What I Think About When I Think About Running

I love running, I love meditation. In this blog I’m exploring how the two fit together.

#4 The Smiling Runner

Who knew? Smiling while running helps you work through your pain and run more efficiently. The how and why boils down to lower oxygen consumption, better gait and the added benefit of feeling that you’re not working as hard. All that in a smile;)

I first heard about the technique from 100+ marathoner Tammy Mercier (pictured above) when we spoke about her relationship to pain when competing.

As anyone who runs long distances knows, pain is part and parcel of the experience. It can be physical pain. It can mental pain. It can be emotional pain. Often it’s all three at the same time.

Long distance running is many ways an ongoing dialogue with pain — and the quality of that dialogue is a central factor in how successful a runner you will be.

For record-breaking vegan ultra marathoner Robbie Belanger, pain is opportunity for insight. “There’s something that is very beautiful in the discomfort of it,” he says. “Like feeling uncomfortable, feeling what some would call pain. But what comes of that, you feel very alive. You feel every ounce of your being.”

For Mercier, pain is an opportunity for growth. “It can either break you down or make you stronger,” she says. “When it comes to pain you have to separate your head from body. I don’t ignore it but I don’t let is change how I am performing.”

So what is pain and how might we better relate to it?

Answering the first part of the question is harder than it sounds. It’s still not clear what’s happening in the brain when we process pain.

It may be that pain is detected like any other sensory stimuli. There may be no specific brain regions dedicated to pain, says MI intern Annabel Chang, who studies neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.

Through her research at MI exploring the neural correlates of different meditation practices, Chang was surprised to discover a wealth of studies exploring painful stimuli and meditation.

It turns out that focused attention meditation is a remarkable treatment for chronic pain — as good a mainstream medical treatment and superior in some cases to pharmacotherapy for chronic pain management. Why this is can be explained by how we as humans experience pain.

“There is the actual stimulus,” says Chang, “and then there is how we contextualise the pain — how we think about and judge it. And if we are able to stop that second part of the process, then we can stop a large part of what we experience when we experience pain.”

This is where focused attention meditation comes in. A core part of the practice of focused attention meditation is the observation of the present moment with non-judgement, ie without reacting. And the more we strengthen our ability to remain focused on the present moment, without judgement, the better off we are when dealing with pain. Simply put, the fear, uncertainty and anxiety that often accompany pain just makes things worse.

Based on these principles, AmDTx’s MyMoment feature curates meditation training for pain management and performance based on your stress, mood and intentions.

“Meditation reduces how painful a subject thinks their pain is and also how unpleasant they think the pain they are experiencing is,” says Chang.

That’s what Mercier means when she says you have to separate your head from body. “The rest is technique,” she says.

And that technique includes smiling while she runs.