Please join me in a short meditation as we stare listlessly at a pair of mud-battered shoes, the ones in the corner that smell like an old sponge.
Keep staring as you bring your gaze, your mind, and your violated nostrils to next-to-zero motivation for putting them on for today’s run. After all, the workday was long and the weather looks ominous. Do you bail? What’s so bad about a zero day, anyway?
Suddenly, a whisper. Follow the sound; see where it goes. Eventually, you hear it, a tactic pulled from your toolbox in moments just like these. It’s a rule, one of the simplest yet most profound training tricks of all time—the Rule of Ten.
What Is the Rule of Ten?
Ten minutes. Ten minutes is the time it takes for me to fold laundry, to take a powernap, to grind, brew, and enjoy a pourover, to scroll Instagram and come out the other side wondering if I remembered to breathe. Ten minutes is a blip, a negligible unit, hardly anything at all.
But this is exactly the point.
Whenever I’m feeling heavy or unmotivated to get out the door, I aim for this puny number. Ten. Over the years, it’s had a profound effect on my…
