Stop Overthinking and Start Running

By Vincent Sesto

How to embrace physical activity and change your life, one run at a time.

 

The aim of this book is to get as many people as possible running, no matter what age, height or size they might be. By reading this book, it's hoped you should be able to gain an understanding of:

- How to get started running and create a lasting, sustainable and consistent habit. We'll provide you with easy to follow training plans and some of the details on why it will help you in your running journey.

- Help you with your confidence, motivation and mindset in getting started and try to help you build a lasting habit that will give you the full benefits of living an active life.

- We'll discuss how you can get the most out of your running by allowing your body to recover and making better decisions with the food you eat.

- We then take a look at ways to make your body stronger so you can get more out of your running and provide you with some of the ways to help you avoid common running injuries.

- Once you have established your running routine and habit, only then we'll discuss how you might look to improve your running and learn about different coaching techniques to take your training further.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent Sesto
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201274191

Vincent Sesto

Vincent Sesto is a DevOps Engineer, Endurance Athlete, Coach and Author. One of his passion's in life is endurance sports as both an athlete, coach and author. He is a certified running and triathlon coach with a goal to inspire people through his coaching and competition and to encourage people to live active and healthy lives. His motto in life is, "I am trying to change the world, one run at a time". As a DevOps Engineer, Vincent has worked with a large number of multi national corporations gaining experience across various technologies and has been able to apply this experience in both his work and writing across a number of books from Splunk, Ansible and Docker. His LinkedIn profile is at https://au.linkedin.com/in/vincesesto.

Book preview

Preface

In my honest opinion, I believe running can be one of the most positive things someone can do for themselves, their families and even for the rest of the world. It can help you live an active and healthier life, spend time outside and help you detach from your current environment, work or whatever troubles you might be having. With physical inactivity being identified by the World Health Organization as the fourth leading risk factor for mortality worldwide. And studies show fitness, or lack thereof, is a stronger predictor of mortality than even smoking.

The aim of this book is to get as many people as possible running, no matter what age, height or size they might be. By reading this book, it's hoped you should be able to gain an understanding of:

- How to get started running and create a lasting, sustainable and consistent habit. We'll provide you with easy to follow training plans and some of the details on why it will help you in your running journey.

- Help you with your confidence, motivation and mindset in getting started and try to help you build a lasting habit that will give you the full benefits of living an active life.

- We'll discuss how you can get the most out of your running by allowing your body to recover and making better decisions with the food you eat.

- We then take a look at ways to make your body stronger so you can get more out of your running and provide you with some of the ways to help you avoid common running injuries.

- Once you have established your running routine and habit, only then we'll discuss how you might look to improve your running and learn about different coaching techniques to take your training further.

This book aims to help people understand the basics so they can trust their own instincts and put their own training plans together to have fun and simply enjoy running.

For me personally, I have a day job as a software engineer which I enjoy and have made a good career out of, but my other passion in life is endurance sports as both an athlete, coach and author. I am a certified running and triathlon coach with my goal to inspire people through my coaching and competition and to encourage people to live active and healthy lives. I tell people, I am trying to change the world, one run at a time.

Through running and triathlon, I've been fortunate enough to also have worked as a journalist writing articles for TriSwimCoach, RunningHeroes and The Running Project.

I want to get people to the start line of their goal race happy, healthy and as injury free as possible. Endurance sports are hard, there is no denying that, but my philosophy in coaching is to provide an athlete with a way to achieve their goal by limiting their chances of over training or putting extra stress on their health and bodies.

Together we want to use the least amount of training possible to create the best desired benefit to the athlete.

The thing I love about endurance sports is that it usually comes with a lifestyle that people gravitate towards. This lifestyle is a great way to help people get healthy, achieve their goals and generally live a better life, but in some situations, this can also push people too far into being fit but unhealthy or worse, over trained, which is something we don't want from anyone reading this book or anyone I coach.

