Running Yourself into the Ground
For most of our clients, performance is not their primary job or career. When you observe your client sacrificing their physical health for performance goals, how do you work with them to create short term performance goals while also focusing on long term health goals? How would you feel working with clients who are willing to sacrifice their health in order to achieve a performance goal?
I had a client who loved to run. One of those get up and knock out 5 miles before work, run in between jobs on his break, and get home and wrap up around the neighborhood. 30+ miles a week this guy was doing with maybe one rest day a week. In his mind he was doing a great thing for his body. He was “pushing himself”, “burning calories”, but he also had a habit built into his runs… coffee. In the morning he would make a pot of coffee, drink it, and then go on his run. In the afternoon and evenings he would pick his routes based on coffee shops around him. Run there, grab an espresso, run home. When we started he would complain that the only time he felt energized was when he was running and right afterwards. Then he would have to take a nap or snooze for five minutes in his car. He was a coworker of mine and he would drag through the work days.
This was a difficult thing for me to bring up and for him to hear. How do you tell someone that the source of their complaints are due to the very thing they felt was good for them? Well, I didn’t. Instead I suggested two additions to his routine. The first was mandatory stretching. 10 minutes for every mile ran. He was just getting into Yoga so he had a good outlet for that. The second was hydration. He had just been made aware of his water intake goals from his body weight to fl oz. conversion, but I shortened the deadline. I requested that he drink the water before the coffee. Slowly I saw his behaviors change. Here’s why.
The stretching forced him to take time away from his running habit and put it into yoga instead. Luckily he lives near a good yoga studio that focuses on full-body intergrations (not one of those new age hardcore/workout type places). Through his yoga practice he learned body-awareness and noticed how much he was hurting. He decreased his runs to about 2 a week and saw a huge decrease in time and pain. He came to me weeks later and told me about a story he had read about Native American runners and how they “run with a smile”, they glide with the wind as opposed to western runners who “grimace and scowl” throughout a run. That made me very happy to hear.
The coffee took more time to adjust. It’s been 2 years and he finally got a Berkey. My water advice did not help as intended. It turned into him chugging loads of water before he ran and then developing pain from having to hold in the fluids. His runs to the coffee shop became sprints to the bathroom. We ended up making a homemade sports drink that he loved and it helped reduce his coffee intake, but that took quite some time.
It was difficult to watch him literally running himself into the ground. I had some insight about his work/life balance and knew that running was a cathartic activity to relieve stress, but it had reached a point where the performance goals were deterarating his health. Trying to be subtle about the changes was ineffective. What worked most was clueing him in on the fact that by changing his habits around running he would see the result he was hoping for.