Running is a lot like Research

I reconnected with running in the fall of 2024. It had been a while, and we were not exactly on talking terms.

The last time I had run, I was on the girls’ cross country team in high school. No, I was not good. Out of the few girls on the team, I was definitely the slowest. My high school was small, so each season, we had to choose a mandatory team sport to play. For some reason, I found myself in cross country because I thought it would be “chiller than swimming”.

Many years later, I found myself huffing and puffing again. Except this time, I was one of the oldest ones in the group. In an effort to make new friends (the struggle is real in grad school), I joined a few summer practices of the Stanford Run Club. During the first few weeks, my pace was slow and each run longer than around 20 minutes was a struggle. But gradually, as I paced myself with the others, my runs became longer and my pace became faster. Before I knew it, I was training for my first half-marathon the following February.

Another year later, I still looking forward to weekly runs. These days, I mostly run alone as a way to clear my thoughts and find peace away from daily chaos. I sometimes reflect on why I came to enjoy running so much, and I find many parallels with what draws me to research.

In both activities, there is basically no end point, and you can always improve. Showing up to a run when you don’t feel like it, or showing up at the office to keep mulling over your research problem that you have become sick of, are basically the same. It’s a promise to your future self, and a faith in the sport.

In research, you don’t realize how much you are learning until one day, you start reading a research paper that used to be gibberish but now makes sense. Just like in running: you don’t realize how much you are improving, until one day, you mention that your weekend plans include a “casual 11 mile jog” as your friends gawk at you.

The quote by Bill Gates indeed holds true for both running and research: people overestimate what they can do in 1 year, but underestimate what they can do in 10.

The small steps you take every day really do matter, even if they don’t feel like it in the moment.

Just don’t forget, as you’re building up to that marathon in the distant future, to feel the warm sun, the cool breeze, the unbridled joy of sprinting down a slope during the run that you do today.