Feel free to connect with me at any of the following channels:

- LinkiedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincesesto/

- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vincesesto/

- Ironman Coaching: https://u.ironman.com/profile-coach_profile/17161/

- Strava: https://www.strava.com/athletes/1778778

Disclaimer

The author of this book has attempted to present the most up to date information available and all the recommendations presented are the opinions of the author with no outside influence from anyone else. Please make sure you are being safe in all aspects of your training and racing. Please use appropriate safety equipment when needed and ensure you consult a doctor if you are unfit or have not recently taken on a physical fitness program recently.

Get Running

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Dear runners, please stop apologizing for being slow. Remember, you're lapping everyone on the couch. - Unknown

Sunday morning and I was in the zone. For a while I'd gotten my routine down to a fine art where I knew I could get out of bed at 8am. Without waking anyone else in the house, I would check my work email while having breakfast and do a quick tidy up of the house before heading out the door for my Sunday morning run. I'd been running for a few years but didn't really start to appreciate my run until I got into my Sunday morning groove.

The neighbourhood was still waking up and I was practically alone in my own world to simply run and think and to escape any worries I had from the real world. My eight kilometre run was undulating, so I was not too worried about my time, but finishing in a good 40 minutes left me happy knowing I'd gotten a good workout.

With my run done, I would make sure I did the grocery shop before stepping back in the house, a quick shower and I would be sipping my second coffee of the day as my wife at the time was getting out of bed.

Sitting quietly smug in the knowledge my Sunday morning had been a fruitful one it allowed me to then relax into my Sunday and unwind before starting a new week back at work again.

I wasn't hiding the fact I'd been for a run, but I was not advertising the fact either, and definitely not advertising that I'd enjoyed it. I was 34 and it's not that I wasn't allowed to go for a run, I knew there was some resentment toward the fact that I had something in my life that I enjoyed and was my own.

The funny thing is we started our running journey together ten years earlier. Newly married, my wife wanted to get more active and wanted to do a fun run. I thought it was a great idea and even though high school was the last time I had run, I remembered that when it came to sports, running longer distances was the one thing that set me apart in the school yard. We started with local 4km and 5km fun runs and I loved every aspect of it.

Soon enough, my wife's interest in running had waned. I still encouraged her to join me in training runs and races, but it wasn't long and I was doing my training runs and races on my own.

Running was becoming a bigger and more important part of my life.

Welcome to Stop Overthinking and Start Running. This book has been put together to encourage as many people as possible to get active through running. I try to eliminate a lot of the guesswork and simplify things as much as possible. I want to answer all of the questions a new running might have to get you to simply start running.

This is the first chapter of the book and aims to get you started on a running journey. I take a little time out to give you an outline of what running means to me and how it can help you. I also discuss motivation, how to start to gain a running mindset, as well as discussing some of the reasons why you might have false started on your running journey on previous occasions. I then take the last few pages of the chapter and present a basic running challenge to get you started and hopefully some of the ways to help you run comfortably as part of this challenge.

Before we start you on your journey, I want you to start with one quick exercise.

There may have been any number of reasons why you want to start running. Running or any regular exercise has a powerful way to transform any life and whatever the reason might be, I want you to think about how your life will be once you reach your running goal.

A lot of people start running to get healthy, some have a goal of running their first marathon, others have completely different reasons.

Running is not easy, and I am sure you know that, but I want you to think about your end state. I want you to visualise how your life will be when you reach your desired running goal.

Try to imagine how you will look, how you will act and how you might have changed from where you are now. For some it might not be very different, but for others their lifes may be completely changed from where they are now.

Visualisation can be a powerful way to keep you motivated and I want you to remember how you visualised your life in this exercise, maybe even take the time to write it down. Whenever you are struggling with motivation and are not sure why you're doing what you are doing, read through how you visualise your life as a runner.

You could answer the following questions:

I want to start running because...

When I reach my running goal, I will be...

My life will have changed for the better in the following ways...

There’s no better time to start running than now, unless you are going to read the rest of this chapter, then feel free to do that first. I think it will be an easy read and give you some of the guidance you need to get started.

DISCLAIMER

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