Imagine if you ate grapes every day, meal after meal, day in and day out. You’d be pretty bored!

Well, doing the same workout day after day is really the same thing. What you want to do with your training is something called “periodization,” which is really just a fancy word for breaking up your training into cycles.

You may, for instance, want to do four weeks where you workout very hard and very intensely; followed by four weeks where you do longer workouts, but at a lower intensity; followed by another four weeks where you cut back on both mileage and intensity; and then you repeat the whole cycle over again. That will keep you fresh and keep things interesting.

Another thing you can do to alleviate boredom with your exercise routine is cross-training. That’s simply mixing and matching different types of activities. You don’t always have to run. In fact, it would be really good to pair running with a complimentary activity. Running is “high impact,” so you might want to try some “low impact” or “no impact” activities, like cycling, yoga, walking and cross country skiing.