“For me, the easiest way to have a sustainable and healthy relationship with running is to constantly remember how simple it is.”
– Geoff Roes
Tag Archives: Running
4-count breathing: An exercise for runners, meditators, commandos, and everyone else.
4-count breathing is well-known as a relaxing exercise, a form of meditation, and a tactical combat tool. This is a very useful tool for runners, because it helps the body function aerobically at a very high level of performance. For those who don’t know what I’m referring to, 4-count breathing is a technique that consists of the following steps:
Running quote of the day
“Every time I go out and race it’s a goal to go out and run faster than I’ve done before.”
-Paula Radcliffe
Society, running, and biomechanics: A systemic exploration (and a hint of future topics).
Systems thinking is more than a theory or a scientific trend. Systems thinking is an idea, an understanding that reality organizes itself into systems. All the tiny different parts of reality—regardless of whether you cut up the pie into atoms, physical forces, or currents of social change—are interconnected to one another. They all interact in chaotic, highly unpredictable ways.
Systems thinking was designed to try to explain, model, and predict how “stuff” that seems to be completely unrelated from other “stuff”—like externalities—interact to create highly complex behavior: creating a system. Strictly speaking, a system isn’t built out of parts; it’s built out of interactions. It’s possible to have a collection of parts, but as long as they’re not interacting with each other in some particular way—as long as they don’t form part of a structure (a dynamic structure in this case)—they aren’t a system.
Therefore, systems thinking allows us to model how different “chunks” of reality interact.
On the topic of paradigm shifts
Transcending the paradigms under which the majority of us train, race, (and generally develop our athleticism) is the most effective way to generate results that wildly outmatch any of our previous expectations of our athletic potential.
Paradigms are our constructed realities: they are the rules by which we are governed. Our paradigms outline which questions are acceptable, and which ones are not. They tell us which sources of information are valid, and which are not, and how we should go about interpreting the information we collect.
Systems thinking scholars suggest that transcending a paradigm—creating a “paradigm shift”—is the most effective way to change the behavior of a system (such as the human body) because it challenges the most basic questions and assumptions on which it is predicated. Necessarily, a new way of viewing the world will lead to the use of new types of information, new strategies, and new outcomes of the behavior of the system, which could have not possibly been foreseen or predicted under the previous paradigm.
Knowledge, “the tyranny of ethnography,” and our personal athletic horizons.
Our athletic potential is based largely on the biological traits humans acquired in evolutionary time, while our athletic horizons are mostly built around our experience of the athletic feats of people in our society. We are not in a position to make judgments about our own athletic potential.
Daniel Lieberman, the chief proponent of the endurance running hypothesis, has continually fielded criticisms that humans could not have evolved as endurance runners, because the cognitive burdens of persistence hunting, such as the need for tracking, would have been too great for early hominids to bear (among other things).
In a 2007 paper, Lieberman et. al. respond to such criticisms suggesting that (among other things), “less-encephalized mammals than humans”—i.e. those with smaller brains—are quite capable trackers, etc. Throughout the paper, the authors suggest that such criticisms come from the observation of modern hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Bushmen. They point out that spears and other hunting techniques are relatively recent inventions (from the early stone age), which fundamentally altered the ways in which humans hunted and scavenged.
Continue reading Knowledge, “the tyranny of ethnography,” and our personal athletic horizons.
Running, writing, and athletic expression.
It doesn’t serve us to think of running as we generally think of “sports.” Instead, let’s regard running as a form of expression. When we approach an activity we see as a “sport,” we typically ask: “what’s the goal here? Is it to get from A to B as quickly as possible? Is it to get the ball into the net?” And we put our bodies and minds in service of answering that question.
But there’s a problem with that: if we approach a sport with neural, muscular, or skeletal issues (which pretty much all of us westerners have, to one extent or another), our bodies will find ways around those problems for the purpose of achieving the stated goal.
That means that the body will find a less efficient way to conduct mechanical energy through the body, as long as the job gets done. Too much of this and you’ve got yourself an injury.
But suppose that instead we treat running (and other sports) as forms of expression. Then we enter a path of self-discovery, where improvements in speed and power are achieved as a by-product of increasing our efficiency, and our knowledge of the deep principles of our sport.
The tales of forgotten subsystems, part I: The Fasciae
People typically think that becoming a stronger runner is all about training muscles, tendons and bones. It’s not.
It’s mainly about developing the connective tissue that holds them together.
Runners don’t dread getting injured by twisting their foot, or by becoming concussed, (even though those things do happen). Most “runner-specific” injuries are blown knees, torn ACLs, lower back pain, plantar fasciitis. All these injuries have one thing in common: they occur because the body was subjected to excess repetitive shock.
What do we typically say to this?
We say: let’s strengthen the muscles, tendons and bones (besides the usual “what did you expect? You went running”). But that advice is inaccurate, and largely useless.
That advice doesn’t take into account the existence of what is cumulatively one of the largest organs, whose main structural function besides connecting other tissues happens to be absorbing the mechanical stresses applied to the body.
Continue reading The tales of forgotten subsystems, part I: The Fasciae
Running quote of the day
“My philosophy is that I’m an artist. I perform an art not with a paintbrush or camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.”
-Steve Prefontaine
The slow progression
When most people start the long process of becoming a runner, they often begin with a question: “how can I run so that I won’t get hurt?” The very short answer is to begin from almost absolutely nothing, and to go very slow.
