8/15/2017 I learned to run 100-mile marathonsthanks to the science of self-control Quartz

FEATS OF STRENGTH

I went from sedentary academic

to 100-mile marathon runner
thanks to the science of self-
control
Nathan DeWall July 02, 2017

If you want to control your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you have to keep track of them. (Reuters/Brian
Snyder)

Most people have days theyll never forget. For me, that day is April 26, 2011.
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It was
Brief. my first time appearing on National Public Radio. As part of the program All
Things Considered, host Michele Norris interviewed me about my research that
suggested increasing narcissism in pop music lyrics. Michele was curious,
insightful, and put me at ease. When I left my office and walked to my car, I felt
light as a feather floating across campus, free of care and worry. I had no idea that
what would happen over the next 24 hours would upend everything in my life. That
day would take me down a different pathone that included regularly running
100-mile footraces.

This is the story of how I use the science of self-control to run ultramarathons. I
believe that self-control is our greatest human strength, and the easiest thing that
we can improve upon. By mastering the three components of self-control, you too
could run 100 milesor conquer other, seemingly unreachable professional and
personal goals.

But before I marinate you in data, lets return to that Tuesday night in April.

Why run 100 miles?

I never planned on running 100-mile races. I didnt even know people did that sort
of thing. But I can trace my path from sedentary academic to ultramarathon runner
back to a phone call I made to my mother on that Tuesday night in 2011. She was
my biggest fan and supporter. Whenever something big happened, Mom was my
first call. This night was no exception.

She told me that she was proud of me. I told her that my college roommate had
heard the interview on the radio: He said he nearly choked on his piece of
salmon. We laughed a lot. Before we hung up, Mom told me she loved me. I cant
remember if I said I loved her back. But she knew I did.

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That
Brief. was the last time I spoke with my mom. The next day, she tripped in her
driveway, hit her head, and her brain started to bleed. The doctors couldnt stop the
bleeding. She died five days later. I couldnt believe it. My world was shaken. For
months, I couldnt sleep.

I started exercising to dull the pain of bereavement. And to support my wife, Alice,
I joined her in enrolling in a weight-loss program. At my intake session, I stepped
on the scale. The nurse gently told me that my body mass index (BMI) put me in
the obese range.

Obese? Im not obese, I said. Im tall.

She pointed to a chart on the wall. Lets see. Youre 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 meters).
That is tall, she said. Then she dragged her finger to the part of the chart that
matched my weight. She said, Youre tall and obese.

Little by little, I improved my diet and became more active. I lost weight. Then
Alice told me about two books she had read, Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes
and Eat and Run by Scott Jurek. In each book, the authors described running 100
miles without stopping. They even talked about running a race called the Badwater
ultramarathon, a 135-mile, nonstop, invitation-only race across Death Valley in
July.

Instantly, I knew that this was something I wanted to do. I had never even run a
regular marathon. But that didnt matter. Karnazes and Jurek described
ultramarathons as life-altering, almost spiritual experiences. Ive always been
driven and prone to take on wild, seemingly unattainable goals. People who ran
ultramarathons seemed like my kind of tribe.

The spark was lit. And as a psychologist, I had already studied the key ingredient I
would need
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disses my new,
Netix, Zuma survives crazy
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beer lawsuit. self-control.
All this and more in Now
today'sI Daily
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needed to figure out how to apply that knowledge to my personal life.

Brief.

The gift of willpower

People with a lot of self-control have the motivation and ability to override their
unwanted impulses and desires. You can tell a lot about peoples self-control by
how they act around marshmallows. Just ask Walter Mischel, who conducted one of
psychologys classic studies using nothing more than a bag of marshmallows and
some adorable kids enrolled at Stanfords Bing Nursery School. Mischel gave each
child a simple task: They could have one marshmallow right away, or they could
wait patiently to earn a second marshmallow. Unbeknownst to the kids, the true
purpose of the study was to examine their persistence in the face of temptation.
They had to delay immediate gratification for a delayed reward.

