i was going to use running as a metaphor for life, but making the connection was just too much effort.

there's a bit of an interesting discussion about running going on in another corner of the internet. folks are posting about their workouts including when they run hard or easy, how far they run, what pace they accomplish [or try to accomplish], whether they run on flat or hills or roads or tracks, et cetera & so on & so forth.

part of the discussion got me to thinking a bit about the inputs & the outputs. effort is what you put in. for running, that would be how hard you run, how much you try to keep running without walking, how fast or far or long time-wise you attempt to go. the output is the pace or the mileage or the time. you put in more effort, you should get out a faster pace, a longer mileage run or longer time run.

it's not always so simple, though. sometimes you put in a ton of effort and you don't get out the result you would have expected based on your past workouts. this could be because you don't have the experience of lots of workouts under different conditions, so maybe you simply don't know what it takes to get the outcome you're after. or, maybe you do know that, and still can't get the result, so maybe you have a burgeoning injury, or you're coming down with an illness -- you can't always tell at the beginning of an injury or illness that something definite is going wrong. maybe you didn't eat the right foods to fuel your body. maybe it's simply not your day.

there are a lot of factors that go into it and they're not all under your control and even the ones that are under your control might not go as expected. like, say you do all the nutrition stuff "right" but you don't get the outcome you'd expect from this nutrition - well, could be your body metabolizes the food slightly differently than the bodies of those folks in the study you read to learn how to do nutrition. or, you might be getting sick, so all that correct nutrition is going to fight the growing illness and there's nothing left over for running.

then - what about the factors that are outside your control? weather's a big one. if you are running in wind, rain, sleet, and snow, you will have to put forth more effort than you would to run in calm, 72º weather. flat or hills? treadmill or road? there are lots of choices that go into each run, and each choice plays a part in the overall. like - i would rather run outside and really hate the treadmill and find that running on the treadmill takes a ton more effort for me, probably mostly a mental thing. but, if it's very windy and raining, then running outside is going to take a helluva lot more effort than running on a treadmill.

so what you put in is the effort and it is subjective, id est: cannot be measured from the outside. you determine how much to put in and you also say if you reached that level. "i am going to run at 50% of 5k race effort." you define 5k race effort, you define 50%, and you judge after the workout if you did indeed put that amount of effort in. totally and completely subjective.

somedays it's easy to run far, fast, forever. somedays it takes all you have to get nowhere at all. the trick is to remember that the result does not define the effort. the effort is the input. you define the input. the bottom line is that it's all up to you, really.