Sustainable Pace

A speed that can be maintained throughout life

A common mistake at the beginning of a health and fitness campaign is to set off too enthusiastically, just like a novice runner on the starting line. It’s not long before we have to pull back, acknowledging the limitation of our capabilities.

Instead of thinking about what we need to do to achieve some arbitrary near-term goal, we could ask ourselves what a sustainable pace looks like.

What can I commit to, knowing that I’ll be able to sustain the pace for the rest of my active and healthy life?

For some, this might be into our sixties, for others it could take us right into our eighties.

It helps to find a baseline level for our adherence to a health and fitness routine that we feel we can sustain over multiple years. This should be hyper-realistic, something that we can do on a habitual daily basis, like cleaning our teeth. Such a routine should be so simple that we find ourselves doing it automatically, without having to spend a lot of energy talking ourselves into it.

We could think of such a routine as our daily table stakes for life. A deal we’ve made with ourselves as a minimal commitment. Something that can be done with minimal equipment - a routine of bodyweight exercises perhaps - but keep it simple.

“Much better to do fewer things and have time to make the most of them.”

- Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

We can build on our baseline routine if we feel like it, by challenging ourselves, be pushing the edges so we can see what we’re capable of - but we’ll always have a baseline routine to fall back on. So when we’ve overestimated our capabilities, chasing goals that are simply too big, we can relax back into our baseline routine while we figure out what to do next.

A sustainable pace beats overly ambitious goals in the long run.