Something surreal happens when training for your first marathon. You wake up one Saturday, look at the training schedule, see that you’ve got a 12-miler, and think, “Thank God. An easy one.” Even if two months prior, you’d never run half that distance.
Running a marathon and professional writing are mostly individual efforts. You might have coaches or mentors, but only you can cross the start line or put pen to paper and race to the finish. They take an extraordinary amount practice and training to finish strong. And one of the things that many runners and writers find the most difficult to internalize is the importance of meaningful rest.
Three weekly recovery strategies in particular can transform someone who’s never run five miles into a marathoner in three months: Rest days, easy days, and stepbacks. Those same strategies can also help you create a newsletter-writing habit that grows your personal platform without burning the candle at both ends.
Sacred rest days
In his book on legendary running coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, USA Marathon champion Kenny Moore writes that “There are only two training questions…What should I do, and how much should I do it?” Questions that many authors, journalists, and solopreneurs agonize over every day.
Around the time Bowerman started coaching at the University of Oregon, a Finnish “hard every day” style of training was the go-to regimen. Runners we doing 400 meter sprints upwards of 40 times per day (~10 miles), every day. Strikingly similar to the advice that many authors see online about building a personal brand, “more is always better.” Record more TikTok videos. Send more newsletters. Tweet more.
But Bowerman noticed that athletes’ times would improve dramatically…up to a point. Up until they’d show up to practice at Hayward Field with “bones that seemed to have aged forty years in the night and the conviction that running was infantile and meaningless.” They’d burn out.
One of the reasons overdoing it is so dangerous, whether it’s running or self-promotion, is the Wile E. Coyote problem. You don’t know you’re in trouble until you’ve already sprinted off the edge of the cliff. Or as Ricky Montgomery described it to Vox in Everyone’s a sellout now, “Next thing you know, it’s been three years and you’ve spent almost no time on your art…[instead] becoming a great marketer for a product which is less and less good.”
Rest days are so universally agreed upon today that it’s hard to fathom the grueling pre-Bowerman training. Hopefully, in the coming years, we’ll look back on the days of hustle culture with the same nausea. Because, as the Nike co-founder would tell every freshman athlete on Day 1, “Take any organism…make it lift, or jump, or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That’s all training is. Stress. Recover. Improve.”
Recovery days only work when they are unmovable and sacrosanct. Even if your legs feel fresh or you had an ingenious newsletter idea over breakfast, punt until tomorrow. Revel in the rest. Eventually, you’ll breeze past everyone who trained for a sprint when they should’ve been training for the marathon.
More LSD
It was nearly impossible to follow running blogs or podcasts in the 2010s without constantly hearing the emerging vocabulary of slow-running: “80/20” or “Zone 2” or “LSD”. Bowerman’s holy rest days, it turned out, still weren’t enough. Coaches were finding that their athletes performed best when there were significantly more easy miles on the schedule than strenuous ones.
“Americans have the saying ‘no pain, no gain’...They get down to the track with a stopwatch and flog their guts out thinking that it’ll make them a champion, but they’ll never make a champion that way,” wrote Olympic marathon coach Arthur Lyriard in 1978, over 40 years before Wikipedia redirected searches for “hustle culture” to its Work Ethic page.
Lyrdiard’s inversion of all-out training was “train, don’t strain”. A philosophy that evolved into a formula equally applicable to recreational marathoners and world-record holders like Eliud Kipchoge: 80% of your weekly mileage should be slow and easy (specifically, around 60% of your max heart rate, AKA “Zone 2”), leaving only 20% of weekly mileage for intense workouts. LSD, or Long Slow Distance, coupled with rest days, became the new running gospel.
Now, productivity gurus are coming around to the idea for newsrooms and newsletters alike. Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity argues that “What ultimately matters [is] where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.” And what example does he present to make his point in the book’s introduction? Pulitzer prize-winning writer John McPhee and his Zone 2 approach to writing for The New Yorker, sometimes spending over a year on a single longform article.
For authors growing their platform with a newsletter today, that might mean that on most days you log some miles of causal stream of consciousness writing. Then, for a single two-hour session each week you push the envelope, putting 100% of your effort into perfecting your self promotion. Or maybe, since newsletters are often better when they’re raw and unfiltered anyways, you save the hard efforts for non-writing channels like TikTok or Instagram.
Yet another 80/20 approach could be to spend the majority of your newsletter efforts on connecting with your audience, writing about what you’re working on and enjoying that week. Topics you might chat about with a running partner during a long, slow jog. Similar to Hugo award winning self published author Charlie Jane Anders’s newsletter philosophy, which she describes as simply an “attempt at building something sustainable that can speak for me, and hopefully reach people who care about the same things I care about.”
Occasionally scale down, not up
Rest days and Zone 2 running still aren’t enough rest to get you to 26.2 miles. The assumption for many new marathoners is that you increase your mileage each week until you get to race distance. Author influencers sometimes preach the same: Write a little more than the day before, every day.
It takes an ungodly amount of fortitude to wake up every day and set a new personal best, whether that’s running distance or word count. Anders believes that “‘Write every day’ is terrible advice for a lot of people, but the soul of that advice is ‘find a way to make writing a habit, something you just do without having to psych yourself up too, too much each time.’"
In the 1960s, freelance writer and Boston marathoner Hal Higdon devised an alternative to the “always more than before” philosophy. Every one of his uber popular marathon training plans, from Novice 1 up to Advanced 2, includes his signature advice: “Weekly long runs get progressively longer, [except] every third week is a “stepback” week, where we reduce mileage to allow you to gather strength for the next push upward.” In Week 10 of the Novice plan, the long run is 15 miles, Week 11 is 16 miles, and Week 12 is the stepback to just under a half marathon. That surreal “easy” Saturday run.
Stepbacks also work for writers growing their newsletter list. You might take two steps forward and one backward with how much time you spend on self promotion, how many words you get out, how many emails you send per month, whatever. Two consecutive increases, followed by something shorter and easier on your tired marketing muscles.
Anders wrote in One Thing (Almost) Every Aspiring Writer Needs about how over the years she had “built up my writing practice, almost like a muscle that I'd strengthened. Sitting down in a cafe and working on a piece of fiction felt like second nature by that point.” What used to feel impossible became the baseline.
The all-important “macrocycle”
It’s exhilarating to reach new heights. To run a half marathon and feel fresh enough to keep going. To finish a chapter and want to keep writing through dinner. Most of the time, it’s probably fine. You might even finish, as Bill Bowerman intended, feeling “exhilarated, not exhausted.” But the rest days, easy days, and stepbacks must point toward an end goal. Otherwise, you’ll just keep pushing the finish line further and further out.
Elite marathoners work in what coaches call macrocycles. Periods of training sprinkled throughout the year ensure runners are in peak condition for certain races and cautiously building up their baseline during the off-season.
For authors, that might translate to a ramping up self-promotion in preparation for a book launch or mobilizing an audience after starting at a new publication. Rest is critical during those cycles. Make a specific day of the week marketing-free. Go hard on another day and then take it easy for the rest. Increase output for a couple of weeks but then take a step back. When that season is over or you reach a specific goal, reset. Create a new plan for a new macrocycle. Don’t try to improve ad nauseam.
Matt Fitzgerald writes in 80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster By Training Slower that “Running too hard too often is the single most common and detrimental mistake in the sport.” The same could be said of self promotion among authors. Maybe all it takes to go the distance is a little more rest and recovery.