44. Run Because You Love It

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Hey there, and welcome to episode 44 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. I think we would all agree that running is hard. But for a lot of us running can also be very stressful, and very anxiety inducing.

I fell in love with running early on. But then something happened that made me almost want to break up with running for good. So in this episode, I’m talking about running simply for the love of running without any other hidden agendas. I believe we should all run because we love it. Because if you don’t love it, what’s the point?

But first, if you like this podcast and you have to come check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. This is a positive energetic fun group of runners. It goes hand in hand with the podcast and I have a big announcement this weekend I am doing something I’ve never done before.

I am hosting a epic training event that you do not want to miss. It is this Sunday, October the I’m sorry, November the first and it’s called getting lean, how to transform your body into a lean fat burning machine so you can run without bonking, lose weight without calorie counting, and develop the habits required to make it all last a lifetime.

I’m basically sharing my six part coaching framework for becoming a lean running machine. This is the exact framework that I use with my coaching clients. I’m pulling back the curtain. I’m sharing it all with you. Again, that is this Sunday, November the first, I can’t believe it’s November already. Sunday, November the first 4pm Eastern time.

Just go to Facebook, type in Running Lean community, you’ll find us you’ll see the the event that I created for this training that I’m going to be doing. It’s all free to join, just come check us out. It’d be really, really cool.

All right, let’s talk about why I’m talking about this subject today. So today, I’m talking about one of the principles of the Running Lean manifesto. So a few months back, I created the Running Lean manifesto, which is a set of guiding principles.

A manifesto is basically a set of values to live your life by these principles that I laid out are my guiding principles. They are my North Star. And I want them to become your north star as well. I want them to become your guiding principles as well.

A manifesto is a good way to see where you are. It helps to give your life meaning and purpose. I believe that we should all have a manifesto to live by. The Running Lean manifesto is this: number one, eat real food. Number two, live vibrantly. Number three, thrive in your body. Number four, embrace discomfort. Number five, run because you love it. Number six, love yourself unconditionally. Number seven, think, feel and act with purpose. And number eight is be an example of what’s possible.

So I’ve been sharing these the last few episodes. And I’ve got a few more here. I’m trying to take a little bit of a deep dive into each one of these principles. And my goal sharing this with you is that I hope you adopt these as your guiding principles as well.

So the Running Lean community is a vibrant, growing community of passionate runners and we share common goals. And this mentor manifesto was really like our collective Northstar. It’s principles that can drive us forward together. It’s a blueprint that we can all use to become the best versions of ourselves together.

So today, I’m sharing the fifth principle from the Running Lean manifesto run because you love it. So I’m going to start by talking about why I first got into running. So some years ago back in 2003. I was very overweight. I was sick. I was drinking too much. I actually was dying mostly with cancer. And this scared the crap out of me.

I made this decision though, and I obviously, you know, got better. You know, I had surgeries and got through cancer and all that stuff. But I made this commitment to myself that I was going to try to be as healthy as possible. And so I changed my diet, I stopped drinking and, you know, really the, the thing that really propelled me into being the healthiest person that I could be was running.

And the first thing I did with running is that I set a goal for myself and I wanted to run a local race here in Cincinnati, the Thanksgiving Day race, it’s one of the oldest Thanksgiving Day races in the country. It’s been going on for like 110 years or something like that. And it’s a 10k, no big deal, right.

But 6.2 miles running that far without stopping seemed impossible to me. But I was determined to make that happen. And so I started training, and I remember training in the fall. But this time of the year, you know, it’s the fall here in Cincinnati right now. And we have these beautiful leaves the change colors on the trees, there’s leaves on the ground, there’s this crisp, clear air, it’s cooler out, and it’s just, it’s a cool time to be outside running.

And so this was like my first time out there being alone running. And it just felt so good. I really did fall in love with running at this time. It was hard. Yeah. And I had to dig deep, but I had to push myself and I had to run farther than I’ve ever run before.

But I had this goal in mind, I was gonna run 6.2 miles without stopping. So I was training for this little fun little 10k. And I did it, I finished it. And in that process I became more. And it really was a jumping off place for me because training for this 10k taught me that I could do hard things. And I wanted to see what else I was capable of.

So a couple of years later, I decided I was going to run a marathon. And I started training for the Flying Pig marathon, which is our local marathon. It’s a great race. Super fun, by the way, hard, hilly, but fun. So I was training for the 2006 Flying Pig. And I trained on my own. I downloaded some sort of training plan from the internet.

And I gotta tell you, that was very challenging to do all the training for a marathon on my own, I really had no idea what I was doing. But I was reading everything I could. And my longest run for that marathon, the longest run I was able to do was only 16 miles because during the process, I was overtraining.

