In January this year I did a run streak. The rule I set for myself was essentially to run 2km minimum every day of that month. That was it. It was low mental admin – there’s an obvious 2km loop around the houses – and it wasn’t physically significant enough to impact any other planned exercise in the day. Why did I do it?
I do enjoy running but I don’t love running like some of the people I know love running. I love being outside and exploring somewhere new, and I love seeing the sunlight on the water sometime between 6am and 7am; I love the run group chats and that feeling when I’m running faster than expected, when the breathing and the body is feeling good. But on many days running feels like a slog, and I often feel better about having done it than in the doing of it. In short, I didn’t do this because of any passion for running.
I honestly didn’t think too deeply about it at the start; I thought I was just looking at changing things up a bit fitness-wise, but in the doing of it I became conscious of some positive shifts: I felt aware of the space in my day to do something just for me; I had the resilience to go running in heavy rain; I had the strength to do a little bit more when my legs felt stuffed after a wind-trainer or weights session. And I had control over my decision to keep going with the streak or not. In choosing to do so I was being consistent, and this brought with it a feeling of autonomy over my own life.
All great stuff, more so because there have been huge chunks of my life where I’ve felt the opposite – disempowered, out of control, weak. But the point I want to make is this: I didn’t have a clear goal in mind when I started. I didn’t do it to get faster or stronger, I didn’t do it to burn a few more calories in a day. I just knew I wanted to create some fitness momentum to start the year and that this was frictionless enough as to be achievable.
This is what I’ve hung onto from that experiment; sometimes just doing something, anything, can have an unexpected positive impact on the self. (Though something I want to remind future me of too is that even if an experiment doesn’t achieve that, all is not lost; there’s something to be learned).
On reflection though, there’s another learning I want to take from this experiment – something I didn’t do – track and measure. Whether that’s a mindful moment of taking stock, or a hard measure, something more quantifiable, this is worth doing. I stopped the run streak after a month because I felt like it had helped ‘in some way’. That was it! And yet, every 3-4 days I would try and do a harder, quicker 2km and I think I was getting faster. Given, one of the goals I had at the outset of the year was to get my 5km to 27mins30s, I can’t help but feel that measuring the impact of the run streak on my times is something I could have investigated a bit further (as it stands right now, I’m nowhere with that goal).
I’ve dedicated an area of this site specifically to experiments because I feel like this is where growth lies for me; when you don’t know what you want, you’ve got to just try stuff but I want to do this in a more mindful and deliberate way. Reflective practice, to borrow a term from good old Learning & Development theory.
I’ve built a simple tool to use whenever I experiment: something structured enough to capture hard data, but flexible enough to draw out unexpected mental insights too.
Life Experiment Canvas: A Periodic Tracker for Intentional Living
1. Experiment Overview
- Name of Experiment: (e.g., January 2km Daily Run Streak)
- Parameters & Duration: (e.g., 30 days | 2km minimum daily loop)
- Friction Level (1–5): [ ] (Is it achievable without overwhelming daily capacity?)
- The Initial Spark: (Why this? Why now? e.g., Momentum to start the year)
2. Baseline & Metrics
- Hard Measures (Quantifiable):
- Target Metric: (e.g., 2km pace, 5km time goal)
- Starting Point: (e.g., Current baseline speed)
- Soft Measures (Mindset & Energy):
- Internal Markers: (e.g., Sense of autonomy, daily energy)
3. Periodic Check-In (Weekly)
| Week | What Did the Data Say? (Paces, completion, numbers) | What Did I Notice Internally? (Resistance, mindset shifts) |
| W1 | ||
| W2 | ||
| W3 | ||
| W4 |
4. Post-Experiment Debrief
- Quantifiable Outcome: Did this move the needle on my hard goals?
- Hidden Realisations: What unconscious benefit or mindset shift surfaced through the doing?
- My Next Move: [ ] Double Down | [ ] Evolve Parameters | [ ] Conclude & Retain Lesson
My plan is to use this framework for every project tagged under the Experiments section of this blog. Whether an experiment yields a breakthrough of some kind, or whether it just teaches me about something that doesn’t work, I’m capturing some hard data on me. The approach I’ll take echoes the overarching purpose of this blog – to leverage what I’ve learned about me in the past to get to the version of me I want for the future. That, in and of itself, will be an experiment.