Running, gritty and slow
An anecdotal response to Duckworth
As loyal readers of Okeydoxy have hopefully picked up on by now, I am a basic nerd. When I was younger, two stalwart, unyielding aspects of my personality were (a) I loved math and (b) I hated running.
To the first, I always had a natural aptitude for numbers. When I was a kid and would tag along with my mom while she did shopping, I would always try to figure out what the change would be before the cashier would tell us. My mom even tells a story about how I would figure out the tax on things for myself. When I was in second grade, my teacher was pushing me to learn times tables long before my fellow students were.
My proudest and/or pettiest achievement in math came my sophomore year of high school. Our probability and statistics teacher, whom I did not always get along with, had given us a study guide for the upcoming exam that had a lot of errors. Flustered, she made us a deal: she would take the exam along with us, and any points she missed on the exam (graded, I assume, by someone else in the math department) would be added to our grade as extra credit. So I got a 108.
I was good with numbers, people encouraged me, I loved praise and attention, ergo I kept studying math. And it always came easy to me. Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, it just clicked. As I’ve mentioned before, I went into college as a math and philosophy major. I thought it likely I would go back to my high school in Indiana and be a math teacher, but I also thought seriously about going on for a PhD in math and becoming a full-fledged mathematician. In college math, I continued to do well, even getting to be a TA for the Discrete Dynamical Systems course.
And then I took Abstract Algebra. It did not click. I did not understand it, try as I might. I had hit a wall, and I had none of the skills for working at understanding math that would have helped me get over the hump. I knew how to understand math when it was intuitive; I had no idea how to study math that wasn’t. Similarly, I found when tutoring (which financially helped me get through both undergrad and grad school), I was not that great of a math tutor. I didn’t know many ways to explain math concepts to students who didn’t have my easy grasp of it.
As for running, I honestly don’t know why I hated it as a kid. I was always a big kid, and I was never the fastest, but I don’t know if that quite explains it. I played all the little league sports: I loved baseball but wasn’t that good, I liked basketball and was ok (because I was tall), and I tolerated football (I was built to be a lineman). As I got older and little league turned into school teams, football was the only one really left that I had the skills for, but I declined to play in 7th grade (too much running), came back for 8th grade (less running but still too much), and then only briefly considered playing in high school before quitting because, you guessed it, too much running.
The sport I committed most to in high school was swimming, which I was also not very good at, but I loved being in the pool, swimming didn’t hurt my joints, and people were generally nice to me.
Anyway, maybe six or seven months into the pandemic in 2020, I took up running. I honestly don’t know why I got it in my head that I should run a 5k now that I had turned 40. Nonetheless, Couch to 5k app in hand, I would wake up before sunrise three mornings per week, put on a headlamp, and train myself up to a 5k.
If, like me, you went from a lifetime of hating running to deciding “hey I should run a 5k,” you know how miserable the first week of Couch to 5k is: a five minute warmup walk, eight 60 second runs interspersed with 90 second walks, and finally a five minute cool down walk. As I neared death at the end of each minute, I cursed whatever wizard had put this desire in my brain. But I muscled my way through, shocked when I was able to make the pivot from running with walk breaks to just plain running.
Three and a half years later, I still run, more or less three times a week. I’ve done a bunch of 5ks, maybe half a dozen 10ks, and even two 15ks. I’m signed up to do a half marathon this November, which remains daunting in my mind. Even when I’ve fallen off the wagon on running, I keep getting back on, keep logging miles, keep replacing my shoes when they wear out.
The reason I’ve been thinking about my relationships with math and running is because recently I’ve been listening to Angela Duckworth’s Grit while I run. I honestly don’t remember which podcast I listen to that mentioned it a couple weeks ago, but I’ve seen many people reference the book and my library had the audio version, so I went ahead and got it.
I am fascinated by books about productivity, and have consumed many of the best known (e.g. Deep Work and The 4-Hour Workweek, with Atomic Habits patiently biding its time on my shelf). I even love the anti-productivity productivity books (e.g. 4000 Weeks). Maybe it’s not fair to label Grit a productivity book, but I think it fits the genre. Beyond her explanations of various psychological studies and the many anecdotes that flesh them out, a lot of the book is essentially about how you the reader can become grittier and follow through better on your passions.
The book is also pretty buzzy in higher education circles, and I can recall it being mentioned several times over the last few years during start of semester meetings. The effects of the pandemic on education are still being figured out, but the sense that I and a lot of my colleagues have had in the last couple years is that students who spent significant portions of high school online often had difficulty transitioning to being college students. In some respects, many of them seem to have less “grit” in Duckworth’s terms.