And I ended up getting injured and I had like stress fractures in my tibias. And the doctor was like, you can’t run and I’m like, well, I’m still going to run. I took a couple of weeks off. But I never got to the 18 and 20 mile runs because I had this injury and I had to take some time off.

Anyway, I really wanted to do this thing like I had trained for it. And there was like nothing was going to stop me from finishing this race. Okay. I loved the training though. I loved being out there. And I was by myself. I loved being out there by myself running.

Again, I was like falling in love, deeply in love with running. And then the day came for the marathon. I was super nervous. And I just remember, during the race, like during the run, I was, you know, going through all these neighborhoods around Cincinnati, and I just remember like, everybody like being so happy and cheerful and cheering us on.

And it just felt so amazing. And then crossing that finish line was like one of the most amazing, transformational moments of my life. I cannot describe the feelings of elation, and joy and accomplishment when I crossed the finish line of my first marathon.

In that moment, I knew immediately that I wanted to do this all the time, like I was going to run this marathon every year. And that’s what I set out to do. And I did and I became a marathon runner. You know, this became part of who I was. And, you know, I just kept falling deeper in love with running. It became you know, part of my identity.

I eventually did something very smart, which is I joined a running group, a local running group which changed everything for me because now I had people to hold me accountable. You know, I had this group that was going to show up a couple of times a week and meet and run.

We would do hill work, speed work, interval training, we would do these long runs on the weekends. And I needed to show up. So I had this accountability. I made friends in the group. In fact, some of the people that I was in this group with had become my lifelong best friends.

You know, I was inspired by watching other people do hard things. I wanted me to do more. It encouraged me to see other people doing these big epic, ultra runs and other things and are running faster and I wanted to become faster. I wanted to run with the faster people.

You know, I had these goals of like PR in every single race, I wanted to always, you know, improve my time, every single race. So I started pushing myself faster and pushing myself to go farther. I started doing triathlons. Then I did an Ironman, I started doing ultra marathons and then did like a 50 miler and 100 miler, and this went on for years.

At some point, running started to become less of a love and more stressful. I was always competing with myself and with other people. I was always comparing myself to other people, or maybe to who I used to be. I was always trying to push myself to go faster, further.

And I started to kind of get burned out by the whole thing, I started to have some nagging injuries. And I was putting my body under a lot of stress, all the time. And I fell into this kind of pattern of chronic cardio, which I’ve talked about before, which is where we run hard enough to be over our aerobic threshold.

So we get into that place where we start to stress out our body, but not super hard, like where we’re sprinting. And so it’s this kind of no man’s land of like, you know, it’s too hard to do for a long period of time, but it’s not hard enough to do for. To make it easy. In other words, like it’s just you’re in this like stressful state of running, and called chronic cardio where you just are putting a lot of stress on your body.

And I was putting myself under a lot of stress, I felt like I had to run like running was something I had to do. And all this time, I was using running as a way to help me lose weight, or maintain my weight at least. And I was eating a plant based diet, I was running a lot. And I was always afraid to ever ease up on the running because I’d gain the weight.

And I saw this happen every single year. After every fall marathon I did, I would scale back on the mileage for a few months, you know, like we do kind of the offseason, so to speak, right. But I would always like gain 5 or 10 pounds.

And this isn’t just me, a lot of people have the same experience. And then once the next spring marathon training season started in the summertime in January or whatever, I would start to lose some of the weight but not all of it.

And so this was a cycle for me, you know, year after year, I would eventually find myself gaining weight not being able to lose all of it until I was like 40 pounds overweight. And running was no longer working to help me lose the weight or maintain my weight. I couldn’t run enough to lose the weight that I was gaining. I was trying though I was desperately trying.

But here’s the thing, you can’t outrun a bad diet, say this all the time. And just know that you are not alone. I hear every single day I hear from people who share this same kind of story. They run all the time, and they can’t lose weight or they started running and they started gaining weight.

And if you’re listening to this right now and you’re kind of nodding your head, then just know that you are not alone. You are one of the millions of people who have tried and tried unsuccessfully to use running as a way to just lose weight or maintain your weight and it kind of works for a little while until it doesn’t.

And here’s why. I’m gonna explain kind of what’s going on here. There are many, many reasons why running is not a very effective way to lose weight. I’m just going to share a couple with you here. Number one, when you run, your appetite increases, you know your body’s always trying to maintain homeostasis, maintain kind of neutral.

And when you run and you burn off a lot of calories and stuff like that, your body’s like, hey, we need to replace those calories. So it increases your appetite. And a lot of times you end up eating more to compensate for the calories that you have, you know, lost during running. And a lot of people overcompensate right, they over eat in that situation.

Also know that running does burn some calories, but not as many as you think. And when you do use running as a way to burn calories, the progress is slow. And it’s kind of minimal. And there’s something very interesting going on here. And there was this study that they did, from 1982 to 1997.