What happened next shocked Mischel and the rest of the academic world. Kids who
delayed gratification in nursery school went on to enjoy happier, healthier, and
more successful adult lives. Kids with willpower were more prone to later success,
because they built the habit of crowding out temptation to remain laser-focused on
their goals.

Indeed, self-control seems to be a key factor in determining academic achievement.

In a clever 2005 study, psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman
measured 140 eight-graders self-control and intelligence. Then Duckworth and
Seligman waited patiently until the end of the school year, when they recorded the
students end-of-year grade point averages. The results? Self-control was over
twice as important as intelligence in predicting childrens academic success.

In their best-selling book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,

psychologist Roy Baumeister and science journalist John Tierney offer many
additional examples of the benefits of self-control. They show how self-control
helped musician Eric Clapton to kick his alcohol and drug addiction and comedian
Drew Carey learn to flourish at his work. One particularly memorable detail:
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Mastering the components of self-control helped magician David Blaine complete

Brief.
his feats of physical endurance, including holding his breath underwater for over
17 minutes.

If Blaine could hold his breath underwater for 17 minutes, could I train my body
and mind to run 100 miles? It seemed possible. And so I set about fortifying my
sense of self-control, based on the following factors:

Standards are the reference points you use to determine whether a

given action is appropriate or desirablewhether you should order
a third drink, for example, or wake up at 5 am every day. Our
standards originate from our cultural surroundings, what people
teach us, and our personal beliefs.

Monitoring is the second part of self-control. If you want to

control your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you have to keep
track of them.

Strength refers to how much energy you have to control your

impulses. Your strength waxes and wanes as the day goes on,
usually peaking in the morning and plunging at night. You can also
build up strength through practicing self-control.

Putting self-control into practice

Reading about running 100 miles is one thing. Doing it is another. I quickly learned
how little I knew about the sport. To prevent injury, I hired an online running
coach. My coach and I developed standards for training, methods to monitor my
running, and discussed how to maintain and build my physical and mental
strength.

Standards: I ran six days a week, building my mileage slowly until

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was running between 60 and 85 miles per week. Although I
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8/15/2017 I learned to run 100-mile marathonsthanks to the science of self-control Quartz

started by running one or two miles per day, less than a year later I
Brief.
could run 20 miles on a Saturday and another 20 miles the
following day.

Monitoring: I recorded every workout online, which helped me

monitor my progress over time. I recommend Strava. Its where I
log my workouts. I noticed that I was spending the same amount of
time running as I had been spending watching television. It helped
me realize that I had always had the time to run; Id just been
doing something else with it.

Strength: To maintain my physical strength, I experimented with

sports foods and drinks that I would consume while I ran. I
currently use SWORD for all of my running. Its liquid gold. I built
my mental strength by running even when I didnt want towhen I
was sore, stressed, or sleepy.

It took a year of training before I arrived at the starting line of my first 100-mile
race, the Hallucination 100 miler in Hell, Michigan. (Yes, I traveled to Hell to run
100 miles.)

At the starting line, I knew I needed to incorporate the three ingredients of self-
control if I had any chance at finishing. The race had a 30-hour time limit. To
complete it successfully, I had to maintain at least an 18:00 minute/mile (11:11
minute/km) pace. How hard could that be?

I had to monitor how many miles I ran, along with the number of calories I
consumed each hour. That also seemed easy. And I needed to draw on the physical
and mental strength I had cultivated during my training to run even when I didnt
want to.

But I quickly realized that it would take every shred of my self-control to run 100
miles. By disses
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60, I was sleep-deprived and stumbling. By the time I hit mile 83, I knew that I had
Brief.
no chance of finishing.

I thought I had done everything right. Id prepared well; I ate every 20 minutes; I
rehydrated consistently; and I was in good physical shape. Still, my mind was
failing me. I needed a boost of strength from self-control.

