Cougars Don't Cut Corners

One of my favorite stories from college lore is this.  The campus grounds crew, tired of students wearing the grass thin as they angled across the well-manicured lawns in an effort to get to classes faster, placed signs all around proclaiming loudly, "Cougars Don't Cut Corners!"

It was an admirable sentiment, until some smart-alek student snuck around one night and cut off all the corners of the signs, leaving a somewhat mixed message for students the next day.  

While this story makes me laugh, I retell it to my runners to remind them of this truth: there is more than one way to cut a corner.  I can't really stop anyone who wants to cut a corner, but you still shouldn't do it.  In the short term it might get you there faster, but in the bigger picture it doesn't get you the results you desire. 

Knowing this, I still found myself subconsciously looking for corners to cut this week as I searched for a marathon training plan.  I am trying to decide if I can run a sub-3, and after looking at the paces and training required, I decided it just looked really hard.  So I began to wonder if I could find another training plan, one that somehow could turn me into a faster runner without all that hard work.  Turns out they all expect me to run faster longer in practice if I want to run faster longer in a race.  There is no shortcut.  And, it occurred to me, if there was someone selling a shortcut, it probably wouldn't yield the results I wanted in the end anyway.  Eventually I came to the conclusion the grounds crew hoped we would all reach years ago: if I wanted to get where I was going, I needed to stay on the proven path and not cut corners.  It might require more work, but short cuts just leave everything worn out in the end.