How I learned to stop worrying and properly LOVE running: Part 2
Clear the deck of distractions
This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on learning to love running by valuing your running for what it is, rather than always striving towards - or falling short of - what you feel it should be. Click this link to read Part 1.
Years ago, someone told me that there are two types of runners: those who try to distract themselves as much as possible from the ‘pain’ of running (eg. by listening to music or chatting with other runners), and those who fully immerse themselves in all the sensations of running. I used to be very much in the first group, and I thought of running primarily as a vehicle to move vigorously to loud music. It was my middle-aged version of clubbing.
But these days I find that depending on distractions is too unreliable a way to make running pleasurable. The wrong songs come on, earphones run out of charge or lose connection, or the sensory overload of music plus traffic becomes stressful. I’ve come to think that, in order to really love running, it’s necessary, not to distract ourselves from the sensations of running, but to strip back the distractions as much as possible and to fully immerse ourselves in those sensations.
In my last post, I wrote about how labelling those sensations as painful is not necessarily reflective of their true nature, and how it primes us to be critical of ourselves and to dread going for a run. In this post, I’m going to offer some suggestions for clearing the decks of distractions, so that, when we run, we’re able to be fully present in the experience. These suggestions include, at the end, my number one, life-changing, if-you-only-do-one-thing-do-this recommendation for taking a more mindful approach to running.
Later this week, in the final post of this mini-series, I’ll write about how, once we’ve detached the unnecessarily negative language of pain from running and made time for it in our lives, we can start to reframe it in a more positive way.
Clearing the deck of distractions
Going for a run is our opportunity to spend quality time with ourselves. Running is time for silence, for escaping the clamouring voices of children and other adults who all want things from us, and for detaching ourselves from our ‘to do’ lists. Whether the run is a 20-min jog around a local park or a 24-hour ultra-marathon, I would encourage you not to underestimate the importance of this time to yourself.
In our daily lives, our bodies are often contorted into uncomfortable, unnatural postures. We hunch over desks, slump on sofas, squeeze our limbs onto car seats or strain to reach the pedals, and manifest our stress by grinding teeth or kicking out in our sleep. The sedentary nature of much work and leisure means that our bodies rarely get opportunities to stretch out to their full extent. If you have young children, your body is in service to them, providing milk and snacks, lifting small bodies and the detritus they strew on the floor, resting them against our hips, soothing and bouncing them on our laps, acting as mattresses for them at night. If you have a shit husband, your body and mind is often in service to him too, cooking, cleaning, being hassled for sex, staying on top of the endless mental list of joint bill payments, shopping lists, children’s clubs and classes, social commitments and so on. If you can ring-fence a bit of time to go for a run on your own, it is an essential tonic in which you can put yourself first, recognise and meet your own needs, and - for a few minutes or hours - be a liberated, autonomous being in the world.