Master Your Mind

Introduction

Need speed? Slow down.

—David Allen, Getting Things Done

Roger’s Story of “Slowing Down to Speed Up”

Life and business lessons come to us at the weirdest times. The idea for this book hit me when I was passed by a 78-year-old grandma on the running trail.

I’d been trying unsuccessfully to train for a marathon for a couple of years. I’d actually run a couple and was trying to get back into shape to run a personal best, and I hadn’t been making any real progress. The trouble was that I kept getting injured – first a foot, then a knee, then a hip – and each injury would sideline me from running for a couple months. And then I’d have to start training all over again. It was this constant process of one step forward, two steps back.

In trying to figure out how to be a faster runner with more endurance, I read a number of books that espoused the idea of training at an incredibly slow pace to ultimately get faster. When I first stumbled onto this teaching, it made no sense at all. I’d always been taught that if you want to go faster, you train faster. Going slow to go fast sounds totally counterintuitive and backward, right?

Well, the thing is, it actually works. Since this isn’t really a running book, I won’t get into all the nerdball science of why it works, but here’s the short version:

For running anything longer than about a mile, you must rely on your body’s aerobic system. That’s the energy production system in your body that allows you to burn fat for fuel ...