I first heard of the slow progression from a story told to me by a friend of a friend (who is a devoted martial artist), who went to China, and sequestered himself with Shaolin monks to develop his skills. For those who don’t know, the Shaolin are a centuries-old order of martial artists, and according to legend, the precursor of Kung Fu.
What I expected were accounts of brilliant and esoteric meditation techniques and rigorous, multifaceted training routines. But what I heard instead was about simplicity. This story has to do with how young monks are taught to jump high. They are told to plant an apple seed, and jump over it 100 times each day.
The first week, the monks only need to jump on flat ground—a challenge so easy that it almost seems like a joke. But slowly, the tree gets bigger. Soon, the monks are jumping inches, and then feet into the air. And they are doing this 100 times a day.
That might seem unremarkable, except for its hidden brilliance: the sheer slowness of the increase. To jump one sixteenth of an inch higher every day does not take remarkable effort—not even when it’s a sixteenth of an inch up from six feet. That’s the point. It takes so little effort to make that tiny increase that the relative wear on the muscles, connective tissues, skeleton and connective tissue is tiny. But the task continues to demand increased power.
The body responds…and continues to respond. The slow progression does its work at the threshold of our awareness: if we’re barely aware of the changes, it’s only because the difficulty of the task is almost nonexistent. To put this in context, think about a contrasting situation: we’re usually hugely aware of something like twisting our foot. Awareness signifies a notable change—an alteration to our structure. We become very aware of twisting our foot because the body will need a long time to heal the bone, tendon, and muscle damage incurred.
In simpler terms, making such a small change is easy. And when the changes remain that small, even when we’ve already progressed a bit, they get relatively smaller to our perception—the same reason that months and marathons fly by when we’re older, but drag on forever when we’re younger: since we experience more time as we grow older, another month is a comparatively smaller chunk of our experience.
Similarly, as the slow progression continues, development becomes easier (less effortful). And because performance is not only based on power and tissue density but on the brain’s grasp of the task at hand, we develop ever more effective strategies fro engaging with the task—making the relative burden on our biomechanics and metabolism even smaller.
But how should we apply this to endurance running?
Run every day for 2 minutes, at whatever speed you want. Keep that up for 2 weeks. The next 2 weeks, run 4 minutes. The two weeks after that, run 6. 2 minutes is a tiny increase, especially when the previous increase occurred two whole weeks before.
Although this may seem extremely slow at first, why don’t we do the math: There’s 52 weeks in a year. That means that at the end of the year, you can be running 52 minutes a day, every day.
There’s madness to this method. Many of us are inclined to run more at first, because 4 minutes seems like nothing. Like I mentioned above, that’s the point. With the slow progression, we can stay ahead of a multitude of components, including the psychological:
If we run less than we think we can, soon we’ll want it more, and soon we’ll become hungry for it.
How’s that for developing a habit?
There’s more: Most running injuries occur due to the body’s inability to cope with the stresses of the run, in concert with the lack of mechanical knowledge of how to use the body to better deal with those stresses. The sheer slowness of this progression allows our body to learn exactly that—more effective strategies of how to run.
In addition the slow progression develops the fasciae, the fibrous connective tissue of the body, which hold together muscles, tendons and bone. They are only developed under certain conditions: low levels of activity, high repetitions-per-minute, and low strain (effort). As soon as the activity becomes difficult, the body will shunt all blood to the muscles, to meet the demand, and away from the fasciae. We’ve got to keep it easy. For the beginner athlete, effort must be kept at a minimum. All we have to do is follow the slow progression in a disciplined manner.
Developing the fasciae will allow the body to become denser, more interconnected, and more competently able to resist stresses. If the body can’t resist the stresses of the task, it’s will know, and the athlete will feel fatigued and without energy. Fatigue is how the body protects itself.
Strengthen the fasciae, and the body won’t feel the need to protect itself as much from those small shocks—the fasciae have become capable of absorbing the excess energy. The body won’t be worried about developing muscle power anymore, and pretty soon it’ll want to cut loose.
So, you’re 4 weeks in. You just moved up to 6 minutes a day. During those 2 weeks you got progressively faster, as your body became more comfortable with the strain associated with that time. But now it’s 6 minutes. Detecting the slightly increased load, your body slows down. But towards the end of those 2 weeks, you speed up again: your fasciae and other often-uncredited subsystems have gotten more powerful. This is reflected not in the fact that you speed up, but in the ease and the naturalness with which you do so.
You continue the progression up to 52 minutes, and beyond. The limits are far enough away at this point for them to be nonexistent.
A bit of caution: This version of the slow progression will get the beginner athlete far, but it’s not the only necessary exercise for someone who did not spend most of their childhood strengthening their muscle, bone, and connective tissue through competition and play. If you train the correct form for running in parallel to the slow progression, you’ll go much further, much faster. A way to do that, of course, is by jumping rope.
Hint: You can build a slow progression into jumping rope too.
The philosophy of the slow progression is exemplified by a saying that I keep attributing to the special forces (but who knows where these sayings really come from):
“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
Internalize that, and hold it in your mind when you’re thinking of setting your timer for just one more minute, and you might go further than your best expectations. After all, this was never about reaching some goal. It was just about taking another tiny little step. If you keep going like that, sooner or later you’ll leave the finish line in the dust.
running in systems 