Slow running

Or learning to lovingly ignore your ego

Today I’m shocked to find myself recommending an article from the New York Times, a publication that has been bugging the hell out of me lately. I will not be going down a media criticism rabbit hole here, because no one is paying me to take a hammer to the already fragile foundation of professionalism I’m teetering on.¹ Suffice it to say that, broadly speaking, I don’t believe reading the New York Times will help any of us see the world in a fundamentally different way, much less give us the tools to change it. Granted, calling the article I’m about to recommend “revolutionary” would be a stretch. But reading it, I felt the remnants of a toxic, calcified belief system slowly being dissolved and washed out of my brain.

The article is “How I Learned to Love Finishing Last” by Danielle Friedman, a charming and well-reported love letter to slow running. “Many runners are driven by a desire to cross the finish line as fast as possible. I am driven by a desire to cross it before race organizers leave for the day,” she writes. I’m used to seeing this kind of piece try to hide self-loathing under a brittle veneer of self-deprecation, or casually smother whatever insights its sources offer under a blanket of ableism and fatphobia. I’m not saying this article is entirely liberated from those frameworks—when you’re writing for a wide audience that might not even know it’s steeped in them, they’re kind of inevitably the starting point even if your goal is to take them down.² But it’s a long, long way from the worst version of itself.

Personally, this article came at exactly the right time for me, as I’m a slow runner who recently realized I need to go even slower if I don’t want to burn out after a few months, as I’ve done many times in the past. My ego has been resisting this reality, as it always does. I’m striving to lovingly ignore the lies it thinks it has to tell me, and while there are no short cuts on the path toward true acceptance and equanimity, a good science-based kick to my cultural assumptions can definitely give me a push in a right direction. 

The persistence high works like this: When we move at an easy to moderate pace — what Dr. McGonigal described to me as a “feels good” level of intensity — for at least 20 minutes, we often experience a flood of biochemicals called endocannabinoids that has long been identified as the “runner’s high.”

Interestingly, some researchers have found that we don’t experience this psychological effect if we run with maximum effort. Jogging at a manageable pace is what usually leads to that buzzy feeling that all is right in the world. 

…

There are also physical benefits to running at a pace that doesn’t feel punishing, said Claire Bartholic, a coach based in Asheville, N.C., who has helped hundreds of people develop a running practice.

“The hardest thing I do as a coach is teach people to run slower,” she said, because it feels “counterintuitive.” Running with intensity might build muscle, but running at an easy pace — which is unique to every runner, she noted — does a better job of conditioning our heart and lungs and boosting our endurance.

Did you know this? Why did no one ever tell me this?³ I’m know I’m not the only one who tends to confuse “doing” with “overdoing,” but, uh, it turns out there’s a difference, and overdoing is way worse that we tend to believe. It’s even worse than not doing the thing at all, because it saps all the joy right out of something that should feel good. My ego is not yet convinced, but that’s ok. The slower I go, the more I realize I don’t have to listen.

1. But here’s hoping that one day I will have the means to destroy it completely!

2. Ok maybe I’ll do a little media criticism.

3. Ableism. It’s always ableism.