So a long study is a very well controlled metabolic ward study. Actually, there were four different studies done during this time. And they all sort of had the same conclusions. The studies showed significant reductions in resting metabolic rate, after subjects exercised for several weeks at a time.

So when people who want to lose weight who maybe are a little bit overweight, when these people do more than an hour of endurance exercise daily, their resting metabolism actually declines on an average between 5 and 15%. This is crazy, right?

Again, your body is always trying to maintain homeostasis. So when you burn a lot more calories every day, consistently, your body is going to slow your metabolism the way you know the rate at which you burn calories, it’s going to slow your metabolism, so you don’t waste away to nothing and die.

So to think that you’re just going to keep running, and everything else is going to work exactly the same. Like every time you know, you eat 500 calories and you go run five miles, you’re burning 500 calories. Exactly. It just doesn’t work that way. And especially with the resting metabolic rate going down when you exercise more.

So that’s kind of another issue, why it’s very difficult to use running alone as a way to lose weight. Another reason is that runners are notorious carb addicts, right? Runners are known for eating a lot of carbohydrates, right.

And we know that when we eat a lot of carbohydrates, our bodies are in a fat storage mode, our you know, our insulin gets high, and we just can’t let go of the fat, we can’t burn the fat when we’re eating a lot of carbohydrates, we burn the sugar very effectively. And that’s great, you know, but you’re not getting to burn the fat, we’re not putting our body into fat burning mode, we’re staying in fat storage mode, when we keep eating the massive amounts of carbohydrates.

Another thing to consider here is that running is only treating a symptom, you know, you’re trying to burn off excess body fat that’s stored on your body by you know, exercising more. And we’re not really treating the underlying causes of weight gain.

So what is causing the weight gain in the first place? A lot of it has to do with hormonal issues, carbohydrate addiction, there’s mental issues, there’s emotional things going on, there’s issues with overeating. And when you look at all of this, when you look at all these things I just mentioned, you can see why running alone is just not a very effective way to lose weight.

It just isn’t now I have people that will argue with me about this all the time, they will challenge me and tell me I’m wrong. And tell me how by just running, they are able to lose all this weight. And they say it’s all about calories in versus calories out. And if that works for you, and you’ve had some good luck with just like that, whatever. That’s totally awesome. Seriously, nice work.

If you can just cut calories, or, you know, keep eating all these carbs and run more and it helps you to maintain your weight to lose weight, then more power to you keep it up. But for the majority of us, running alone does not work to lose weight period. I have tried this for years.

And I can tell you with 100% conviction that this does not work. And I talk to people literally every single day who say yeah, Patrick, I totally get where you’re coming from. I didn’t know what the problem was either until I figured it out.

Okay, so that was a little tangent I went on just to explain why running is not a great way to lose weight. All right, but all of this stuff that I’m talking about here, I didn’t know all this by the way and in trying to run to lose weight was really stressing me out, you know, I kept running more and more and more, and I kept gaining weight.

You know, my clothes were not fitting me anymore. I was getting close to that 200 pound mark again, which was, you know, something I never want to see again. And I was like, right there. I hated how I looked in the mirror. I was beginning to hate running, because running had failed me.

You know, I thought running was stupid. And it was hard. And it was hard work. It doesn’t work. It was creating all this stress and anxiety for me. And I was thinking I should just break up with running, I should just quit. What is the point seriously?

Maybe my best running days are behind me anyway, so why bother. So this was sort of a dark place I was in, you know, I was ready to break up with running. But then early in 2020, I decided that I was going to do something about my weight. And I knew that running wasn’t helping. And I was running every day for a while there to try to maintain my weight. And it was not working at all.

I needed to change my diet. You know, I needed to figure out how to fix this weight problem. I began learning everything I could about running and weight loss and how it all works together, and began following all these leaders in the field of exercise physiology and sports nutrition. I started reading books, listening to podcasts, I attended seminars, I got all this training, I got training on sports, nutrition and training on weight loss.

And I learned that, you know, weight loss is like 90% diet and 10% exercise, you know, exercise helps a little bit. But really, it’s like almost all diet. So I ditched the carbs. I ditched the plant based diet, and went back to just eating real food. And the weight began melting off of me.

And I started to look good again. And I started to feel good about myself again. And I started to have more energy again. And something else interesting started happening. Running was becoming easier again. And I started to actually enjoy running again, you know, I stopped trying to use running just as like a weight loss tool.

And it became something different for me, I started to run regularly again, running became a very important part of my life again. So one of the reasons why I’m sharing all this with you right now is because I dedicated my life at this point to helping others. I figured this out, and I want to share it with others. And that’s basically how I got here.

You know, running was important to me, it started to become something that I needed to do for my own mental health for my own sanity, you know, running helped me to get through my divorce. It helped me to get through the early days of COVID, you know, through job furloughs and all kinds of other stuff.

