Joy is not decoration on the training. It is the thing that determines whether you are still doing this in five years.
The rarájipari is a Ráramuri ball-kicking race, run over long distances, usually as a community event with betting and considerable noise. I mention it as a specific named game belonging to a specific people, rather than as evidence for a general claim about anybody’s attitude to running, which is the mistake the fourth essay was about.
The portable observation is small: for most of human history running long distances happened inside games, work and ceremony rather than inside training plans, and the grim-solitary-effort version is recent and unusual.
Which raises a question most runners never ask. If you stopped measuring this, would you still want to do it?
The relevant research is on what happens to enjoyment when an external structure is attached to an activity people did for its own sake.
The finding, replicated widely: expected, tangible rewards contingent on simply doing a task tend to reduce subsequent intrinsic motivation for that task.5 The meta-analytic picture is that this is conditional — it shows up most reliably with expected tangible rewards and much less with unexpected ones or with verbal feedback — but the core effect is well established.
The extension to tracking is mine rather than the literature’s. Streaks, scores and leaderboards are not quite the rewards those studies used. But they share the structure: an external contingency attached to an activity that previously ran on wanting to do it.
There is also the burnout literature in sport, which finds the syndrome associated with environments emphasizing outcome and evaluation over enjoyment and mastery.7 Self-report, correlational, and consistent.
If you stopped measuring this, would you still want to do it?
Small, deliberate, and slightly embarrassing, which is usually the sign.
This series discusses running practices belonging to specific Indigenous nations of the Americas. Where a practice belongs to a named people, it is named; where a source is an Indigenous author, runner or organization speaking publicly about their own tradition, that is said. Ceremonial and religious specifics that those nations have not made public are not discussed here and are not the author’s to convert into technique. General claims about running physiology and psychology are cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.
Attaching an external contingency to something done for its own sake reliably erodes the wanting — a well-established effect, though the extension from rewards to streaks and scores is mine.
The question worth asking: if you stopped measuring this, would you still want to do it? And the fix is a lamppost sprint, which is undignified and works.