By grit, Duckworth means a combination of perseverance and passion oriented to some big picture goal in life. If one has only perseverance or only passion, one is much less likely to achieve. She identifies four key factors in grittiness:
interest (do you care about what you are doing, or could come to care about it)
practice (do you put in the effort to get better at it)
purpose (do you believe it matters beyond your own sense of enjoyment)
hope (belief that you can overcome the challenges and obstacles that will come)
Early in the book, Duckworth notes a distinction between (a) those who are gifted, naturally talented, innately able to achieve and (b) those who strive, work hard, and give maximum effort. She claims that culturally, we are actually somewhat ambivalent about whether we care more for talent or effort. According to the survey and clinical evidence she references, in the US we claim to value and praise hard work, such as claiming we would rather hire the hard worker than the person with talent. However, in practice, we tend towards people who are perceived as talented, who are “naturals,” rather than the “strivers” who are just hard workers.
In Duckworth’s estimation, both talent and effort are needed, but effort is more important overall. She offers a two equation system:
Talent X Effort = Skill
Skill X Effort = Achievement
Thus effort is needed in both phases, giving it the edge.
There is a fair amount of critique of Duckworth’s take on grit, ranging from picky to systemic. This is right and good for any social science argument. I don’t have the competence to weigh in on that; I can only say that the claims in her book have been helpful for my thinking through my own successes and failures in life.
I did not become a math professor. I had talent in math, but had never put in much effort (hadn’t needed to), so I never quite got to the skills for working through more and more difficult math. During my abstract algebra course, I lost hope that I would be able to overcome my challenges.
But also, by then, my interests and my passion had shifted. As I hit my wall in studying math, I also hit my stride in studying theology. My fascination with theology was similar to my fascination with math: both were avenues for me to try to understand existence. But while that grasp had always been intuitive (and lazy) with math, it was a persistent struggle with theology. The concepts and texts I wrestled with were difficult intellectually, but they were even more challenging personally. The theological route to understanding for me was less like seeing the light through stained glass and more like banging my head on the church door, hoping I might bore my way in.
Again, in Duckworth’s terms, I had interest in theology itself, I practiced (so much reading, writing, and conversing, still ongoing), I found purpose in it, and I hoped that I would come to a deeper (but never complete) understanding.
And then there’s running.
I will likely never be a particularly fast runner. At my peak a year and a half ago, on a beautiful November morning, I ran a 10k at a 13:28 pace through beautiful downtown St. Petersburg, FL. I was, and am, deeply proud of that race, completely comfortable knowing that a blistering pace for me is a breezy jog for so many in my age bracket.
Nowadays, coming off a rough year of inconsistent training, I’m closer to a 14:45, and I’ve had to run/walk the last couple 10ks I’ve done. But, for whatever reason, I keep running. I just bought a new pair of running shoes, meaning I’ve mentally committed to another 4-6 months of this stupid, annoying, sometimes enlivening hobby. I’ve got a few races to sign up for over the coming months.
Right now, this is what grit means for me. And maybe the still new challenge of running will help nurture my hope in the face of other ongoing and forthcoming challenges.
I love reading and thinking about this as I have also loved (quietly and at a distance) loved seeing you become a runner. As you know, my journey was similar. I hated running in high school and college and then learned to love it in grad school and wound up running a bunch of marathons and shorter races. Part of my story is that I lost a bunch of weight and that made running much easier for a bunch of reasons, but it's also the case that I actually came to enjoy it and the challenge that it presented in terms of endurance and discipline. I think there's maybe a missing term between effort and talent: technique. This has become apparent to me in terms of running and now kettlebells: technique is the habituated and mostly unthought practice that allows one to efficiently transform effort into performance. Technique isn't effort--I put in way more effort when I lacked it--but it also isn't talent; I've never been a talented runner, but I am a vastly more efficient one now than when I started and the same, frankly, goes for my kettlebell work.
I think about this frequently in terms of my classes too and what I try to teach my students. Reading difficult texts and asking good questions are things that require habituated, unthought habits of mind. They are reflexes that move beneath the skin of thought. Similarly, ethical relations of care, mercy, and compassion are all cultivated as habits through practice, not simply because, in any particular moment, we have an overpowering and enduring desire to do right (ethical grit?) or are vastly more empathetic than other people (ethical talent?). I tell my students that the reason they shouldn't do a trivial ethical wrong they know is wrong even if it's unlikely to harm anyone is primarily that it deforms their ethical practice and makes them ethically slovenly and make them less likely to do right when it really does matter. Feminist virtue ethics ftw! Much love to you and yours.
Of course I love this. The stats test!!!!