Running as Practice

Talk offered as a ‘Wisdom Wednesday’ at Mountain Cloud Zen Center; September 11, 2024.

I’d like to talk a little this evening about what, for me, is ‘The Fifth Posture of Zen’ … we have the four of: lying down, sitting, standing, walking, and, the fifth—running. Initially, I was hesitant to talk about running, following in the footsteps of Katie Arnold’s wonderful talk a couple weeks ago. I highly recommend watching or listening to that, and picking up her latest book, Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World. The nature of her talk inspired me to approach it as a lens through which to explore our portfolio of practices off the cushion; practices that nourish us and can serve to amplify and solidify inquiry and insight. And, ultimately, help us recognize the inseparability of practice on and off the cushion.

Stepping back in time … I was decent cross-country runner in elementary school; I could win some races, and generally hang with the front of the pack. But it wasn’t until several years later, in Graduate school in my early twenties, when running became more of a practice and a vital component of physical and mental wellbeing—a way to relieve stress and anxiety, even when it was a frigid 50-below in the winters of Alberta, Canada. Despite being firmly rooted in the sciences, academically, it was around this same time that I was coming to appreciate my more contemplative and philosophical tendencies and curiosities. This was fulfilled, in part, by the, then popular, ‘new atheist movement’, along with a fascination for and the study of cosmology. I figured that surely the ‘answers’ to life’s big questions were somewhere ‘out there’; it was just a matter of time until we had the right dataset. This was also the time, some twenty years ago, that the seed of my own meditation practice was planted, bolstered by the early neuroscientific studies of long-term meditators, highlighting the ‘benefits’ of meditation. Little did I know then that the practice, beyond stress-reduction, also contained the Universe. And so, there was a mutual arising—an interdependence—of practices for me: running and sitting, which has continued and evolved over the past many years.

Like Zazan, or sitting meditation, running is a wonderfully simple act. It requires only a little time, space—ideally outside—and a comfortable pair of shoes … and you may want to forego those, too … just like delusions shroud our True Nature, modern running shoes often shroud our natural movement. Our species is highly evolved for distance, indeed making running one of our most natural and innate movement profiles. We evolved several biomechanical and physiological adaptations that enabled us to engage in what’s known as “persistence hunting.” We leveraged the fact that many other animals sweat and shed heat through panting, but they can’t run and pant at the same time, and so, even though we couldn’t catch and take down our prey in a short burst, we could push it to heat-exhaustion through relentless pursuit. From an evolutionary biology perspective, there’s much evidence to suggest that these activities, of traveling greater distances and incorporating a diversity of foods into our diets, had profound effects on our cognitive development.

Now, for me, and fortunately most runners, running isn’t about hunting and sustenance—at least not in terms of food—it’s about practice; about transcending goals and accomplishments; a way to connect with exactly what is; simultaneously a destructive and creative force; one that enables growth and development in unexpected ways.

It’s typically when I’m running wild that I feel most alive and creative. This is particularly true when running among the living world in the mountains here in Santa Fe. It’s in the absorption of complete engagement with running where the epistemic boundaries of ‘me’ and ‘mountain’ can be dissolved, revealing a spacious, unitive experience. This, for me, is the true “runners’ high”; no runner at all.

That being said, running is by no means always a pleasant activity. And we wouldn’t want it to be. Running will take you through extreme highs and lows, both physically and psychologically. A few weeks ago, a small rock coming down one of the ski runs here was a great reminder of this, as it caught my toe and sent me flying, then tumbling and sliding a few feet over rocky terrain. I sat there for a few moments to collect myself and ensure that nothing was seriously injured, got up, gave the rock a bow of respect, and carried on, bloodied and bruised, and a little lighter, having shed some ego in the fall.

Psychologically, the mind loves the captive audience and will do everything it can to get you to stop, by reminding you how hard it is and how many other things you could be doing that are so much more pleasant. However, just like on the cushion, and in life in general, it’s the letting go of aversion to discomfort that opens a new dimension of experience, capacity, and insight.

And this leads me to seven brief insights, or lessons learned, that I’d like to highlight. While these will be described in terms of running, my hope is that you’ll find relevance to your own set of practices, and life, in general.

1) It can get better.

Conventional thought would suggest that our bodies operate analogous to the battery on our phones—we start a race or a training run at 100% and, as the effort progresses, we can only lose capacity. Rather, a significant endurance effort is a remarkable journey through multiple peaks and valleys, physically and mentally. There have been so many instances of being, say, 10 miles through a 50-mile run, feeling absolutely terrible—the body sluggish, the mind not only demanding to stop, but questioning all life choices that lead to this event. But through allowing it to be exactly as it is and simply continuing to move forward, there is, often still surprisingly, something else to tap into; a deeper reserve we didn’t know we had, such that, at mile-40, I’m now feeling light on the feet and expansive in the mind.

And beyond allowing it to be as it is, what can arise is the recognition that, while we can describe and think differently about ‘peaks’ and ‘valleys’—these ups and downs in our performance—they are in fact fully inseparable in experience; that is, they arise mutually; they constitute a whole. There’s never been a mountain peak without a valley, and in that sense, they are one and the same thing. Distinct but not separate.

And so, while we tend to have a preference for ‘peaks’ and an aversion to ‘valleys’, we can shift our perspective to that of expecting the valleys to arise; we reframe the valley, not just as something to be allowed, or tolerated, but as something to be embraced as the origin of the peak itself. To paraphrase a quote by George Addair, “Everything we want is on the other side of something we don’t want.” And so, into the valley, we carry great faith; faith that the valley, too, is impermanent and the path forward will reveal itself.

2) Skillful effortlessness.

