Don't Think. Just Run

A classic track t-shirt

For the past twenty years, I have marked spring’s arrival with one event. It is not the calendar date of the spring equinox. It is not the first day the thermometer reads above 40 degrees. It is not even the day that the last pile of dirty, brown, snow-ice-slush finally melts from the corner of my driveway. Since I was in seventh-grade in 1994, I have marked every spring’s arrival with the first track practice of the year.

Track season, like its spring placement, is a season of rebirth and growth. It is a season where we shake off the long miles of winter’s doldrums and adjust our eyes to again soak in natural light. Track is a season of camaraderie, challenge, and t-shirts!

Track t-shirts have become something of legend over the last two decades. What once were simple short-sleeved symbols representing your high school allegiance, have become a battle of wit and whimsy. Shirts emblazoned with the current team’s motto are chances to inspire, intimidate, or simply illustrate a great sense of humor. Two of my personal favorites are "Looks can be deceiving; our workouts are a lot longer than our shorts," and from the ranks of cross-country t-shirts, “Cross-country…finally a good use for golf courses.” While these whimsical sentiments make us chuckle, there are some shirts slogans that manage to remind us of some key aspects of running. A former team of mine coined one of these, “Don’t think. Just run.”

Those four simple words have offered more training, racing, and life advice over the past several years than any article, seminar, or running book I can recall. “Don’t think. Just run.” As runners living in the age of Twitter, Facebook, Wi-Fi, and 4G, we have immediate access to any information we can imagine, and just like the dystopian novels we read in high school warned us, too much information may just be a bad thing.

A recent trend I’ve noticed in running articles has been the “How to handle” phenomenon. Over the past five months, I’ve seen articles covering “How to handle racing in the heat,” “How to handle racing in the cold,” “How to handle racing in the rain,” “How to handle racing in the wind,” “How to handle racing on trails“ and “How to handle racing on a Friday after a long week of work when the kids have been an absolute terror and you have a deadline looming that you probably wont meet.” Ok, so I made the last one up. But you get the point.

Invariably, all these articles begin with the same sage advice, "adjust your expectations." As we comb through the corn maze of information available to us as runners, we are confronted with thousands of data points that offer us thousands of reasons to “adjust our expectations.” If race day dawns hot and humid, we have a verifiable fact upon which to “adjust our expectations.” In other words, thanks to this treasure trove of data, we have a built-in excuse system just waiting to be tapped, before we even step foot on the starting line.

I’m not often one for nostalgia, but I certainly cannot remember ever calculating the agreed upon impact percentage one can attribute to temperatures below 40 degrees when racing a distance longer the 10k. At least not until the invention of the smart phone.

So the next time you lace up your shoes for a race consider returning to a simple, four-word slogan on a high school t-shirt, “Don’t think. Just run.” Indeed, it appears that there may just be bliss in ignorance, and perhaps a personal best time as well.