Finding The Right Pace

Hey, John Somnez from simpleprogrammer.com and I’ve got something today that I think is a problem that a lot of people struggle with.  I struggle with it myself.  It’s something that’s really difficult to tackle and there’s really just no right answer for this, but I’m going to give you my best answer for this problem that a lot of us experience in our careers and in life in general.

The big problem that I’m talking about is finding the right pace.  I’m a runner.  I don’t really like to run, but I run.  I’ve been running every single day now about 5K and it’s often difficult when running to find the right pace.

If you run too fast, you’re going to tire out too early and you’re not going to make it the whole distance.  You’re going to be really miserable and you’re going to end up slowing down towards the end.  If you run too slow you’re not going to be really exerting yourself.  You’re going to be basically wasting your time and you’re not going to get the workout that you want to.  So you have to find what the right pace is.

The same applies in life and it applies in your career.  You can’t just work like a dog all the time.  If you work too hard all the time you end up running out of steam and you don’t make it through the race.  You could start out this year, for example, working really, really hard trying to achieve your goals, trying to work out and lift weights and try to do as much work on your side project as possible and write 15 blog posts.  But if you do that, and that’s not the pace that you can actually run at, then what’s going to happen is you’re eventually going to crash.  When you crash, most people unfortunately, don’t recover.

So getting the right pace is really, really important because you don’t want to burnout.  If you go too slow, you know what happens.  You don’t go anywhere.  You basically don’t accomplish anything.

I found that what you’ve got to be able to do is figure out exactly what that pace is.  You want a maintainable pace that you’re going to be able to carry forward throughout the entire year, but it needs to be fast enough so that you’re actually making headway, that you’re actually accomplishing things.

There are a couple of strategies that I use in order to figure out what my pace is and to keep my pace going.  One of them is what I call pipeline.  On the beginning of a week or even in the beginning of the day, before I start anything I try to plan out what’s going to happen for that week, for that day, just maybe 5, 10 minutes, maybe half an hour to plan on a week.  I’m using this time to load up things into my pipeline ahead of time so that I can keep going, so that I don’t have to keep on bending down to tie my shoelaces while I’m running.

The other thing that I do is that I adjust.  I’m going to load up for my week what I expect to happen and I usually have a routine.  I know what’s going to happen.  I have these routines that I’ve built.  I know what’s going to happen every single day, but I modify that.

For example, I start running every single day.  I may not be able to keep this up when I get really back into the swing of my regular work schedule so I might have to cut back 2, 3 times a week.  I may have to adjust things and I’m going to keep on adjusting things until I get to the point where I’m filling up my day and I’m not going too fast and not going too slow.  It’s a kind of gradual adjustment.  You want to keep on loading things on until you get to a point where you can’t really load anything on anymore and then see how you do.  You can always load things back off.

The big mistake that people make is that instead of doing it that way, they tend to load all this stuff on at once and then they’ll try to run with it and they’ll make it a little bit of the way and they can’t make it any further.  So instead of pulling some things off and continuing on forward, continuing on with their pace, they’ll throw everything off and they’ll give up.  Then they’ll do that again and they never really get anywhere because they never are able to see things through.

Hopefully this advice has helped you.  I’m still struggling myself with trying to find a good pace.  I think it’s a continual thing that you’re always just going to have to work with in life.  Just don’t give up.  Remember, don’t run too fast, don’t go too slow, adjust it over time.

Don’t forget to check out my blog at simpleprogrammer.com and if you’re interested in some fitness tips like running, check out my podcast at getupandcode.com.  Thanks and I’ll talk to you again next week.  Take care.