Today, I took a 18.6-mile (30-kilometer) run; it took me a little under 2½ hours. It felt pretty normal. That feeling — “pretty normal” — caught my attention, as it has on a few other similarly long runs over the past 6 – 8 months: because for a very long time, I topped out at around 16 – 17 miles, and those were very difficult runs for me. Now, an 18-miler just feels normal. Not that I do it every day or anything, of course, but, hitting that kind of duration and distance on a long run no longer feels particularly taxing or draining.

This is what progress in most disciplines is like, in my experience. Big breakthroughs do happen — runners sometimes talk about a “purple patch”; as a composer inspiration is real even if only a small part of the work; in software development I find myself having a ha! moments, suddenly able to solve problems that once intimidated or confused me — but they are rare and they aren’t really the measure of progress. The measure of progress in most disciplines is when things that used to be particularly difficult (perhaps entirely impossible!) now feel normal.

With running, this is a simple function of training volume. When I found that an 16 – 17-mile run was particularly difficult and draining, I would top out at 40 – 50 miles. This week, on a week when I had to skip two workouts because of illness, I ran 52 miles and cycled another 20. More miles on my feet every week means that the big long run is a smaller percentage of overall work, and my body is better adapted to the work I am asking it to do. The details look different for composing or programming or writing, but just putting in more time in the activity is certainly a significant part of getting better at those, too.

There is more to the story, of course. I have also embraced much more rigorously structured training in the same span. The kind of practice one gets is perhaps not quite as important as getting in the practice in the first place, but it is a close second. As an old saying in software circles goes: it matters whether you have ten years of experience or just one year of experience ten times. The same goes for most endeavors.

I find thinking about progress in these terms helpful in two ways:

1. Looking at what I can do now and comparing it to what I could do with the same “effort” in the past can be incredibly encouraging. Precisely because progress tends to come slowly rather than in great spurts, looking back a year or two and comparing what I can do at a given effort level now versus then can be quite encouraging.

2. On the flip side, if there is nothing that has crossed that threshold over some long-enough period of time, I probably ought to evaluate why that is. Do I need to put in more time? Or do I need to change the kind of time I am putting in?