My wife, Cheryl, hovered in the doorway.
“Julie G_ asked me if you have any tips for her, so she can focus better while she’s training. You know, she’s doing the Team in Training thing for a half marathon. She wants to know how she can talk herself into her long run. She asked me what you do to keep yourself going on those runs.”
Yes, if only there were a secret mantra. Something one could recite, and all boredom, effort, sweat, and time would melt away. But there is no intrinsic reason, once we’re adults, to get out and run. We’re smart enough to know it isn’t really any fun. Anyone who tells you about the spirituality of aerobic exercise has suffered a serious breach in their contact with reality, as far as I’m concerned. People who rhapsodize about their running experience have just not experienced enough running, or else are operating with a different nervous system than I am.
There is no higher plane I reach during, or after a run. There is only the work, the effort, the sensations, and the feelings I have while running. On rare occasion, I admit I do have sensations that are fleetingly close to rapture. Like when it’s been raining for the first 40 minutes of a 2 hour run, then stops, and I get an opportunity to replace nature’s shower with my own sweat. The temporary pause between being soaked from the outside, and being soaked from the inside is a good little space to be in. Or when I reach the gradual end of a long down hill, and am in that too short time between pounding my quads from the downhill effort, and starting the groan in my calves from going back uphill. Or maybe I have remembered to bring some gel along with me, and, 55 minutes into my long run, I take a quick pull on the foil of the Gu pack, rolling it up into my mouth, and follow with a few swallows of water. Sugar!
So, no, I don’t run because I find the actual effort pleasurable. I really doubt anyone else does, either. The spiritual set are simply practicing “dissociation”, by which turning one’s attention AWAY from the efforts and act of running allows one to continue the struggle.
There have actually been a number of studies of runners, and how they deal with the need to continue making an effort to finish the day’s planned running program. First, the studies demonstrate that everyone needs to find a method to keep going in the face of all the things which are NOT pleasant about running. Every single elite and professional Ironman triathlete I have heard says that, somewhere during the race, most often around mile 80 on the bike, or between miles 15 and 24 on the run, they just want to quit. Not surprisingly, all the amateurs I talk with say the same thing – there ALWAYS comes a point in the race when the desire to slow down or stop becomes almost overwhelming. For many, it is overwhelming. Those are the people you see walking at the end of the race, or tootling along on their bike in the last hour or two.
Now remember, this is during a race which most people have been training and preparing for over a six month period, which presumably means an awful lot to their self-image. If motivation lags at this time, imagine what must happen during the more mundane efforts leading up to the Big Event.
Among those studies of how people handle the desires to stop, slow down, or otherwise stray from the planned level of effort, be it time or speed, a second set of tactics appears – “association”. Apparently, many elite athletes (in all sports), instead of ignoring what is going on in their bodies, become hyper alert to it. For a skill sport like golf, the need for this focus is obvious. In endurance activities, it might seem counter-intuitive to dwell on the developing soreness, tiredness, and general persistence of effort required during the 30 minute to 8 hour time frames involved in long distance running and triathlon.
But the most successful athletes, those who end up winning or exceeding their own expectations, are those who are able to pay attention to where the red line is within them, and work right up to it, but not over it. They are constantly monitoring and fine tuning their effort level, and ignore the internal signals which others describe as “pain” or “suffering” Oh, they are aware of how much it hurts – they have just reached a point, by putting all their attention into precisely how hard they are working, they can ignore the consequences of that work on their muscular sensations.
That’s not something you just DO, though. You have to train yourself to do it. A developing school of thought in endurance training believes that a lot of the value of higher intensity training is not just to improve the physiological capability of muscle contraction, oxygen transport, and fluid management. By running or swimming or biking both faster and slower than you expect to go in the race, you are training your brain to learn with more precision where all the effort levels are – which is too much, which is too little, and which is just right.
And, the value of the long run or bike is not just to build more efficiency in the slower, fat-burning speeds, but also to teach the brain that the body IS capable of going for hours on end at those speeds. But this takes a toll on our psyches. Left to our own devices, we would gradually slow down over the course of a 1-3 hour run, or a 2-6 hours bike ride. The very best athletes know that in ANY workout, the perceived effort level must INCREASE from beginning to end, in order to maintain a STEADY speed.
Here’s a little example which nailed down this concept for me. It happened one day in the weight room. I was doing leg presses – lie down and push up increasingly heavy piles of weight with me feet (there are machines which let you do this). For me, I know from long experience that 90 pounds is very easy, and 450 pounds is very hard. YMMV. Anyway, one day, while proceeding progressively up a set by 90# increments, I found I could laze away my brain quite easily doing 90 and 180. But when I put 270 on the machine, I could FEEL my brain recruiting more neural resources to make sure I completed the task. The sensation was exactly the same as stretching and loosening my limbs before swimming, or taking a few deep breaths before dropping into a steep snow filled gully. My brain was doing the equivalent to breathing deep and shaking the kinks out. This sensation became more and more pronounced as I went through 360 to 450 pounds. By that level, I recognized that if I tried to think about ANYthing else except lifting the weight, I would not be able to budge it. This is “association”.
Translating that sudden burst of focus, which lasts all of maybe twenty seconds, to an hours long effort, seems hopeless, I know. No one can maintain that level of neural recruitment for very long. But the level of focus is not all of nothing. Over time, I have learned how to put my brain into, say “70 %” focus at the start of an Ironman, and slowly build that to close to 100% by then end. But it takes every single workout leading up to the race to get their.
So here’s what I tell people about focus. If one is a casual athlete, a first timer, or someone who’s primary goal is participating in and completing the event, then “dissociation” is the primary tool. Practice with an iPod, with others to whom you can talk, with your dog. Run from mile to mile, or in ten minute increments, or from phone pole to phone pole. Look at clouds, at cars, at trees. Think about your friends, about work, about the lawn you need to mow. Mull over zen koans, try and do calculations in your head, imagine your family tree, plan your next vacation. Anything and everything to go outside yourself. Learn to focus by focussing outside yourself. When it comes race time, you will probably find many people around you who have the same set of goals – participate and finish. Stay with them, talk it over, encourage each other. Stay focussed by going outside yourself.
But if getting from “A” to “B” as fast as I can is your primary need, then I must learn how to go within myself. Each and every workout becomes an opportunity to get there. Each workout must have very specific effort, pace, speed, or time goals. Those goals must be developed based on what I am currently capable of, and must lead to what I want to become capable of. During the workout, by focussing on those micro goals, I learn how to monitor my effort level, and read the feedback from my body and how to adjust my effort level to meet or exceed that day’s targets. I learn to focus by focussing inward on my own performance. And each race becomes another opportunity to not only see how fast I can go, but to see how well I can stay in touch with the process of going fast.