My advice? Don’t.

Study it, sure. Give it gallons of your sweat and some of your blood and tears, too. Spend money on it. Daydream about it.

But save yourself some time and energy by not trying to “figure out” running. As if there’s a formula. As if it can be controlled or mastered.

I found that running became easier, almost instantly, when I realized that so much of it was out of my immediate control.

It was a weight off my mind to realize and accept that, after six months of everyday running, I could have days when I felt like I had started all over again. When, after a year of training, a half mile jog exhausted me. When my feet started to hurt the minute I set out for a 45-minute run. When I had to take a nap after warming up because my body just wasn’t feeling it that day.

Put another way, sometimes there’s just no rhyme nor reason to why you might have a disastrous running day or the best of your life. It’s like trying to figure out why the back of your neck itched or why you felt the need to stretch just then.

Some things just aren’t made for solving.

When I learned that, and even more so when I accepted it, running became so much less confounding, less frustrating and less stressful. I think part of the beauty of running, part of the reason it’s an art to some, is that you’ll have some of your best running moments when you’re least expecting them. And, likewise, some of your worst moments when you’re least expecting them. That’s why running never gets stale, why it never gets easy, only less hard.

So if you get outside today, whether it’s your first day running or you’re a marathoner, and you feel out-of-whack, or you try and can’t make it out the driveway, or you run 12 miles when you only intended five… don’t try to figure it out. Just try again tomorrow =)

-Ben (@BenMarkus1985)