Arbitrary Numbers, Part II

After publishing yesterday’s post, I realized I also wrote about arbitrary goals in The Happiness of Pursuit.

Here’s the story:

I use an app on my phone to track my running, especially the longer runs that I do most Sunday mornings. On a recent eight-mile run, I noticed that my pace was consistently around 8:34 per mile. At the six-mile point, I decided it would be fun to aim for an average pace of 8:30 or less. Since I only had two miles left, this would require those final miles to be run mu...