I considered titling this “Bundle to make things suck less.” It’s a more honest title. I ultimately flipped it, though, to put emphasis on the positive, since that’s the goal with bundling: to have a good experience with something you don’t want to do.

I run for exercise. It’s efficient, effective, and super low maintenance. Running gives me the health benefits of a walk in half the time, running gives me an energy boost and a feeling of accomplishment after I’m done, and to go for a run, I only really need running shoes, a hat to keep the sun out of my eyes, and headphones. No pool, no bike, no facility. Running can happen anywhere.

I don’t particularly like running. I do it because of all the above stuff. I’m always happy after my run is done — I feel invigorated and alive! — but it takes a lot of motivation to actually go out and run. If I don’t have something to distract me, usually in the form of listening, I won’t go. I’m constantly finding excuses not to go. When I can’t get excited about the experience of running, I get bored with it and just stop doing it.

That happened a few months ago. I just couldn’t anymore. I dreaded runs because I was so bored: with my route, with my running playlist, with the activity itself. I walked instead, but walking takes a long time if I’m not actually trying to get somewhere and am just walking for exercise and I really need to get back to the house and get to work.

I thought I needed to listen to music to run. I thought I needed the beat and the energy to keep me going. But I was bored with all my running music, too. Meanwhile, I had podcast episodes piling up in Pocket Casts, and not enough time to listen to them. Hidden Brain, The Happiness Lab, Radiolab, Fresh Air.

So I gave it a go: I listened to a podcast episode instead of music on a run. And it worked! I was so absorbed in what I was listening to that the run just disappeared beneath me. At the end, I still had that awesome post-run energy, and I had the excitement of learning something new.

For several weeks now, I’ve kept up my running practice, running as many as 4 or 5 times per week, because I want to listen to all these podcasts. I want to learn about the human mind, and why commitment can be better than endless choices, and about rabies, and about British Vogue‘s editor in chief. I love to learn, and I love the short format of podcasts, and I love listening for knowledge (as opposed to reading non-fiction books or articles with my eyes). I think for non-fiction I need that human component of voices and interviews and sound effects that can happen in an audio recording that just don’t happen on a page.

Now, I look forward to running. I can’t wait to go out so I can listen to whatever is queued up next in my podcast feed. Now, because I’ve paired something I don’t want to do but needs to be done (run) with something I want to do (learn!), I get excited about my runs, and I actually do them. I learned on one of the Happiness podcasts I listened to that this is called bundling, and now I do it with lots of things. Don’t want to fold clothes or empty the dishwasher? Bundle those activities with podcasts. Don’t want to iron? I’ll watch Schitt’s Creek while I do it.