I went running 8 times in the first 5 months of this year, and then hit 40 over the next 3 months. The key was aiming lower.
Before I had kids, I ran pretty regularly and would complete over 300 miles per year. But it all fell off a cliff as my time filled up and my energy was sapped with a host of new daily tasks. My running bottomed out in the first half of this year when I had managed only 14 miles through May of 2026.
When I finally stepped back to think about how to unblock myself, I realized that even though my goal at one time had been fairly SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), that I hadn’t evolved it as my situation changed. For many years I aimed to run for at least 30-60 minutes each time I went running; a specific target that used to be achievable when I had more time. But as my schedule changed, I consistently avoided running because I didn’t feel like I could carve out that long AND come back with enough energy for everything else I had to do.
Lowering my goal duration felt like admitting failure. But eventually I realized that comparing myself against what I used to be able to do just led to doing nothing at all. So I accepted that my goal now was running more often than 1-2 times a month, rather than logging a long run each time I go out. So I set a new target of getting out the door 4-5 days per week and doing only 15 minutes on each run. That way it would be very hard to say I didn’t have time or wouldn’t recover enough for everything else in my day.
It worked like flipping a switch. In the next 3 months I ran 40 times and completed 73 miles. I totaled 13 hours of running compared to January through May when I had managed only 2 and a half.
And the light bulb really went off for me when I realized in July and August that I was actually starting to push my runs to 20, 25 or even 30 minutes. I was hitting my old bar; I just had to get unstuck to start seeing how that could become possible.
What does all this have to do with Thinking Empirically? The key reframing is to recognize that changing behavior means running an experiment on yourself. If you’re setting a clear, SMART goal, researching the best path forward and changing one thing at a time, and finding that you’re not getting the results you want, it’s OK to change the plan.
Changing a goal instead of abandoning it means you’re still moving in the direction that you want to go. I’m focusing on this because if you’re feeling like Thinking Empirically is a nice idea you’d never have the time for, the path forward is to start to focus on one or two situations where you can start to do something differently. Once you start the momentum, it will become more and more natural to do things in a new way.
So how do you pick your spots to get started? In my next post I’ll tackle the challenge of how to recognize situations when you need to think empirically.
