Murphy’s Lore
Sam is a fan of being at one with her run
Running is soooo boring.’ Ever heard that one? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been told how dull my sport is. A quick trawl of the internet will pull up plenty of articles on how to ‘spice up your run’ or ‘beat boredom’, often authored by coaches, with the implicit suggestion that, actually, yes, running is mind-numbingly tedious. The only way to get through it is to take our minds off it or grit our teeth and think of all the good it’s doing us. I always feel slightly offended when people tell me how boring they find this thing I consider an integral part of my life. I would not tell a chess player or a golfer how uninteresting I deem the game they are so passionate about. But it does make me wonder whether people are missing something.
When I’m running, I am fully engaged in the experience. I feel like a pilot at the controls of a vast dashboard on board a moving craft: let’s drop the level of muscle tension here… breathing feels steady… rabbits in the field… careful over this slippery bit… sip of water… look how the sunlight is playing on the water there… pick up the cadence. I’m registering what’s going on inside and outside my body, and making tiny adjustments to ‘optimise’ the run. How could I possibly be bored?
A study published last year found that boredom was one of the most common reasons cited by running novices for quitting, second only to pain or injury. Why did they find running so wearisome? The study doesn’t say. But I have a couple of theories. When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi came up with the concept of ‘flow’ – the sensation of being ‘in the zone’ – he said the best place to find it was in a challenging but doable task. ‘If challenge exceeds skills, one typically becomes anxious; if skill exceeds challenge, boredom ensues,’ he and his colleague, Jeanne Nakamura, wrote in a 2009 article titled Flow Theory and Research. ‘When perceived challenges and skills are well matched, as in a close game of tennis or a satisfying musical performance, attention is completely absorbed.’
Perhaps, with little experience of judging intensity, new runners outrun their level of fitness (too far, too fast). Conversely, they may not challenge themselves enough because they’re nervous of overdoing it, and end up willing every workout to be over.
Or maybe bored runners mistakenly seek inspiration in distraction. Some of the most common boredom-busting advice relates to taking your mind off what you’re doing. Exercising while watching TV or listening to a podcast might seem like a good way to make running more interesting, but I’d argue it invites you to engage with something other than what you are doing and competes with the information you’re getting from your body and senses. Csikszentmihalyi says distraction is one of the surest ways to deny yourself a flow state. And, perhaps, one of the surest ways to ensure your running career is short-lived, because you’ll soon find it easier to watch the TV or listen to the podcast without all that inconvenient jogging up and down.
‘Boredom attunes us to the features of the situation in which we find ourselves,’ says Andreas Elpidorou, a philosopher and the author of Propelled.
‘It alerts us to how our present engagement fails to properly satisfy us.’ In other words, it’s a call to arms.
Rather than branding it as boring, how about seeing the fact that you’re experiencing it that way as an incentive to reshape your relationship with running and find greater meaning and interest? Or you could take up chess.