It’s hard for me to believe, but some people actually enjoy treadmill running. I don’t mean those who “hit the mill” because of weather, or injury, or a time constraint. I mean people who just like to run on treadmills, even those facing into a corner and empty white walls. There are people who do “100 Miles in Three Days on a Treadmill” challenges. I don’t get it. I restrict my dreadmill runs to truly bad or cold weather.
Why do we hate it so much? I’ve never tried to articulate why — beyond noting that it is boring. Recently I came across two articles, one by Hochstetler1 and one by Martin,2 that help to explain our dislike for the treadmill. The two pieces overlap in some ways, with the Martin piece going a bit beyond Hochstetler’s. I’ll highlight the three central requirements they jointly suggest are required to have a “significant” (or meaningful) experience, and along the way show why these are absent on the treadmill.
Purpose: The First Ingredient of Significance
Hochstetler’s article has two connected goals: first, he wants to clarify the notion of significant experience, and second, explain why treadmill running is in strong tension with that notion of significance. In defining significance, he says:
By significance or meaning I refer to the way our lives cohere and make sense. We live in this way when our daily activities matter. There is a purpose to our existence; a hope that our present and future coalesce in a valuable way, where this means experiences that incorporate the breadth of life opportunities — the dramatic and the mundane, the joys and the sorrows. In this way our experience encourages curiosity, promotes growth, and strengthens individual and collective initiative.
Hochstetler’s definition of significance points to two requirements - purpose and flow. The first, purpose, is straightforward and its relationship to the treadmill is easy to make out. To grasp purpose, we can simply imagine acts that connect present behavior with goals about the future. Purposeless action doesn’t do this; if we can ask “why?” and there’s no clear answer, the action appears meaningless to us.
The most famous example of purposeless action comes from the French existentialist Camus and his character of Sisyphus - the guy who is fated to roll a rock up a hill over and over for all of eternity, only to see it roll back down again each time. According to Camus, Sisyphus is punished by Zeus for all eternity to this fate, a life that lacks any significance since his rock rolling has no purpose or meaning. When he asks “why?” there’s no answer — and he is fated to be conscious of his pointless existence.
Sisyphus’ fate serves as an analogy; it highlights for us the meaningless routines that we become trapped in throughout life, everyday actions that ultimately seem to have no point. Although Camus is not thinking about treadmills, it is easy to see how a connection can be made to running on one. When we think about this activity, we object to the monotony of the run, but also to the fact that it seems — to use Camus’ own language — absurd. We’re running, but we are literally not going anywhere.
Of course, treadmill running can find a meaning in a training plan, but there’s no escaping the fact that while on one, it feels pointless. In fact, to have a feeling of purpose, you have to keep looking at the artificial data telling you how far you’ve gone, or for how long, or how fast. This is not our natural way to experience a connection between present action and future purpose and so, robbed of the normal experiential ways we gage meaningful action, we have to be told that we’re actually doing something. That’s odd, and a fight we mentally wage each time we’re on a treadmill.
Complex Flow: The Second Ingredient of Significance
Purpose is essential to significant action and living, but it’s not enough to get you there. Hochstetler further suggests that purposeful action must incorporate a “breadth of life opportunities”. Following William James, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Emerson, he suggests that such action emerges in experiences that are complex, rich, unpredictable, risky, involve decision making — and that involve flow.
As an example, he points to Thoreau’s famous 1845 book3 in which he describes his move away from civilized Massachusetts and out to a small cabin on Walden Pond, where the “earth is unexhausted and richer” and the “ground not yet tamed”. For Thoreau, the predictable, familiar, safe, monotonous nature of civilized life hindered the having of significant experiences — even when such daily actions were obviously purposeful. But what makes his life at Walden Pond special and significant?
Hochstetler’s suggestion is that such experiences, what Thoreau was looking for, embed activity in what he calls musement, a quality of consciousness that differs from its opposite - amusement. The word suggests its meaning — when we are engaged in “musement” our activity is inspired by our own muse, this being our own authentic inner voice. When we are in contact with that voice, or muse, we process the environment around us in a way that leads us to “ponder, reflect, and imagine”.
Unlocking the muse requires purposeful action embedded in complex experience that reflects adventure. Running on a path, or a trail, is an example — without thinking, we scan around, encountering novelty in nature (or the urban setting) for what challenges the completion of our action; we sense the terrain under our feet, analyze the different smells, we process chance encounters with wildlife or people, calculate risks, all while making the micro-level decisions needed to stay on task within the richness of the changing conditions. Our purpose is absorbed in the environment in a state of flow.
As this happens, the mind begins to float freely and we are awakened to our authentic selves. Perhaps “running to clear one’s head” means this. To Hochstetler, “clearing one’s head” isn’t not thinking, but thinking in a different way, reconnecting with one’s inner voice, and to thoughts more natural to oneself. What is “cleared away” might be the inner voice heard when engaged in the “day to day” activities of civilized social living. Perhaps Thoreau wished to “clear his head” and rediscover himself — a task he found difficulty in the city and possible in the adventuresome wilds of Walden.
