On January 1, 2025, Scott Towle, 48, an IT tech salesperson, saw a couple of dimes on the ground while running around his neighborhood. While, typically, he would run right past any loose change, this year he said to himself: “I wonder how much money I would collect if I just picked up every single coin that I find on the ground while running for a year.”
With that, a random experiment was born. Towle, an RCAA-certified running coach, who has been consistently running since he was about 10 years old, realized collecting this money was akin to each regular training run. Each time he completed a workout, it was like making a deposit.
He also found that picking up change (or dollars) reenergized his runs and even pushed him to go longer. “There were definitely times where I hadn’t found anything in a while and needed to run a little bit farther to get out of my neighborhood, just to see if maybe I could break the streak of not finding anything,” Towle says. “It’s funny how much just finding a penny became something that made me smile, because I was adding to that total.”
Most runners are working toward a big breakthrough moment—one where it all clicks. While that moment can manifest in a myriad of ways, including moving into a faster pace group, surviving Yasso 800s, or breaking two hours in the half marathon, the reality of getting there, as Towle demonstrates, is about what happens leading up to the big goal.
“The truth is, we often look at running as a ‘heroic effort’ when we see the highlight reels on social media,” says Jessie Zapo, a USATF- and RRCA-certified running coach, global consultant for Adidas running communities, and founder of Girls Run NYC. “But that is not how we train. Much of training is piecing together smaller, consistent efforts regularly to boost and build fitness.”
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Not to negate a great single effort, but “a single workout will only cause the body to adapt a very small amount,” says Alex Rothstein, EdD, CSCS, coordinator and professor for the exercise science program at New York Institute of Technology. “It is such a small amount that we currently struggle to even detect a change. After [your body] adapts, it requires a new stimulus to get it to adapt again and this pattern of training, adaptation, training, adaptation gets repeated until the chronic adaptations pile up and then become large enough to detect.”
Towle’s monetary payoff was the result of consistently running five to six days a week. Were there several days when his runs did not produce a single cent? Yes. But fewer runs would have yielded even fewer opportunities to earn money.
Similarly, “when we are not giving our body consistent stimulus, the principle of reversibility takes over, which is the concept of use it or lose it,” Rothstein tells Runner’s World. “The body tends to not want to have these adaptations because they are metabolically expensive to maintain so if you don’t keep telling the body you need them, they will disappear, and you will start closer to the beginning if you go back to training.”
According to eight-time marathoner Jamilé Ramírez, certified running coach and founder of Waypoint Run Club in New York City, sporadic training keeps the body in a constant cycle of stress and rebuild. “Muscles never fully adapt, so soreness becomes your default state,” she says. “Fitness gains that took weeks to build can unwind in a matter of days, and tendons and ligaments stay perpetually unprepared for anything more demanding. You’re essentially asking a beginner’s body to do an experienced runner’s workout, every time.”
So how do you become less sporadic when it comes to clocking miles and actually make noticeable adaptations? These running coach-backed tips will help you plot a better, more consistent path forward.
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Zapo encourages runners to identify small habits and try stacking them to build a structure that supports your goal. For example, set out your running clothes the night before, so you see them when you wake up. Or try her signature challenge: Do a one-minute plank four times a day for a month, which helps strengthen the deep core muscles—a must for runners—and can help get you in the habit of strength training.
“Whatever the little habits are, they will add up over time, just like doing the miles,” Zapo says.
Set a baseline you can always hit too, adds J.R. Hughes, a RRCA-certified coach based in Atlanta, such as running at least three times per week no matter what. “Everything above that is a bonus,” he says. “This protects your identity as a runner even during chaotic weeks.”
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“The runners I coach who stay the most consistent aren’t the ones with the most time,” says Ramírez. “They’re the ones who build guardrails around their routine so that when things get busy, their workout isn’t the first thing to go,” which is why being proactive is key.
“If you know your workday tends to spiral by afternoon, you make the sacrifice to get up earlier and get it done before the chaos starts,” she explains. “You block the time on your calendar and treat it like a meeting you can’t cancel.”
Redefine What Counts
Hughes often reminds his runners they are not training for today but rather depositing into a plan that pays you back in four to six weeks. And that progress comes from stacking small wins, which means every run doesn’t have to be a big production. The short run you squeezed in at lunchtime? It reinforces discipline. Those easy runs you didn’t really want to do but did anyway? Those add to your aerobic base. Those weeks you spent slogging through miles even when it didn’t feel particularly amazing? Yep, those add to the system too. “Thirty minutes counts. 20 minutes counts. Showing up counts,” Hughes says. “Consistency grows when the goal is doable on your worst days.”
“Think about it like compound interest,” adds Ramírez. “Every run you show up for, even the unremarkable ones where you feel sluggish and slow, is a deposit into your overall fitness. And just like a savings account, those deposits accumulate over time into something you can actually feel and measure.”
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Working with a coach, especially when it comes to training for a big race, can help an athlete learn how to adapt a plan when they miss a workout or workouts. They can also help you identify and overcome the root causes of why you’re missing workouts.
“Sometimes it is in the athlete’s best interest to miss a run, when it would put them in a better position to rest and recover, and then tackle the next run healthy,” says Zapo. “Discipline and consistency are important to training, but working with a coach can also help you understand when it’s important to be flexible as well.”
Be a Regular
“The more regular running that we can do, the better we will get at it, and our bodies will adapt and be able to do more,” Zapo says. “Athletes who skip workouts and then try to ‘catch up’ with a big heroic effort often end up putting themselves at risk for illness and injury… Athletes who follow the plans by taking the small consistent steps every day—including rest and recovery as part of those steps—build fitness over time and have stronger performances.”
That’s not to say you should beat yourself up if you miss the occasional run, Ramírez says, as it won’t unravel your fitness. But she says patterns have a way of becoming habits before you realize it, and “letting gaps string together can quietly erode the routine you’ve worked hard to build.”
Your focus should always be “staying close enough to your practice that getting back to it never feels like starting over,” Ramírez adds.
No single run amassed Towle a huge amount of money. But after a year, he earned $14.55, and decided to continue his money-grabbing efforts this year.
Think of running the same way. “It’s not any single long run; it’s not any single workout that gets you to that finish line,” Towle says. “It’s the accumulation of everything you put in over the course of your training block.”
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Rozalynn S Frazier is an award-winning, multimedia journalist, and certified personal trainer living in New York City. She has created content for SELF, Health, Essence, Runner’s World, Money, Reebok, Livestrong, and others.