Just as in Buddhism we talk of the path as ‘the middle way’, there’s the need, particularly with trail running on technical terrain, for a ‘middle way’ of attention. There’s an optimal intensity of focus that enables a skillful type of knowing, of effortlessness, to take over, such that it becomes like a dance with the landscape. Applying too much contracted focus on the next step and the mind fatigues and the body doesn’t have time to fully prepare and react to what’s ahead. Although, too distracted, or lost in egoic thought, and it’s not long before the trail reminds you of its apparent solidity.

But right in the middle, with a soft, open awareness, a remarkable collaboration between mind, body, and landscape arises, such that a beautiful pattern of footwork unfolds that ‘I’ can only observe with wonder. It calls to mind the Taoist principle of wu wei—the practice of taking no action that is not in accord with the natural course of the universe. When we align our attention and skill with the landscape, we find a way of running that’s akin to sailing with the wind, rather than rowing; allowing a skillful relationship to emerge.

3) Utter purposelessness.

There’s a line by Alan Watts—although perhaps not his originally—that’s stuck with me over the years: “When purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing in itself has been grasped.” There’s a beautiful moment in running when goals, objectives, and outcomes are transcended and there’s the recognition of the utter purposelessness of the action. This, for me, gets at the true purpose; that of none at all. Just the doing—the practice—in and of itself is already it. Practice-realization as we call it in Zen. And, following from that …

4) Just showing up is the practice.

The mind is incredibly adept at prioritizing urgent over important; it will reliably identify reasons to avoid the perceived difficulty of practice. It’s raining or it’s too cold; too many emails to answer; I need to know what’s happening on Tik Tok (frankly, I have absolutely no idea what’s happening on Tik Tok). But all of these fabricated ‘urgencies’ keep us from what we know is truly important and what ultimately orients us in the direction of flourishing. It’s in the consistency of just showing up that leads into the next …

5) One run can change your day; many runs can change your life.

I’ve certainly experienced the transformative power of consistent practice; both in the acute effects of a morning outing on the rest of the day, and as a cumulative force nudging me into being a better a citizen of the world. There’s something remarkable that can take place when consistent time and attention is placed upon those things that we truly value, acting on us in subtle and profound ways; over time shaping us into, or revealing, a truer version of ourselves.

6) The helical path.

A few weeks ago, I took part in the Leadville Trail 100—a 100-mile foot-race in the mountains around Leadville, Colorado. I often think about this particular insight—the helical path—in the context of running, but something about the Leadville course really solidified it … going out 50 miles, turning around and doing it all over again in reverse, ending up in the exact same place I started.

And that is: life is typically conceived of as a liner journey from birth to death (or a “brief pause between the maternity ward and the crematorium” as has been said), but often having a cyclical nature to it, as well; meaning it can feel as though we’re continually returning to the same problems, the same patterns of behavior, the same difficult circumstances, feeling like we should have moved past or beyond this repetition. But what’s missed here, is this two-dimensional view of the ‘cyclical nature of life’ is in fact a projection of a three-dimensional helix, which is, in reality, ascending in the vertical dimension—the dimension of growth and development. What we can fail to recognize or appreciate is that it’s only through returning again and again that we proceed. Always beginning, and yet, never the same.

And so, back at the Leadville finish-line, 29 hours after crossing start-line … 140,000 steps taken; no distance traveled; nothing achieved; and yet utterly transformed.

Lastly …

7) The ‘ingraspability’ of phenomena.

A significant percentage of ultra-endurance activity is simply the ability to make peace with discomfort; as noted earlier, to allow it all to be just as it is. It’s not necessarily that trained endurance athletes experience less physical and mental discomfort, it’s that their relationship to it has fundamentally changed. There’s a well-known phenomenon called the “pain cave”, where focus narrows and what remains is just the physical and psychological discomfort of the activity. Sounds terrible, perhaps; however, many seasoned athletes actually anticipate this phase of a race, because they know that this is where the real effort begins and from where their limits are truly tested and transcended.

It’s in these moments, in particular, where it becomes quite interesting to ‘play’ with discomfort, to really interrogate it as an arising phenomenon in consciousness.

I’ll often run with it as a Koan in the spirit of “What’s the origin of Mu?”: “What’s the origin of discomfort?” For those new to Zen, that sentence may be somewhat mystifying, which is entirely appropriate; just go with this.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time with this inquiry while running, and, reliably, what’s immediately available is the amorphous nature of the compound sensation of discomfort. If struggling with an acute pain in the knee after tumbling down the mountain, for example, it’s possible to deconstruct the sensation into its component parts, like heat, tingling, pressure, and so fourth. Similarly for psychic discomfort—there’s a base set of emotions that constitute the sensation. But beyond deconstruction, when we really go into the heart of the matter, there’s a clear experience of non-locality and a boundarilessness to the sense of discomfort. Meaning, without resorting to thought or concept there is, in fact, no defined location of the discomfort; both physical and mental discomfort arise within (or we might say “arise as”) the same ‘spaceless-space’ of awareness. There’s no segmentation possible; there’s nothing durable to grasp.

And then, if this sense of discomfort arises within this vast open-awareness, so too does the mountain landscape. It’s in this recognition that the Koan, “Make Mount Fuji take three steps.” can really open up.

Similarly, during one late-night run in the wilderness of Colorado, having accidentally switched off the headlamp, an incredible depth of darkness was revealed—a vast emptiness, and yet a rich fullness, dotted beautifully by the stars, all arising in this same ‘space-less space’ of awareness. In that moment there was the distinct and very real sense of, not looking ‘up and out’ to the stars, but of looking in to the totality, to the reality of what we truly are.

… and then, in that darkness, I tripped over a rock and was brought back to earth, quite literally and forcefully! That rock, like the running itself, just another part of practice.