Saumya's MindfulRunning

"The makeup of your social circle has profound implications for your own behavior"  Brad Stulberg & Steve Magness Fitness is contagious. Who impacts that the most? The least fit person in your group. Researchers found: "If half of your friends were to become among the least fit for reasons unrelated to you, your own fitness level would drop by nearly 20 percent…" It turns out that motivation can function almost like a disease. It is contagious and can work its way through your peer group in the same way that the flu potentially can. To coaches, teachers, managers, leaders or anyone who deals with motivating groups of people this shouldn’t sound too surprising. It’s referred to as “team culture.” In 2010, the US Air Force Academy set out to understand why some cadets increase their fitness while others do not. They tracked the cohort of cadets over 4 years. Cadets spent a vast majority of their time interacting with peers in their squadron where the squadron was ...

There are no magical workouts or magical zones. People always want to know how certain exercises impact and how one classifies them. Every time someone asks you a question about a workout, and you tell them exact details, then they’d say “you mean, a Vo2max workout” for example. In your head you think “No. There’s more than that”, but mostly agree. Training has become engrained with the idea of classifying workouts based mainly on distance and speed. It’s human nature to divide the world into neat and manageable pieces.  How can you break free from the grasp of classification and not lose your creativity? Getting “stuck” We have lost all creativity by making it more scientific and calculated. If we see 400m repeats, it gets automatically processed as “anaerobic” or whatever it is in our classification. In the words of Daniel Kahneman (psychologist, economist & author), we default to our fast system 1 thinking, never allowing system 2 to even have a check. In other words, t...

  “Being intentional about our surroundings is essential to eliciting our best performance.”  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. From his book ‘The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium’. You are tired after a long day’s work. When you sign off from work, you have intentions to exercise, but that nice comfy couch is calling your name. You can’t resist the pull of sitting down, turning on the TV or just eating and relaxing thereby skipping your exercise.  There is a battle between the goal (e.g. exercising) and your body’s natural pull towards the path of least resistance. Sitting is a lot easier than stepping out and burning calories or picking up the weights at home (since you can’t hit the gym in these times). Our bodies are made to conserve energy, especially when we feel drained. Your brain has tied that piece of furniture (couch/bed) to relaxation and areas in your brain related to taking that action begin to light up. This occurs well before you’ve made the act...

People who push themselves physically are much calmer when it comes to life stresses because they have trained to be with discomfort. Long-distance runners, cyclists, triathletes, mountain climbers and endurance athletes in general can teach us a lot about how to deal with the current situation. The pandemic feels like a marathon and marathon’s require patience. Initially COVID-19 felt like running an 800 m sprint but now it feels like a marathon or more likely an ultra-marathon. Unlike endurance athletes, who choose to participate in prolonged and grueling events, we did not sign up for COVID-19. Yet there is so much we can learn from their experience on how to move through extended periods of discomfort.  Patience, Pacing, Process  and  Purpose  are four important aspects guiding successful endurance athletes.  Patience “If you are kind to yourself, most of the time you’ll get through the dark spot in a better mood and without wasting precious energy rumi...

“Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there.”  John Wooden (American Basketball player & coach) Sports teaches us life lessons might sound cliché but, in some cases, this cliché holds true. What makes Super Champions? Sabrina Ionescu is the most dominant basketball player. She is a world record holder for triple doubles for men and women  (A triple-double is achieved when a player records a double-digit total in three of the following categories: points, total rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks) She was born to immigrant parents and has a twin brother. She honed her early competitiveness from the psychological drive to beat her brother. They competed in everything – chores, racing, who can get in bed first etc. There was a natural inclination and push towards competing and that didn’t come from parenting. This is an example of a study called “Talent needs Trauma” which indicates that there needs to be some sort of challenge t...

  How do you encourage new runners? How do you convince them to take that first step out of the door? It’s not easy but hundreds and thousands of people have taken that first step, otherwise we would not see as many as 30,000 (and upwards) runners participating in marathons. That first step is the hardest and the next few steps over the next few days and weeks can be tough too. Motivation is something you can’t buy on the Internet, encourage people to run. Most important, encourage them to start. Part of what makes running so great are the conversations (or runversations) that you have during it. If one couldn’t talk for the vast majority of their training, running wouldn’t be as much fun. So, when a novice says it’s tough, they need to slow down to converse. Exercising hard will feel hard. We relate the feeling of exhaustion and sweat as signs of a good workout. Want to lose weight? Increase fitness? Run a faster kilometer? Lift heavy weights? Train hard. No pain, no gain. Bu...

Running a kilometer nonstop for the first time can provide you with your first Runner’s High. Running that kilometer progressively faster can keep you going or you can increase the distance you can cover continuously to 2 kms, 3kms or more. Even though you don’t consider yourself a competitive runner (and most runners probably do not compete), you might want to pick a goal for yourself and then train to reach it from “tabula rasa” to mastering it. Unfortunately, while in the process of achieving the goal which could at times be overambitious, many runners succumb to  injuries which sometimes force them into periods of lessened training. This could be due to: - peer pressure - not able to body sense and understand the needs of your body or  - simply excitement There are times when we must modify activities to recover for good times to come. Philosophers and physiologists might argue over whether these periods of injury and recovery represent low and high points in our lives. So...