When I saw Alice at mile 83, I felt likeand resembleda ghost.

I need help, I said. Can you help me?

What do you need? Ill do anything.

Will you do the last part with me? I asked, knowing that Alice had never done
more than a 5-K race.

Of course I will, she said.

We covered the last 17 miles together, with her encouraging me every step of the
way. When I whined, she told me to eat. When I said I needed to sit down, she told
me to keep moving. When I crossed the finish line, after 26 hours and 42 minutes of
running, she gave me a hug, a kiss, and told me she loved me.

There are two points to this story. First, Alice is an incredible partner. But the
second, broader point is that acts of extreme self-control are made possible by
close relationships. As Malcolm Gladwell astutely points out in Outliers, achieving
eminence in a given field is about more than just 10,000 hours of deliberate
practice. Bill Gates spent thousands of hours learning how to program computers
but he only had that opportunity because he had the good fortune of having
parents who supported his education. Mozart spent most of his youth performing
and composing, which was made possible by his father Leopold, who sacrificed his
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Brief.
To even make it to the starting line of my first 100-mile race, I needed to have a
partner who supported me. And I certainly needed Alice to finish it. Self-control
and close relationships are the two components necessary for success.

The spillover eect

Since that first ultramarathon, Ive run a slew of long races, including the Last
Annual Vol State 500km (314-mile) race and the 147-mile Marathon des Sables
stage race in the Sahara Desert. Ive helped friends finish races and break world
records for running across the United States. And after five years of running, I
achieved my big goal: I was invited to toe the starting line at this years Badwater
135 ultramarathon on July 10.

But the bigger payoff of running ultramarathons has been at the office and at
home. By strengthening my body and mind, Ive been able to accomplish more at
work and become a better husband and father. Succeeding at relationships and at
work also requires self-control. Self-control can help you override undesirable
urges, like snapping at your partner or putting off a big project. And the good news
is that strengthening self-control in one area of your life can improve other
components of life. Its the gift of self-control spillover.

Once you build self-control through a chosen activitywhether its running,

quitting smoking, getting on a budget, or finally buckling down and writing your
bookyou do a better job exerting self-control in other situations. Consider a
simple experiment by psychologist Tom Denson and his colleagues. They
conducted a study in which half of all participants practiced self-control over two
weeks by using their non-dominant hand for everyday tasks (for example, cooking
and carrying their books). The rest of the participants were in the control group,
assigned to perform undemanding tasks.

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Next the researchers insulted all the participants by giving them negative feedback
Brief.
on a public speech, and waited to see if they would react aggressively. It takes self-
control to override aggressive impulses, whether its toward a colleague who rubs
you the wrong way or a family member whos criticizing the way you wash the
dishes. The study found that the people who had practiced self-control with their
non-dominant handsan activity that had no bearing on the situation at hand
were better able to keep their tempers in check. The bottom line: Practice self-
control in one area of your life, and you can apply it in other parts, too.

Successful entrepreneurs and businesspeople have long testified to the benefits of

self-control. Grit is every entrepreneurs trump card, said LinkedIn founder Reid
Hoffman on his podcast Masters of Scale. In his comprehensive biography of Elon
Musk, Ashlee Vance shows readers how Musks genius consists of setting incredibly
high standards, monitoring progress closely, and working around the clock to build
his physical and mental strength. The result? Companies that are deftly disrupting
and redefining the automotive and space industries.

As I reflect on that Tuesday in April, 2011, I feel a mixture of sadness and gratitude.
What started as a way to cope with grief became an opportunity for growth. Im
reminded of the book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy,
by Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and psychologist Adam Grant,
which focuses on life after loss. After the unexpected death of Sandbergs husband,
a friend told her, Option A is not available. So lets just kick the shit out of Option
B. Im living my own Option B now. And running 100 miles helps me kick the shit
out of it.

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