is something you can excited about.

Create habits around things that you can get excited about.

That's how you can overcome the pain.?

...?

After, After The Pop.?

Running doesn't hurt as much, physically, but it's come to compete with several different morning habits and routines that I equally enjoy: biking; yoga; meditation and journaling, and so on.?

The reward is the same: I do the thing, then I get coffee.?

But it's less painful.?

Now?the routine?is just as engrained as, say, waking up.?

The only difference is that it's something I have to?think about?and consider.?

Some days, the consideration is, "You need a break."?

Or, "Let's try this instead."?

It's competing with several other equally constructive routines.?

But the habit is there, and it will probably?always?be there until some other cataclysmic event happens.

- Mike K.

p.s. I made a video about my experiences of learning to love running again. You can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4uNK85PwvE