The ultimate guide to making running a lifelong habit
Words: Anna Harding
For many people, running is more than just a way of keeping fit or moving their body; it can become a journey of self-discovery. But the first step to running enlightenment is to incorporate it into your regular routine. Once you’ve built it as a habit, it tends to become second nature to go out for a run during your week, whether you’re training for a goal race or just doing it for fun.
In this month’s Running Skills, we’ll be giving you some more information about what habits are, how to make good ones, and we’ll give you specific tips on how to form a habit in running.
What are habits?
From a science perspective, habit formation involves the basal ganglia, which is a part of the brain associated with motor skills and procedural learning. As habits become ingrained, they shift from needing conscious thought to becoming automatic behaviours. In this way, they’re thought to be a way for the brain to conserve energy. Once a behaviour becomes a habit, the brain doesn’t have to work as hard to execute it, allowing for more efficient use of its resources.
Simply put, habits are the small decisions you make and actions you perform every single day. You probably have a number of habits that you don’t even realise. According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40% of our daily behaviours.
How to create a good habit
In a book called The Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg breaks down the process of building a habit into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. James Clear has taken these themes in his book Atomic Habits, and has created a framework for how to turn these steps into something that we can work on in our lives:
Cue: make it obvious.
Craving: make it attractive. Response: make it easy. Reward.
Clear then puts these stages in context with an everyday life scenario:
Cue: your phone buzzes with the arrival of a new text message.
Craving: you want to learn the contents of the message.
Response: you grab your phone and read the text.
Reward: you satisfy your craving to read the message. Grabbing your phone becomes associated with your phone buzzing.
Here’s another scenario based around running in the morning:
Cue: leave your running shoes and clothes out before you go to bed. As soon as you wake up, you will see your running shoes and your mind will focus on going for a run.
Craving: you want to be more consistent at go