And I really began to love my alone time running, it was just me and my thoughts running through the city, running along the Ohio River, running through the parks and old historic neighborhoods here in Cincinnati. And it became this like, helpful meditative time for me. It was like my time, my quality time.

Sometimes I’d listen to podcasts, sometimes I’d listen to trainings and coaching calls and things like that. I was always learning or I was getting inspired, or I was getting motivated. And sometimes it was just me with no headphones, I was just out in nature, focusing on the rhythm of my breath and the sounds of my own feet, touching the ground.

I began to really fall in love with running again. And it felt a lot like it did back in 2004 when I was training for that first 10k. Same kind of feelings were coming up from me again, I was excited about running. I was pushing myself again. I couldn’t wait to get out there to get my heart pumping, to get the blood flowing, to get my lungs working, to start the surge of all the adrenaline and the endorphins and the dopamine.

For me running is like far better than any mood altering drug. And I know I’ve taken a lot of them so I can tell you that it’s better than anything else. And I love when people say this, they say running is my therapy. I love this idea, right? Just like therapy.

Running helps you to feel good about yourself. It helps you to build self confidence and self esteem You know, running helps us to improve our sense of self, our self awareness, running helps us to then connect with others better. And just like therapy, running can help mitigate depression and anxiety.

You know, running makes us feel better about ourselves, we feel happier. Running can help improve our focus and concentration. So we can actually be more productive at work or at school. You know, running is just this amazing stress reliever for a lot of us.

So what I when I say run because you love it, here’s what I mean by that. Don’t run, just to try to lose weight, right? That’s going to cause you all kinds of unnecessary stress, and it doesn’t work very well. Don’t run because you feel like you have to, because then that’s just that makes running feel like a chore.

You know, don’t run to prove something to other people. You have nothing to prove to anybody else. All you have to do is prove something to yourself, what can you do? What are you capable of for yourself, run because it feels good to run. Run because you want to become more through the process of running. Run because you love running.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever push yourself or have goals. I want you to have goals, I want you to go for that PR run, run as fast as you can, you know, try to run your fastest race. Run further than you ever thought you could. If you’ve done a half marathon before and you’re like you know, I really want to do a marathon, do it.

Set your sights high, aim for more, see what you’re capable of. I want you to blow your own mind with what you can accomplish. Just do it in a way that serves you. Do it in a way that feels good to you. Love the process, love running throughout all of it.

Because if you find running is beginning to stress you out and it’s causing you all sorts of unnecessary anxiety. I’d encourage you to just take a good look inside. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Answer that question. That’s a good question. Why do you run? And if you do find yourself, getting a little stressed out about running, there are some things you can do. You can leave your watch at home and just head out and run untethered. No phone, no watch, just go run, run free. Run through the woods, instead of running on the sidewalks, go find a trail.

Oh my gosh, that is like my happy place to be running on trails alone in the woods. I love it. Maybe don’t take any earbuds with you, just focus on your breathing and the sound of your feet hitting the ground. Or if you’re the kind of person that usually doesn’t use music or whatever, maybe bring some earbuds, listen to music, listen to a podcast, learn something, listen to something that makes you laugh, or maybe get lost in a story.

I do this all the time. I listen to podcasts and I listen to stories. And sometimes they just get lost in this story. And it just feels so magical. I kind of forget that I’m even running. Not really, but kind of, but maybe use that time out there alone while you’re running. It’s just you and your thoughts and you could use it as a time to be thankful to give thanks for everything that you have in your life.

You know, be thankful for the sounds of the birds and the trees and the and the fact that you have a sidewalk to run on or maybe a dirt path beneath your feet. Be thankful for your health and for the people in your life. Maybe use this time to meditate or pray. Whatever you choose to do, however you choose to, love running. I want you to choose to love running.

That’s my encouragement for you this week is to fall in love with running. You can still crush your goals you can still go for that PR you can love running, and PR your next marathon. You can love running and crush that goal. You can love running and push yourself faster and further than you’ve ever run before.

You know running can still be uncomfortable. It can be hard but you can still love it. I want to encourage you to fall in love with running again. Run because you love it. Because running is where you truly find yourself. It’s in the running that you become more. I will be diving into the other principles of The Running Lean manifesto in the upcoming episodes and you can go back to the episode I did called eat real food.

And that’s where we start talking about these principles. I think these principles are so powerful and so important. And, and I hope you’re getting something out of this. I really truly do. And then be sure to join me this Sunday, November the first at 4pm. Eastern time for a little event I’m doing in the Running Lean community on Facebook. I’m sharing it all with you guys.

I got something big, big to share with you. Cool. Just search for Running Lean community on Facebook. We will see you there on Sunday, the first at 4pm. That is all I have for you today, my friends, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you keep on Running Lean, and I’ll talk to you soon.

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