Enough is Almost Always Enough

Running cost me my last job.

It was a good job, too, by nearly every external measure.
Good pay, good benefits, lots of vacation time.
It should have been more than enough.

And then, I went for a run.
It was the same run I'd done, probably, a hundred times in the four years I lived there.
From my house, down to the river, greenbelt loop around the river, and back home.
Exactly five miles.
Door-to-door.
Same route.
Each time.

Until one day, mid run, I'd had enough.
I stopped. Took a picture. And quit.

Confessions of an intermittent runner.

I've been a runner my whole life. I have not, however, been consistent. I'm either all in--training for something big--or on the couch. I'll get into a running routine just for the sake of running, feel great, and within a few months I'm tracking times and distances and other metrics until I don't like it anymore.

Just like my go-to five-mile route, I ran the same pattern for years.
I didn't really pay attention to it until after I found myself unemployed.

Each time I'd pick up my running habit again, I go through a phase of euphoria.
I'd feel better, look better, my head is clearer, and problems I need to solve all of a sudden start making sense.

Then, in an effort to feel more better and look more better and have my head more clearer, I start piling on the trackers and external metrics. My running pendulum would swing from being something that clears my head and gives me energy to another problem I had to solve or thing I needed to improve. Soon, instead of continuing to get energy from it, running would start competing against all of the other things that competed for my energy and become a drain.

My energy would be spread too thin, and I'd run back to the couch.

Enough is Enough

The day I decided, mid-run, to quit my job was an enough-is-enough moment in the traditional sense.

You know the one.
When the things that don't make sense about a situation gradually overtake the things that do and you realize that getting out makes more sense than staying in.

I knew my job frustrations were something I could run my way through.
I'd done it a million times before.
This time, I just didn't want to.

It wasn't until about a year later that enough-is-enough made a different kind of sense.

In that reflection, I saw more clearly the pattern I'd been running with running.
Running, in the early stages of getting back to it, always brought clarity.
But, when running started to bring too much clarity, I didn't like it.
I'd go from "I can handle this," to "I don't even like this... I want something more, something different."
That "something more, something different" was scary and unknown so I'd stamp out that disruptive energy by overtraining myself back to the couch.

Health: The Return on Energy You Invest in Yourself

I now realize why I was vacillating between running and couch rotting: I used running to keep my energy levels high enough to handle stress but low enough to keep me from doing anything proactive or creative about it.

I was forcing a complacent equilibrium.
Complacency paid well.
Don't rock that boat.
Tired people don't rock boats.
Spend energy on anything but rocking the boat.

Couch rotting created no energy.
Overtraining drained all my energy.
Swinging between too little and too much avoided that "just enough" spot where my energy got disruptive.
But was it disruption I was avoiding?
Or creativity?

When I finally saw my inconsistency with running a sign of me avoiding, maybe even sabotaging, my own creativity, it snapped me out of the forced complacency. I wanted to create a life where I could stop doing more and start doing more of what matters. To do that, though, I had to first decide what mattered. I couldn't do that when I was out of energy.

In Stack the Deck, I define health as the return on energy you invest in yourself. Decisions we make about our health are fundamental to the lives we create for ourselves. When I centered money as my decision making currency, I kept my health in a state that was good enough to keep me working effectively. Beyond that, I was spending money, time, and energy trying to otherwise "be healthy." I'm still not entirely sure what that meant, but I know it involved a lot of pendulum swings.

When I shifted and centered energy as my decision making currency, the pendulum swings stopped--not just for running, but for everything regarding health: what I ate, what I drank, how I spent my free time, the amount of sleep I got. I no longer spend money, time, or energy trying to find my way to "being healthy." I simply do things that give me energy and don't do things that drain my energy.

Since wealth is defined as the abundance of energy we can use to create, an abundance of creative energy is only signal I need to know whether I'm investing energy in myself in the right ways. If I have energy to create, I know I've done it right.

Running looks different these days.
I no longer run to cope or to prove I can accomplish hard things.
Now, I run to create energy and I use that energy to create a life I love.
And in that space, consistency comes easily.
Enough, I find, is exactly the right amount.