Rule #19: Avoid Out and Back

For those readers who follow me on Strava, you might notice something about the running routes that I follow. With the exception of my weekly attendance at Running for Resilience and Parkrun, both of which are group runs with an out and back course, for all of my other runs I avoid running over terrain that I have already traversed. Essentially, when I have a choice, I will always run a loop in preference to an out and back.

I have tried to work out what motivates this approach and I think my running is a bit of a metaphor for the way I approach life and work. I have previously written about removing backward-looking language from our vocabulary and not fixating on the past in Rule #2: Would have, Could have, Should have… Rule #19 builds on Rule #2.

Fellow runners know that sometimes you regret how you tackled a particular portion of your run. You may have gone out too hard in the first couple of kilometres and emptied the fuel tank too quickly. Or maybe you didn’t hold your cadence on the uphill, or you didn’t take enough advantage of gravity on the downhill. Those regrets are fine, but they are in the past and there is nothing you can do about them in the here and now.

If you run an out and back, though, you are forced to re-live the stretch of road or trail that has caused you regret. As you run down hill on the way back, you will be reminded of how poorly you tackled that climb on the way out. Why put yourself through that pain and disappointment?

A better approach is to just keep moving in a forward direction. Sure, beat yourself up for a short time about how poorly you tackled that climb, but then use it as a learning experience as you look down the road to the climb that is facing you. What are you going to tweak to make this one a better climb than the last one?

Avoiding out and back routes is also a way to keep the mind active. In the same way that a repetitive job can be detrimental to your motivation for work, a repetitive running route, where you know what is ahead, can degrade your motivation for running. It’s far more motivating when you don’t know what is around the next corner. Is it a cruisy descent, a killer climb, or a stretch of picturesque forest? You’ll never know if you turn back, so better to just keep moving forward.