Thursday, July 06, 2006

Oh Bliss! Oh Joy! On loving running.

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I have just experienced the most incredible weeklong episode of runner’s high. Every run was marked by a feeling of my body being on autopilot and my mind merely being taken along for the ride. The week blissfully ended in a near-effortless three-hour mountain bike ride.

The event that opened the door to my magical experiences was an eighteen-hour non-stop run, bike and canoe from downtown Toronto to St. Catharines. There was no real purpose or motivation behind the exploit. It was my birthday and I thought it would be fun to challenge myself to an adventure. With my boyfriend’s support en route and the camaraderie of a good friend to endure the miles, we set out after work one Friday afternoon. Conversation did wane as the miles wore on. However, pushing forward felt uncomplicated. In spite of some moments of incredible fatigue where my eyes had become mere slits, thoughts of stopping or quitting never entered my mind. Nearly every moment, every physical movement was just about moving forward. I did not find myself having to force motivating thoughts to keep going. Nor did I have to remind myself of the overriding goal. In fact, I found that there was not the time or space to produce thoughts. In hindsight, I would say that I was very focused on what I was doing and derived a sense of enjoyment out of my activities. Having the added challenge of navigating through various parts of the night probably facilitated these states of being. Interestingly, focus, challenge and enjoyment are key components of peak performance.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively over the years on this topic. He describes peak performance in sport as a state of “flow” incorporating focus, challenge and enjoyment. Flow has feel good qualities; “[It is] the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter, the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”


The complexity of focus, challenge and enjoyment
This experience with my birthday adventure, like the many others that I have had through the years, provides insight on my understanding of runner’s high and peak performance (or flow). Although these concepts all have distinct attributes, their commonality is the altered state of consciousness they produce. Through the process of observing my own experiences in running and adventuring, I am becoming more convinced that we cannot perfectly deconstruct altered states. Similarly, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to create a state of peak performance – or a high – by tackling focusing, challenge and enjoyment individually. This is because the more we try to focus and try to let go of invading thoughts, the more elusive is a state of continuous focus. The more we think about a challenge, the more we either scare ourselves away from it or the more we fail to recognize its inherent value. And lastly, the more we attempt to convince ourselves that we are enjoying something, the more we realize we are but trying to convince ourselves of something.

Furthermore, I think that the three activities – focusing, identifying challenges and enjoyment – are tightly bound concepts that work in a dynamic relationship to build a mental framework that facilitates an altered state of consciousness. All three may need to be present in varying degrees to facilitate this state.

The one area where we may have the most control is with our thought processes. In my last article entitled, “ The elusive search for runner’s high,“ I suggest that a high can be facilitated by letting go of negative emotional reactions. If this holds true, then it seems reasonable to assume that the opposite – positive emotions – would also facilitate the high. I do not think that this necessarily means that we have to think positive thoughts. I believe that the key is in FEELING our good feelings. This is not easy. Just as we cannot dissect or reconstruct the components of an altered state, I do not think we can easily make ourselves “feel good feelings.” Whether we are trying to assert control over our negative or our positive emotional response mechanisms, our thoughts can get in the way.

On the other hand, we can chose to believe that it is not our thoughts that are the problem. We can see the emotions we attach to the thoughts as the problem. Ideally, if we could turn our negative emotions off, ramp up our positive ones and/or separate our rational thoughts from our emotional responses, then achieving an altered state would be easier.

I seem to have ruled out all means of facilitating our own highs and peaks. It can be done. We might find success by vigilantly practicing one of the three components of peak performance – like focusing. As I emphasize in previous articles, however, it takes practice, practice and more practice. Where I do think we might have more success is in rediscovering the concept of “enjoyment.”

Interestingly, many articles, particularly on trail or ultra running point to the genuine enjoyment top performing runners derive from their pursuits. And enjoyment is one thing that is difficult to dissect and compartmentalize. I think too that children are better at finding activities that they naturally enjoy and ones in which they end up engaging in for hours on end. In pure enjoyment, thoughts that lead to judgements and elicit emotional responses subside; focus ensues and; challenge is inherent. All three components – focus, challenge and enjoyment – come together naturally. Thus the best approach to facilitating runner’s high is probably no approach at all. Just enjoy the ride!



© 2006
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Further Reads

  • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. Harper and Row, 1990.

  • Flow in Sports: The keys to optimal experiences and performances. Mihalyi Csikszentmihaly and Susan Jackson. Human Kinetics, 1990.