I started running because I felt overweight and had no money, and running was ostensibly a free sport. Uncountable1 pairs of shoes and deliveries of Tracksmith later, I’m willing to admit that this sport can be free but certainly doesn’t have to be.

That’s not what I’m writing about here, though. What I want to write about are the opportunity costs we bear with every choice we make. 

I’m writing this on Saturday, September 7. My club did our long run this morning and the air was almost crispy at 68° when we finished. Far cooler than it has been in months, but not as cool as it’ll be tomorrow. My group was planning our recovery run for tomorrow to take advantage of the wonderful temperatures and someone mentioned that it’d be so nice to just be one of those people with their coffee and their dog just walking around the lake like they have nothing but time and nothing to worry about. I said offhand that we could actually do that instead of running if we wanted to.

Running is a pretty costly sport, especially if you’re committed to training. You get to spend time with your thoughts or your running buddies while you’re out, but you sacrifice slow time at home or with your family. If you’re running in the mornings, you lose late bedtimes and lie-ins. Training for a marathon requires a time investment far greater than just the time you spend pounding the pavement—there are the post-long run naps and the stretching, rolling and strength work that support all the training miles to account for as well. Not to mention the simple fact that you’re barely able to walk up stairs and you’re falling asleep in your soup during peak week.

There are the choices we make to avoid the things that might keep us from running, like passing on a pickup basketball game with friends or crossing bowling off your list of leisure activities because it caused knee pain last time you did it2. There are social plans we decline because we need to get to bed early and lots of “I’m good with just water” on Friday nights before a long run.

There are books we don’t read and photos we don’t take because we’re fall asleep after three pages or we’re out running while the light is good. There are vacations we don’t take because they’re allocated for destination races instead.

I love running. I do. I love getting faster and pushing myself first thing in the morning and having something accomplished before breakfast. But that costs me slow, contemplative mornings, among many other things. When you do something enough, it becomes a habit, and the habit makes you forget that you’re making a choice.

Examining those choices we make by force of habit is important to do periodically. We have to account for both the pros and the cons when we do it, and sometimes it can help us realize that we’re not making the right choices for the situations we’re in. Sometimes I notice I’m actively avoiding getting my runs done and try to decide if I’m just not enjoying running at that moment or if there’s something else afoot3. I’ve ended training cycles early because I was so miserable that it was the right thing to do at the time. It simply cost too much.

It’s something I do every summer living in Texas, too. On one hand, we have a house that we love and friends and family here. On the other hand, it’s hot and other places are not nearly hot. We don’t have to live here because of our jobs; we could live wherever we wanted. Sometime around the beginning of August, I’ll start opening up Zillow and look for houses in other parts of the country. Every time we talk about moving, we have to determine whether the effects of better weather and new scenery outweigh the cost of a new mortgage and the distance from our families. So far they haven’t, but we’ll continue to ask these questions regularly and I think that’s a good thing.

It can be easy to find yourself moving through life on autopilot. Most of our day-to-day activities are unremarkable and repetitive and I think that part of maintaining contentment with life is accepting this truth4. Taking stock of all of the little costs of decisions we take for granted can help us introduce variety into our routines—the little bites of dessert that make eating our everyday vegetables more appealing.

When my friends and I spoke enviously of the people we see taking a slow morning walk while we’re sweating it out, it almost didn’t enter our minds that we could be those people too, if we chose to. But we might just give it a shot tomorrow.