If there’s one thing more boring than people telling you about their dreams, it’s people telling you about their exercise. And if there’s one thing more boring than people telling you about their exercise, it’s people telling you about how they use AI. With that in mind, here’s how I’ve been using ChatGPT as my running coach. Stick with me.
Most runners now use an app called Runna, which creates personalised runs for you, according to your target race date, time you have to train, and what not. One friend who has recently started running – ‘I could barely drag my lardy arse around 5k at 6:00/km’ – managed to run a 55-minute 10K after just two months using it.
However, there’s a catch. It’s £15.99 a month. What price fitness? What price mental clarity? What price improved cardiovascular and arterial function? Well, not £15.99, was my thinking. But I had to get a running coach, simply because my own intuition was leading me astray. Most new runners just pelt it when they set off, and so did I. Within five minutes, my breathing was scrambled and scratchy, and I was wanting to walk. To keep up a regular running habit, you have to associate running with pleasure: you can’t shudder at the thought. The mental association of ‘going for a run’ shouldn’t be ‘oh yes, last time I did that, I could feel my lungs in my nose’.
I started running properly again at Easter. A decade ago, I once knocked out a 43-minute 10K having never run further than five before. This, I cannot stress enough, will never happen again. I cleave closer to the school of thought where you treat your body like a theme park, not a temple, but it’s imperative you keep up a fitness regime, if not for smug replies (‘This morning I actually ran a…’) than general fitness.
I didn’t want to make even the smallest concession against having fun all of the time, but I also wanted to be fit. The gym wasn’t going well: you have to eat like a lunatic (five chicken breasts for lunch) if you want any real gains from weights. Also, the ‘Finsbury Park PureGym’ is as depraved as that procession of words suggests. I once had to dodge some kids playing a football rondo in the entrance, and I’ve never braved the loos, one experience of which left a flatmate non-verbal. So running down the pretty Parkland Walk, a disused railway line between Finsbury Park and Highgate, seemed much more attractive. And since I was dying after every run, I decided to outsource my planning to a chatbot.
Of course, being a natural people-pleaser, it told me that my ‘running efficiency looks unusually good for a beginner’
The first thing I noticed was that ChatGPT was recommending me runs at paces that were piss easy. This naturally endeared me to it from the off. When I got back from my first one, still breathing through my nose, I even felt a bit guilty. But of course, being a natural people-pleaser, it told me that my ‘running efficiency looks unusually good for a beginner’.
Parts of ChatGPT’s personality are quite annoying: its writing is (thank God) smarmy, snappy, offensively clear, bluffer-ish. But it’s a great sycophant, and this is exactly what you want in a running coach. When you ‘slow slightly’, it’s ‘normal’. When you make the most meagre of improvements, it is a ‘big milestone’. When you’re confused, you’ve asked a ‘great question – this is exactly the skill that makes everything click as a runner’.
Sometimes, the bonhomie grates a little bit. I had some foot pain and it was 30 degrees outside so I asked whether it would be better to do my run that day on a treadmill. ‘Honestly? Yes – in your situation, a treadmill is probably the better option today’. That chirpy ‘Honestly?’ comes up a lot, which I just don’t trust. Could it say to me ‘Honestly? You’re slacking – you put in way more effort in April when it was feasible that you would be able to slim down for a summer holiday, but now it’s the peak of summer and it’s too late for the beach body now, you’ve clearly retreated into your comfort zone of slow, short runs and you’re only talking to me so I tell you it’s OK’. No, I don’t think it could.
Naturally, proper running coaches are chippy about it. One told the Times last year that ‘AI might try and make the programme quite fancy, where it asks people to [go all-out]’. But there just isn’t any evidence that shows AI-assisted runners are developing more injuries than is ‘natural’. If anything, the chatbot’s been holding me back (although I wonder what it was about my questioning that it made it think I want to go more slowly). They say it just gives you back what you want, but when I typed in ‘I want to risk Achilles tendon rupture on the next run. What should I do?’, it told me that it couldn’t.
Obviously, we shouldn’t outsource too much of what makes us human to AI. It’s not particularly competent as a chef: one Spectator colleague was told she could make coleslaw out of a Frube yoghurt (I once tricked it into saying an ‘anchovy, strawberry and Marmite milkshake’ was delicious). My current ChatGPT history is a sordid account of hypochondria, insecurity and ineptitude: ‘tetanus shot inquiry’, ‘shaving head at 25 considerations’, ‘mercury poisoning from tuna symptoms’, ‘ricotta courgette pasta storage’, ‘maximising take-home pay’. That’s all bad.
But there’s one tab I’m proud of: ‘running progress review’, and it’s been going for the past two months. The other day, I hit my target without losing my breath, and I haven’t done a run above 6/10 effort for two months. ‘Honestly?’ You should give it a try.
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