Thoughts About Running
Learning how to meditate as an anxious skeptic
Columns By Madeleine Cummings Mindful for a Month
Every so often, I attend a yoga class, usually when my body is too injured for any other form of exercise. I suffer through every minute of it, not because stretching is hard but because of boredom. I’d rather watch golf on television than be there. It’s terrible. Instructors encourage lying in Savasana for a while at the end of each class, but I always bolt, rolling up the mat as quickly as possible to get on with my day.
As you might expect, my f lawed, impatient self has never been drawn to meditation and mindfulness, even as their popularity soared. I kept both words in a mental bucket along with phrases like “speaking my truth,” “fulfilling my destiny,” and “being my authentic self.”
After hearing several high-profile runners and writers praise mindfulness, however, I started to wonder if I was wrong. By now, you probably know where this column is heading: yes, like millions of other people, I downloaded the mobile app Headspace and spent a few minutes every night listening to a British man’s gentle instructions on breathing and visualization.
I learned the difference between mindfulness and meditation during a drop-in class at a community centre. The class leader, a former nursing professor, explained that mindfulness means being aware of one’s thoughts without judging them. Meditation is a form of deliberately practicing that nonjudgemental awareness.
Though I found running and meditation to be very different activities with different goals, I did use many ways to combine running and mindfulness. I tried ditching my headphones, ignoring the splits on my watch, counting my breaths as I ran, paying attention to my running form, and paying attention to sounds and movements on the trail. These techniques did seem to help keep my mind from wandering as erratically as usual.
In recent years, sport researchers have been studying the effects of mindfulness training on athletes with promising results. A 2014 paper from a team at George Mason University showed that athletes on an ncaa men’s team who completed mindfulness training followed by – to my disappointment – yoga sessions, reported more goal-directed energy and less stress than athletes from the control group. Another study, published this summer by researchers from the University of Kent, in England, proposed mindfulness as a tool to improve injured athletes’ pain tolerance and awareness.
I’m especially interested in whether mindfulness could help runners during and after difficult races.
“Athletes can be quite self-critical ,” said Amber Mosewich, a professor in the University of Alberta’ s Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport and Recreation. Some of her research focuses on how self-compassion could be used as a tool to help athletes deal with difficult sport experiences.
According to another self-compassion researcher, Kristin Neff, mindfulness is one of three components that combine to create a self-compassionate way of looking at the world. (The other two are being kind to oneself and recognizing that other people also struggle).
In a 2013 study, Mosewich and her colleagues found that participants in a seven-day self-compassion in sport intervention had higher levels of self-compassion afterward. They were also less self-critical, dwelled less on bad sport experiences and had less excessive concern over mistakes.
Many scholars, Mosewich included, stress that more research is needed to better understand how mindfulness could serve athletes. Two Temple University professors concluded in a 2015 review paper that though there was preliminary support for mindfulness-based interventions for athletic performance, more scientifically rigorous studies were needed.
Some researchers go a step further and say the findings of many studies on mindfulness have been greatly exaggerated. In a 2017 paper called “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation,” a group of scholars warned that misinformation from poor studies could “potentially lead to people being harmed, cheated, disappointed, and/or disaffected.”
My month of mindfulness didn’t transform my running, of course, but it did give me insights into why so many people (and runners) are drawn to it. Carving out time in my day to slow down, relax, and pay attention to my surroundings wasn’t so dull, after all. It was kind of wonderful.
Madeleine Cummings is a journalist based in Edmonton. Her column appears regularly in Canadian Running.