Pacing, Not Punishment: What Half-Marathon Training Taught Me About Spending Money Like a Grownup

Running 12 miles on a Friday night and trying to rein in everyday spending turn out to have the same problem: it’s hard to stay in the right zone when your brain keeps sprinting off.

Most people don’t overspend (or underspend) because they’re bad at money. They do it because they don’t have a steady, sensible pacing system. Training for a half marathon with my wife reminded me how powerful it is to get frequent, realistic feedback—and how useless it is to shame yourself when you inevitably drift. Photo by author.

I’ve been training for a half marathon in Boston this month, which is a slightly funny sentence because I don’t actually like running very much. If I had my way I’d be playing tennis, or cooking for friends, canvassing for candidates I like, or doing almost anything besides running in circles around town. But my wife and I signed up together, and I do like keeping promises, so I downloaded Hal Higdon’s training plan like every other suburbanite who decides to run more than a 5K, and I started doing the miles.

Right away I noticed something I also notice in people’s financial lives: it is surprisingly hard to do the thing you said you were going to do at the pace you meant to do it. I would head out for what was supposed to be an easy run, put on a podcast about politics or finance, hear something I wanted to argue with, pause the podcast to have the argument out loud with no one, and suddenly realize I was walking. Not running slower. Walking. The goal was to run. I had an hour to get the miles in. But my attention drifted, my body sped up or tightened up without me noticing, I overheated, and then I had to walk. There was nothing morally wrong with walking, but it wasn’t the plan.

That, to me, is exactly what happens with money.

Most of the people who come to me aren’t blowing up their finances on luxury goods. They’re doing fine. They have good incomes, they’re saving something, they care about justice and community, they want their work to mean something. But they can’t quite get their day-to-day spending to line up with the future they say they want. Sometimes the drift is in the “too much” direction—DoorDash, travel, the Costco runs that are somehow $147 every single time. Other times the drift is in the “too little” direction—people who have plenty of cash and still feel guilty buying a new winter coat. In both cases, they don’t have a good way to match the decision they’re making right now with who they are and what they can actually afford.

Running made this painfully literal. Left to its own devices, my brain doesn’t pace. My brain either sprints because it’s fired up about something, or it sulks and wants to stop. It is not sitting there calmly monitoring heart rate, stride, time per mile. So I did the thing a lot of runners do: I added structure. I downloaded an app that lets you set the pace you want and then, at a pretty frequent interval, tells you “speed up” or “slow down.” Not at the end of the run, when it’s too late. Not once a week, when the data is useless. Right then. I found that really helpful. And I found something else, which is that “slow down” was often the more important cue, because nine times out of ten I was running too fast, not too slow. I was letting my mind spin about something—some old argument, some imaginary Facebook fight, some national political issue I have no practical control over—and I was literally burning energy I needed for later. Once the app said “slow down,” I could come back into my body: loosen my face, drop my shoulders, notice my breath, and get back to the actual job, which was not “win fake arguments,” it was “run 10-minute miles for an hour.”

That is the exact same move I teach people with spending.

Most people have either too little information (vibes-based money management, which feels fine until it doesn’t) or way too much information (full-budgeting-app misery, which tells you you spent $362.48 on “restaurants” but fails to mention your kid had a birthday, your friend was in town, and you got COVID so you ordered in). Neither of those helps you decide whether you can, in fact, go out to dinner tonight. What helps is a small, separate, very boring system that gives you frequent, actionable feedback. For a lot of my clients that looks like: paycheck goes into a pass-through account that pays the predictable stuff you owe no matter what (rent, subscriptions, student loans), a weekly transfer goes into a flexible spending account you actually live out of (groceries, coffee, dinners out, Target), and then bigger one-off things get their own savings buckets. Now, when you’re at Trader Joe’s or looking at tickets for a weekend away, you don’t have to do mental gymnastics. You just look: is there money in the account that funds this kind of spending? If yes, go. If no, slow down. It’s the same as the running app. Frequent cue, no shame, just “you’re coming in a little hot right now.”

I didn’t realize how powerful that was until I had to do an 11-mile run on a Friday night after eating a giant lunch with a friend. I had every intention of nailing the run, but my body was like, absolutely not, burrito boy. The app kept chirping “speed up,” and I literally couldn’t. So I turned it off and just ran what I could. That’s another money lesson people need to hear: sometimes reality wins. You can have a gorgeous budget, a righteous intention to cut back, a plan to save more for the house/leave toxic job/retire younger—then your car dies or you have to fly to see a sick parent or your dishwasher breaks. That doesn’t mean the whole system is useless. It means this was the wrong day to demand perfection. You adjust, and then you get back on the plan.

The run that really clicked for me, though, was a 12-miler I did on Halloween. I ate lighter beforehand, put on music instead of podcasts, turned on the pacing app, and decided to treat every “speed up” not as “you failed” but as “come back to your body.” Because I’d noticed something: one way I resist running is by wandering off into my head; another way I resist running is by narrating to myself how much running sucks. “This is too hot, my knee is weird, I hate this, people who like running are liars.” That’s just another form of leakage—energy that could be going to the actual work is getting burned on complaining. So every time I heard the cue, I said to myself, “I accept.” I accept that I’m sweaty, I accept that my legs are heavy, I accept that this is mile 9 and I want to be done, I accept that I’m slower than my fantasy self, I accept. And then I relaxed my jaw, dropped my shoulders again, and kept moving. And wouldn’t you know it—my 12th mile was one of my fastest. The slowest was mile 6, right in the middle. The dip in the middle didn’t predict the end. I recovered.

That’s money, too. People start a new spending system, burn through their flex account by Wednesday, and decide they “can’t budget.” Or they overspend the month they’re trying to save for a trip and decide they “have no discipline.” Or they look at their partner’s credit card statement and decide this will never work. But the middle is often the messiest part. You haven’t built the habits yet, you’re still learning what your real number is (not the aspirational number, the real one), and you haven’t absorbed the fact that you, a person with a real life, are going to have erratic weeks. You don’t throw out the system; you learn from it. Maybe you actually do need $300/week for flexible spending, not $200. Maybe that means you save $100 less. Maybe that’s fine. There is no honor in starving your life on paper just to move money into savings you’re going to pull back out in two weeks. That’s the same as running too fast in mile 2 and then walking miles 3–5. Looks ambitious, doesn’t get you where you said you wanted to go.

What I love about both running with a pacer and using a multi-account cash-flow system is that they both respect energy. They recognize that you cannot white-knuckle your way through 13 miles or 30 years of adulthood on sheer willpower and vibes. You need a structure that does some of the thinking for you, that nudges you often, and that gives you permission to slow down when you’re overdoing it. You also need, occasionally, someone outside you—a literal race pacer, or a financial planner—who can say, “You can actually go a little faster than you think,” or, “You’re making this harder than it needs to be, let’s relax your shoulders.” Sometimes other people can see your capacity better than you can, because you’re too busy grimacing.

So if you’re the person training for something big—half marathon, career shift, parenting through a very expensive season—and you’re also the person who wants to feel calmer and more aligned about money, try this: build yourself a pacer. Not a perfect budget. Not a shame-based report. A pacer. A little weekly transfer into a spending account, a glance at the balance before you order, a conversation with your partner about what this week actually looks like, and enough self-respect to say, “I accept” when life is heavy and you have to ditch the system for a day. That’s how you get to the finish line: not by sprinting and beating yourself up, but by staying in range, mile after mile, week after week.

And if you want someone to help you design the financial version of that pacing app—something that actually matches your values and how you live, not how some budgeting blog thinks you live—that’s the kind of work I like doing. Running is optional. The pacing is not.