One of the things I’m trying to work on with my running is breathing and focusing in controlled and deliberate ways. In my experience, success with practicing meditative-oriented mental awareness and good breathing is as fundamental to running as proper physical form. Sadly, I’m not particularly good at the mental aspect, and frustrations with it always lead me to resist working on it. Since I’ve made a commitment to work on this over the summer, I’ve been working my way through few books to help.1 I like to reflect on what I’m reading, so this post contributes to that effort.
Although I am not adept at meditation, I do find the practice interesting and valuable, and the link between it and running is very intriguing. As I make my way through this running journey, it feels like more than a hobby, a practice closer to the center of may life. That being so, I’m trying to remain open to thinking about and engaging the experience from a variety of different perspectives. One good thing about starting my running journey only four years ago is that I have no definitive framework through which to understand it. So it’s easy for me to be open-minded about it.
So let’s dive into some ways that authors have connected mediation (and breathing) and running. Since the relationship between the two is not obvious, it’s important to forge some general conceptual links so that the practices of both can be understood and brought together. Usually the best place to start is with the foundation, and for runners, the foundation would be the practice of “base building”. As some authors have suggested, base building can be applied to meditative practice too, so let’s think about what it would mean for both practices, and how they can help running.
Building a Base: A Mental as Well as Physical Task
Physical base building is familiar to runners. According to McMillan2 “base building” has five goals; it (a) builds aerobic capacity, (b) improves musculature, (c) develops fat-burning capacity, (d) builds stamina, and (e) develops mental toughness. Obviously these are essential if your plan is to run faster, further, or longer. Typically, such base building involves committing to a regular routine of running a solid number of miles a week over a long period so that the right physical (and volitional) habits become ingrained into one’s body as the routine develops your basic physical capacity.
Let’s now ask whether building a meditative mental base is also essential to care of the runner’s mind. When I think about whether this seems intuitive to me — and it does — I imagine a great run. A physical base is needed, as it makes possible moving at a consistent pace effortlessly with no erratic changes in speed. But it also includes the mental — a regular, slow, controlled breathing process that is unlabored, rhythmic, and steady. It involves deep awareness of one’s surroundings. It means both body and mind are in sync; awareness is focused and neither breathing nor pace are out of step.
I’ve had five minute stretches of runs go that way - they feel so amazing they're hard to miss! But that’s all I get. Suddenly, in a Thanos snap, my body/mind unity crumbles as I desperately try to find the problem. Perhaps my pace picked up unintentionally, or I hit a minor incline that increased heart rate and made my breathing erratic. I quickly focus on slowing down, or making some other adjustment, but it’s too late. Breathing is now shallow and inefficient. I’ve lost flow and am frustrated. I finish with a good pace, but it’s no longer a great run. I simply lack the solid mental base to sustain it.
Base Building Flips the Default Mode of Body and Mind
So, what is the root of the difficulties we face in body and in mind while running? Authors writing on the topic suggest that the default modes of the body and of the mind are the exact opposite of what makes for great running. So, both must be rewired for the task. In fact, some note that the Tibetan word for meditation, gom, which means “to get used to, or to familiarize,” captures the heart of base-building seen as a way to familiarize the body and mind with these new modes of being. When we fail to have great runs, either the body or the mind, or both, have lapsed into default mode.
What are these default modes? For the body, it is rest. “Rest” here doesn’t imply no movement, but can be a disposition to do the minimum bodily activity required to perform the routine tasks one is engaged in. Typically these tasks require sitting, walking, or making short quick movements. Not surprisingly, the body’s default mode clashes with running, which involves moving faster, and/or longer, and/or further. Base building is thus a kind of physical meditative practice that, through a slow increase of weekly miles, familiarizes the body with those activities.
However, our concern is with the connection to the mental. Whereas the body’s default mode is rest, the mind’s default mode is motion. In default mode, the mind ricochets quickly and haphazardly from one thought to another. Sometimes we obsess about the past, or we pour over ideas worrying about the future. Or we engage ideas that tap into our feelings of anger or fear. Overall, our default mental processes lack direction or intentionality, always frenetic and erratic. As Buddha3 notes, our task is to rewire this default, to learn to bring the mind to rest -
Just as a fletcher straightens an arrow shaft, even so the discerning man straightens his mind — so fickle and unsteady, so difficult to guard. As a fish when pulled out of water and cast on land throbs and quivers, even so is this mind agitated. Wonderful, indeed, it is to subdue the mind, so difficult to subdue, ever swift, and seizing whatever it desires. A tamed mind brings happiness. Let the discerning man guard the mind, so difficult to detect and extremely subtle, seizing whatever it desires. A guarded mind brings happiness.
Here, Buddha describes the default mental state as one of agitation, as desperately flailing about, looking for mental ideas to satisfy its erratic desire. In order to push the mind out of this default, mental base building will involve practicing a focus on controlled breathing. The breath is always present now, and brings us back to ourselves. So, focus on breathing is a good base building activity that takes us away from the chaotic stream of thoughts. This is hard to do, and like its bodily counterpart, such mediative practice requires mental habits that take a while to get established.
Just a few days ago, I gave this a serious effort on a 10k run. My plan was to only use nasal breathing, which is extremely hard to do, because it feels like you are starving the body of oxygen and because it keeps you running slowly in a low aerobic zone. It took considerable effort, but I did it. As I ran, it was hard not to focus on my breathing. For longer stretches — I made it almost a mile at one point — I was not aware of thinking about anything. I simply became a body moving, hyper aware of breath, of the birds, the ground, the wind, the path ahead. To have more of that, I need more base building.
In running, it appears to be that this state is achieved when our body is moving and our mind is still, when both are not in their default mode. The form of happiness that Buddha points to takes us far beyond running, but more narrowly construed for our project, it is a type of calm serene awareness when you calmly inhabit the running body. No thoughts of the past, the future, no wild emotion; once you build your base, you are present. You don’t ignore your natural surroundings, but instead the wind, that bird, the tree — you intuitively feel connected to them as they exist, right now.
I’m curious what the experience of other runners is like. Do you have great runs? Or just good ones, where some performance bar is exceeded? How hard is it for to still the mind as you run? Does a focus on breathing increase and augment the experience of your running? Obviously what I’ve described in this post may just be my experiences; but there may be a more general wisdom behind some of what authors who focus on the connection between meditation and running are arguing.
Enter your email, hit ‘subscribe now’, and these posts will go to your email when published. I write mostly on analysis of my own training and running, and also about philosophy and how it intersects with running, and sometimes about philosophy on is own. Thanks in advance for reading, and please feel free to leave a comment!
Goddard, Vanessa, Still Running, The Art of Meditation in Motion (2020), and Mipham, Sakyong, Running with the Mind of Meditation (2012).
McMillan, Greg, “What is Base Training?” at https://www.mcmillanrunning.com/what-is-base-training/
Buddha, The Dhammapada, Poem 3, “The Mind”
Building Your Mental Base
Hi Chris, I have started slow running recently too but have been doing only nasal breathing during all my runs for a while. It takes a bit of practice (not more than 3 runs) but after that, it becomes natural with nasal breathing. The good thing is it is hard to overstride when you are breathing in/out through the nose which is good since it avoids a lot of injuries too. Good luck.