[conistonwater]

Painful, exhausting, and boring is a combination that usually means you are running too fast for your fitness level. It's usually recommended people run at a pace that allows them to have a conversation relatively easily, and it's rare for people to find that pace painful and exhausting. Especially (!) if you can't focus enough to watch something on TV. When I run hard I can't listen to podcasts either, that's pretty normal and just part of how things work, but it's nothing to do with running per se. Obviously I don't know what your fitness level is, but running can be a humbling experience sometimes, so one shouldn't give up just like that.

I know people like to play up individual preferences and personalities, genetic variability and all that, but the basic physiology of running is (scientifically) basically the same for all people barring some health conditions. So if you hate it there's still a good chance that some experimenting will get you running quite fine even if you hate it now. We're all just humans anyway, you know, you're not that special.

[anyfoo]

Hmm, thank you, that's actually really good advice. Next time, I will just keep the speed so low that I can listen to my podcast without problem, and see what happens.

I will probably still wish I would do dishes while listening to that podcast instead of running, but hey, it's necessary.

[conistonwater]

If you find that your slowest running pace is still not conversational (which happens a lot), try the run-walk method, and accumulate as much total running time as you can with enough walking breaks that keep you listening to podcasts. That's pretty much where I started myself.

[anyfoo]

Cool, I will try that. I will likely be a bit disappointed how slow my pace is, but I guess it will improve over time...

[abdullahkhalids]

From what I have learned from running with various people, most people don't know how to properly breathe during running. At normal jogging pace, that's good for exercise, you can breathe at a very normal and steady pace. Once you have learned to do that, which is not necessarily easy, a lot of the difficulty of running disappears.

Except the boringness of it. There is no solution to it, except running in a large park or nature.

[conistonwater]

> Except the boringness of it. There is no solution to it, except running in a large park or nature.

I like podcasts and audio books. Since I started running I got through a lot of books, way more than I could possibly read physically. But yeah, if you have things under control, then sometimes it's like doing nothing for an hour straight: pretty dull, so you have to have something else going on.