So, can’t the treadmill be a kind of Walden Pond? For Hochstetler, treadmill runs fail to provide the richness of experience required for musement. No situational richness of novelty envelops one’s purpose; the environment is static, the feeling of the terrain never changes, there are no risks to analyze, the temperature is controlled, there are no chance encounters, and no micro-decisions need to be made. The experience is highly sterilized — in fact, one must always stare straight forward artificially, since looking off to the side will lead you to lose balance and fall off the treadmill.
Everyone who has run on a treadmill knows what happens next — the impoverished experience leads the mind to experience itself as a burden. Time slows down dramatically. You check the clock every 10 seconds. You want to forget what you are doing, and where you are — and this leads to the need for amusement, as opposed to musement. In order to provide a drug-like narcotic for your burdened consciousness, you flood it with external stimuli — you listen to music, or a podcast, or watch the fitness center’s TV. Anything to distract yourself from your activity.
What is interesting in this discussion of complex flow, and our response to conditions that are overly artificial, and that suppress our muse or inner voice, is that this analysis can be extended to social life. Thoreau experienced the mind-numbing impoverished experience of civilized life like he was on a treadmill. For many of us, the Sisyphus-like repetition of our work life is experienced as a burden to consciousness, and we dull it by after work or weekend amusement, a way to provide a narcotic to the pained mind. In a sense, like not wanting to be conscious of the activity of running on the treadmill, we want to forget the life that we are living.
Disruption: The Third Ingredient of Significance
At this point, you might think the two conditions Hochstetler argues are required for significant experience and that are missing in treadmill runs — purpose, and complex flow — are plenty. But let’s go a bit further and add a third condition that Martin adds, disruption, one that complicates Hochstetler’s portrait. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, Martin suggests that:
The rhythm of falling in and out of equilibrium that is experienced by all living things as they struggle to adapt to their environment, combined with a human conscious awareness of that struggle, serves as the core of aesthetic experience.
By “equilibrium” Martin means what we’ve just talked about as flow — but note that he thinks an aesthetic (which means “artistic”, and which is interchangeable with what Hochstetler calls “significance”) experience requires that flow be disrupted. His point, which is an interesting one, is that the experience of authentic consciousness, or the experience of the muse that Hochstetler discusses, is unlocked not simply by pure flow, but rather in the nexus that connects normal mindedness with flow.
Martin’s portrait here is complex but suggestive and rich. First, he suggests that true authentic running requires not just purposeful activity that engages a complex set of surroundings as its medium — which is Hochstetler’s point — but in addition that the medium must be experienced as a resistance to one’s purpose. Following Dewey, Martin sees a run as significant when it is “linked to vitality of experience” where vitality is a type of deep connection to one’s environment as a resistant component of achieving one’s purpose.
So, let’s think again of purposeful running with a goal — we set out to run in a certain way, be it distance, or heart rate, or speed, or time — this goal or outcome will be challenged in various ways by the complexity of the external environment. If we achieve a state of harmonious flow with that environment that is not disrupted, then the goal is not quite hard enough for us and we actually lose the connection with the environment that awakens significant living. As Martin puts it:
If we remain in this harmonious state indefinitely, we would not be having an experience, without resistance from surroundings the self would not become aware of itself, it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope neither disappointment not elation.
I think Martin is onto something here — true purpose, as opposed to monotonous action, carries with it feelings of fear and hope. We fear that we can’t pull off the purpose, but we hope so! If we can, we are elated. If we cannot, we are disappointed. Actions that fall short of a sufficient level of challenge lack these emotions. This is the third condition: if the goal is sufficiently difficult, we will experience flashes of flow, but inevitably we will also fall out of harmony and become conscious of the disruption, see ourselves as agents striving to become something, and push ourselves again to regain the harmony.
Taken together, the three conditions that Hochstetler and Martin jointly present for significance doom treadmill running. As both point out, this doesn’t mean that one should never run on a treadmill. But it shows us why we resist the activity — and why the machine has rightfully earned its nickname, the dreadmill. It’s an interesting word choice, since the existentialists — like Camus — link dread to a recognition of a lack of meaning. And perhaps that’s what we dislike about the treadmill; not the literal activity itself, but the lack of meaningful existence while we’re on it.
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!
Douglas Hochstetler, “Can We Experience Significance on a Treadmill?” in Running and Philosophy (2008),Blackwell Publishing.
Martin, Christopher, “John Dewey and the Beautiful Stride: Running as Aesthetic Experience” in Running and Philosophy (2008), Blackwell Publishing.
Thoreau, Henry. Walden, Thicknet and Fields (1854)