Struggle to Be Mindful When Running? Do This Instead
Super Shoe Hype After 7 Years + Thinking You're Tool Old
🧠 Struggle to Be Mindful When Running? Do This Instead
👟 Super Shoe Hype After Seven Years With Them
⏰ If You Think You’re Too Old To Start…
🧠 Struggle to Be Mindful When Running? Do This Instead
Let me tell you a story that might bend your mind… just a bit. It's about when I almost blew up my own running progress by being too mindful. Sounds wild, right? How could being present and aware ever be a bad thing?
I can almost hear the skepticism in your brain right now—"Being conscious and focused is supposed to be a good thing. How could it hinder performance?" Well, do me a favor and park those doubts for a moment.
This story is for all runners who want to maximize performance from all aspects of their physical and mental training.
What I'm about to unpack will show you how to disrupt your brain's “I’m bored mode” and find the right balance of mindfulness for embracing discomfort during a run. You’ll also understand the delicate balance between conscious presence and unconscious flow that every runner needs to master for peak performance and daily 1% gains.
It all went down during a 90-minute training run as I was gearing up for an upcoming half-marathon. I was trucking along, finding that nice, meditative cadence that usually makes those long distances feel almost zen-like. My body was on autopilot, each stride smooth and automatic after 25 years of mindless miles.
But then I made the crucial mistake of being too damn mindful. Maybe it was the gel I had at mile eight or the song that came up in my headphones. But suddenly, I was crazy-aware of every single sensation - the pounding of my feet, the way my left sneaker made a slight squeak noise, and how these particular shorts never really fit right. Instead of zoning out into that euphoric flow state, my conscious mind cranked up the awareness to an 11.
In a few quick seconds, everything went to poop. My stride turned sloppy, and my breathing was all over the place. It was like my body's natural ability to cruise on muscle memory got hijacked by my overly conscious mind obsessing over every little detail. There goes mindfulness being the golden ticket to enlightenment.
As wild as it sounds, research actually backs up the idea that obsessive mindfulness can be counterproductive, especially for activities that thrive on automaticity. But before we touch on the science, let’s go back to 2001 so I can give you more context into why I’m questioning running and being too mindful.
Where This Came From
In 2001, I saw a guy phenomenal movie called "Waking Life.” This movie proved to be a pivotal life experience. It introduced me to the idea of going against the status quo, thinking outside the box, and generally being more "woke"” but not in the left-wing political sense. More in the NEO WakeUp Matrix; take the red pill woke. It had concepts of quantum mechanics/physics, lucid dreaming, questioning whether dreams are "real" or not, etc. Yeah, it's some heavy stuff and not for the usual Netflix and Chill crowd.
There was a scene about the "now moment". It went something like this, "If you are so aware of the now, then the now is not the one you were passively in. This is because you are observing it. In quantum mechanics, when particles know they are being observed, they act differently than when they are not." As a runner, this concept of being too aware of the present moment resonated deeply. During long runs, I've found that if I become overly conscious of my stride, my breathing, and the sensations in my body, I lose the meditative flow that propels me forward.
The solution: You must strive to be in a hybrid state. Aware just enough that you are in the now, but also not shining the light right on it to scare it away. You can't really be "in the present" if you are 100% aware that you are "in the present". They are mutually exclusive. This balance between awareness and surrender is crucial for runners. We need enough mindfulness to monitor our form and push through discomfort, but not so much that we interrupt the unconscious rhythm our bodies have cultivated over countless miles.
With meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhism making a radical pop culture shift in society, people are starting to make it cool and cliche to be mindful and present to feel good. That's fine, but I also want to argue why that's extremely hard to do and why you shouldn't in some instances. For runners, being excessively mindful can hinder our progress by disrupting the muscle memory and automatic processes that allow us to find our stride.
Your Brain On Boring: Default Mode Network
Different people define mindfulness in various ways. Let's go with Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition: "Paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally."
This is separate from overthinking or paralysis analysis. When discussing mindfulness, I'm paying attention to everything happening right now and not worrying about future events that haven't happened yet, aka anxiety.
But for runners, this level of hyper-awareness during a run can be detrimental, causing us to overthink and lose the unconscious flow that makes the miles feel effortless.
Default mode network Is a scientific term for when your brain gets bored - it’s not good. It’s when you don’t want to be bored but start thinking about other things so you’re not bored. It’s the automatic mode your brain goes through to avoid the discomfort of being bored.
A real-world example: You can utilize all your senses and think about how you feel about those senses being stimulated—not how you react, but how it makes you feel. Most people can't control their emotions and feelings, but they can control how they respond to them.
The argument against being too mindful and creating a state of mental laziness is BS.
"Too many people are sleepwalking through our waking state and wake walking through our dreams.
