The Four Pillars

A holistic commonsense approach to health and wellness

If you subscribe to a bunch of health and fitness newsletters like I do, you are used to being informed on a daily basis of some magical formula that will put you on the track to wellness. It could be Six Ways to a Healthier You, or Five Superfoods Guaranteed to Add Years To Your Life. 

I click on a lot of those pieces and try to learn something from each one, even the stories with over dramatic headlines. Most of the articles repackage ideas I’ve already read somewhere else, but there’s often a nugget or two of wisdom to be found. 

The reality is you can sort the elements any way you like, but they generally come down to four simple things that you -- YES YOU -- can do to improve your health right now. 

1. Eat real food

2. Exercise

3. Get proper sleep

4. Embrace community

That’s it. That’s the whole list. 

We haven’t really talked about a holistic approach to health and wellness to this point, but since I’m making a listicle out of the concept of listicles, let’s go ahead and call this: Running Probably’s Four Pillars of Healthy Living. 

The concepts may be basic -- move your body, rest, eat, engage with other people -- but where it gets interesting are the endless variations and variables found within The Four Pillars(™). 

Take food, which is a whole universe unto itself.

Day after day, I get email blasts touting the efficacy of intermittent fasting or extolling the virtues of going vegan or Keto. These diets are not trends, exactly. Veganism has been around for thousands of years, just as meat-friendly eating plans have been in vogue since the invention of fire. As for fasting, we have an entire documented history of people withholding food for all kinds of reasons.

Given the modern marketing emphasis on lifestyles, these diets are presented more like a personal ethos than a way to consume calories. Lifestyle is a highly-charged word because it connotes a strict adherence to a rigid set of rules that seem implausible to non-practitioners. Taken to an extreme, lifestyle diets can start to feel like cults. 

Less extreme, but still odious, is the idea that drastically changing nutritional habits can be a hack or shortcut. Those words always make me queasy. I’ve seen people encounter serious problems when they dive headlong into the latest dietary fad without sufficient preparation. Like runners getting injured after doing too many miles without a solid training base, there’s a propensity to crash and burn.   

Still, there’s an element of truth to the word lifestyle because committing to a different way of eating necessitates changing habits and embracing new food. If you’re going to get your calories primarily from plants or animals, you’re invariably going to wind up getting rid of a bunch of processed stuff in your cabinets. 

Allow me the obvious disclaimer: I have no intention of telling you what you should eat or how you should prepare your food. I can only offer my own experience and point to things I find interesting or informative. The short version is that I became a vegetarian last February. 

The longer version is that I had been thinking about eliminating meat from my diet for a few years. Part of my reasoning was altruistic -- reducing my carbon footprint, etc -- and part of it was that I didn’t like how eating meat made my body feel. What spurred me toward embracing plants at that exact moment last winter was that our refrigerator kept breaking, and there was no room to store meat in our backup dorm fridge. 

My fridge will never be this perfect again

The initial impact was immediate. I dropped a few troublesome pounds and felt leaner and lighter on my feet. I recovered quickly from tough workouts and was able to train at a higher level. Those effects evened out with time, but I still feel a positive boost from my plant-friendly diet. 

Just like running became a huge part of my identity, so too did becoming a vegetarian.

When I decided to stop eating meat, it changed the way I shopped for groceries and how I thought about meals. I now work the produce aisle like the forager I’ve become and am a big fan of legumes. 

Technically, one would call me a pescatarian since I still eat fish. I’m not a huge fan of that label -- or any food labels in general -- because it seems weird to single out something I eat maybe once a week when the bulk of my calories come from fruits and vegetables with a healthy dose of nuts and seeds. My eating habits could best be described as a plant-based version of the Mediterranean diet with a little fish on the side. 

(Turns out, this might be the *perfect* diet. At least, according to this Medium piece. Yay me.) 

I’ve thought about going vegan, but I feel pretty good about where my nutrition is at the moment. I honestly don’t know where my food journey will take me next. That’s ok, it’s part of the fun. As I grow older, I’ve found that being able to evolve and adapt with the needs of my body is a smarter strategy than hopping on the latest nutritional bandwagon. 

The same holds true for exercise.

There are countless ways to move your body and even more variations and techniques that teach you how to do it. Just in the last few decades, runners had the barefoot craze and the chi pose method, along with training plans that emphasized raw speed and others that suggested slowing down. 

As with food trends, there are things to be learned from all of these ideas, but the essential truth remains the same: Exercise is good for you. As runners, we already know this. There’s no need to belabor this particular point further except to note that the joy we feel running allows us to sustain a consistent training approach, and that helps build good habits. 

Speaking of building good habits, let’s talk about sleep.

I aim to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, but that often becomes sixish and rarely gets close to eight. (Shoutout to my 7-year-old.) 

That’s a problem because sleep is our hidden superpower. It’s the key to recovering from hard efforts and long training blocks. On the other hand, when something’s bothering me -- be it running, writing, or just existing in everyday life -- there’s a good chance I’m not getting enough sleep. 

This was particularly true during the long, hot summer when I was getting up earlier and earlier to run and wound up spending my evenings stressed and unable to shut down. You can keep that pace up for a little while, but there’s a price to pay and friends, it’s a doozy. Tantrums, meltowns, irritability; I was not always a pleasant person to be around at that time. 

Any good listicle about building better sleep habits will mention a few familiar themes: creating a comfortable sleeping environment, limiting social media and screens before bed, allowing your brain time to slowly power down. My particular bout with insomnia touched on all those things, but was also born out of a lifetime of working nights as a sportswriter. 

It took me a while to crack the code, but I finally realized that if I stay awake past 10:30, my brain automatically goes into deadline mode. The manic bursts of energy needed to function on that level keep me up well past midnight whether I’m working or not. 

That pattern of behavior was so ingrained, I had to take active countermeasures. Instead of resisting sleep and fatigue, as I have done throughout my adult life, I began paying close attention to my circadian rhythms. My sleeping habits can still improve, but they’re demonstrably better than they were this summer. 

In a nutshell, that’s what this newsletter is about: identifying weakness and applying practical, common sense solutions that involve listening to ourselves, rather than applying some algorithmic hack. It’s so easy to get lost in the blizzard of information we have coming at us from every direction. Those first three Pillars -- real food, exercise, and sleep -- offer a solid foundation for improving as runners, and if I may be so bold, as humans. 

And that brings us to the final pillar: Community. 

I’m not that social. My dream when COVID is over is to drive somewhere far away and be alone for a few weeks, preferably by a trail with a babbling brook to keep me company. That preference for solitary isolation plays well as a writer and runner, but being left to my own devices for too long plays havoc with my mental health. 

Even for someone like me, communities are vital and oh so tough to come by these days. I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss talking to strangers on the trail. In these dark days of winter, I feel incredibly fortunate to have made a connection with all of you through this newsletter. If you allow me some 2021 optimism, I feel like we’re on the verge of creating something special. 

In that spirit, I’d like to learn from all of you. What do you consider vital to your health and wellness? How’s your relationship with food and sleep? Tell me something good.