Either way, we won't get much out of it." - Waking Life
How does this work for running? For runners, there is a risk of being too mindful and disrupting the automatic processes that allow us to find our stride and enter that transcendent flow state.
How to find the balance between being too mindful and not mindful enough
Georgetown Psychologist Chelsea Stillman found that highly mindful people struggle more with implicit learning - the ability to subconsciously pick up complex skills and form good habits without even trying. When you're so focused on being aware of every stimulus, you can't let your unconscious mind vibe and groove into those subliminal patterns.
Based on testing and observations, she stated that "People high in mindfulness—a state of active attention to what's going on in the present moment—are worse at automatic learning." For runners, that's kind of a big deal. So much of our sport hinges on logging mile after mindless mile, allowing our bodies to entrench those movements into pure muscle memory until they become second nature. Once you start overthinking and obsessing over every stride, you interrupt that flow and stumble out of that glorious autopilot trance.
Author Christopher Bergland puts it best: "The Georgetown study confirms that it is counterproductive to be overly cerebral when creating good habits, but everyone needs to flex some mental muscle to break bad habits. Taking a dual-pronged approach that combines conscious willpower with unconscious conditioning and practice is the key to making healthier habits a part of your daily routine." This balanced mindfulness and unconscious integration approach is optimal for runners building an effortless, high-mileage routine.
Mo' Mindful Mo' [Good] Problems
Fortunately, most people don't have to worry about this problem. This is like the "More money, more problems" theory. Most people don't have enough money (or think they have enough), so it's less of a problem for the majority of the world and more of one for a small percentage. The rest of the population finds it hard to relate to this. For dedicated runners, constantly striving to improve by a small margin daily and heightening their awareness is essential. However, being overly mindful can become a genuine concern that hinders their progress.
Because of our inherent nature of always striving for positive feelings, we tend only to be mindful when it's an associated good feeling. Being mindful and aware of negative things like stress, discomfort, and anxiety is one of my favorite tools. I practice it a lot in meditation and running. When things get hard, I try to get down to my core, ground myself, and "feel" everything. I let things be. Sometimes, I'll personify the uncomfortable feeling by giving it a face, color, texture, or anything! I've found this to help blunt the discomfort. And on more than one occasion, the pain actually starts feeling kind of "good" in a masochist sort of way.
It would be great if 'being too mindful' was an actual problem for most runners. Like 'being too dedicated to training' or 'being too focused on proper form' or 'being too concerned about injury prevention.' Insert whatever habit we wish more casual joggers would embrace. If obsessive mindfulness during runs was the biggest issue facing the running community, to borrow a line from Marlo Stansfield in The Wire: "Sounds like one of them good problems.'”
Read, watch and listen to the rest of it on your next run or workout here.
👟 Super Shoe Hype After Seven Years With Them
Remember when super shoes were first available to the general public back in 2019? Well, it’s been about five years, and what has changed? What have we learned?
Shout out Chris aka Ironclydesdale on Instagram - for asking this question a few weeks back.
Here is his question:
“I'd like a newsletter section where you discuss the practical considerations of using carbon-plated shoes for long events. Who you've found benefit from them. What risks should be considered when choosing to race in them for distances longer than a 1/2 marathon? Does one need specific preparation for these styles of shoes?”
I need to do deeper research on this and will hopefully make an episode about this in the future. But in the meantime, I pointed him to the above video that gives some interesting insights on super shoes in general. I think super shoes are amazing but also overhyped. Humans love “stuff”. And since shoes in our culture are popular, it makes sense that the most ridiculous thing with the most bells and whistles gets all the attention.
You can also use super shoe as a recovery tool vs a performance tool. Shouts to Shannon R. for that crazy hack) and something that is overlooked by many, including myself. With all of that squish, they protect your body from the post-hard/long run pounding so that you can do a nice recovery run and get in the fitness benefits but not thrash your body. Bonus squish if you wear them on grass, dirt, or the track.
I think using them all of the time isn’t optimal. I like to bring them out for special occasions, like when you wear a suit for an event or when grandparents would bring out fancy plates and silverware when guests would come around. Then, every time I would use them, it felt “special” and was a novel experience. I’ve also heard some rumblings in the feet community that they dull the proprioception in your feet and muscles in your lower limbs, “go to sleep,” and aren’t as active. This is mostly theory, but anecdotally, I can’t feel my big toe pushing off in carbon shoes with a lot of stack height. Feels like all Squish Mallow to me.
I’ve also heard that Nike and other brands are making super shoes specifically for amateur runners who run marathons in four to six hours instead of making them for pros and then giving the general population the scraps. These runners tend to be heavier in weight, heel strike, and overstride. I think that’s interesting. Not sure how I feel. I’ll check back in when I finish up that episode with Chris.
⏰ If You Think You’re Too Old To Start…
