Our Birthright: Running As Movement Practice
Hello. Welcome to the Running On Purpose podcast, a podcast dedicated to training the body, the mind, and the soul for what the race requires. My name is Steve, and I'm your host. Well, this week, I want to cover a topic in a solo episode that I've been working very hard on. In fact, I've recorded this three or four different partial episodes, one full episode, and innumerable starts and stops.
Steve SIsson:And it'll probably seem after you listen to this episode that that was all unnecessary, that what I'm going to be presenting here is pretty fundamental and foundational. But I feel really it's really important to lay the groundwork here and to say how essential I think viewing running as a movement practice is to anyone's experience of running. I think this way especially for those who have been running for an extended period of time, let's say for a year or two years or beyond, recognizing that there's an alternative to racing, recognizing that that alternative is already happening. It's already in play. It's already the foundation of whatever training you're doing.
Steve SIsson:But I think it's important for relatively new runners to be thinking about this because they frequently get pushed right into racing as a thing that needs to be done for them to be considered a real runner. I think a lot about the idea of being a jogger versus a runner, having really bridled at that idea that I'm a jogger. When I think that jogging is actually not such a bad thing that I thought it was before because it's really just a word for some less focused driven maniacal pursuit of a particular time goal or a race distance. And I think so many runners get pushed into that early on. I know I certainly have been guilty of that for the vast majority of my running and coaching career.
Steve SIsson:In fact, would say the last of my thirty years, nearly twenty five to twenty eight of them have been really focused on showing the world or revealing to people that they can be an elite level type runner, that they can train at an elite level. This was the foundations of the business I had before running, Rogue Running and also the foundations of Telos running the business that I run now. And I still believe that there's a great value to running, to racing and be thinking about racing and moving that direction but perhaps not quite as quickly as most people are being pushed to that. And that if there were an alternative viewpoint, a revisioning of what running actually could be, that it would be of great benefit to most runners. I even argue that it would be of great benefit to very, very experienced runners.
Steve SIsson:I can say this because in my own life, in my own running, I've been focused much more on running as a movement practice than I have been as a pursuit. So before we get down the road of too far, let's really unpack what it is I'm talking about. So it's my view that most people consider running primarily as a pursuit. By that, I mean primarily it is a mode of operating, which we could call training, where the focus is on finishing a race distance and or finishing a race distance in a particular time and using the runs that you do every day in pursuit of that finish line. And again, I don't want to diminish the importance and value of the pursuit.
Steve SIsson:We have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who recognize the value of running as a pursuit. But in my experience, and in the experience of many athletes that I watch as a coach, I've noticed that at some point in time, the luster sort of fades on the relentless pursuit of excellence in running, and that the relentless pursuit of excellence must equate with running times and getting faster. I fundamentally disagree with this point of view. I think it's a mode of running, it's an aspect of running, pursuing and racing and training, that is always available and always in play, but it's not the only way to look at it. In fact, I argue that every single person that is pursuing, is racing, is doing it from a much broader perspective of being in a movement practice.
Steve SIsson:So what do I mean by movement practice? What does that word, those two words together mean? What it means to me is that you consistently participate in the activity of running, moving your body, pushing off the ground so you're flying for some extended period of time because that's the definition of a run, is you're not walking, you're flying. There's some point where you're in the air. To feel good, to feel connected to the earth, to other people, to your own body, to a sense of self care in terms of exercise and staying fit and being a fit person because that's good for our long term cognitive and medical benefit.
Steve SIsson:There's no doubt that running consistently is hugely beneficial to our long term cognitive and physical well-being. But also, I believe that each and every runner that I know, at a fundamental level, is more committed to the practice, to their day to day experience of pushing their bodies, of getting out the door, of being in the weather, treadmill, of engaging desire, engaging with intention, the fundamental human birthright of trying to achieve something is not purely the domain of racing, but it can be just the domain of searching for the outside edges of who you are and what you are or plumbing the depth of what exercise or running mean to you at a much more psychological, developmental, or even soul level. So that's what I mean by a movement practice. Let me give you some examples of other movement practices that I think that we can use as corollaries. In the East, we have many of these.
Steve SIsson:Three key ones are Tai Chi or Qigong, which is Chinese, which is a movement process that mimics the movements of animals and geological features to connect the body and the mind in a positive and healthy way, so using the body to move in certain moves. It's a little bit like dance without jumping up and down. Another is martial arts. Every martial art that there is, that I know of, has as its foundation a practice that is essentially much more important than the martial aspect of it. There's an art form.
Steve SIsson:There's a daily habitual practice that goes through steps and processes in some cases, like with judo and other martial arts that have belts and things like that. And then there's also a competitive element or a martial element where there's fighting involved, but that at its core, almost every martial art comes back to the inner experience of just moving your body in a certain way in accordance with an art form, a patterning that is traditional long term. In Tai Chi's case, it's primal. It's mimicking the movements of nature. Another version of this is yoga that comes from India.
Steve SIsson:Everyone understands that there's aspects of yoga that might be considered fitness or even competitive. Much of the Western's version of yoga has kind of slipped a bit away from the core validity of inner work that goes on with yoga, but it's there. And every yoga teacher and every yoga course you're in, almost all of them will at some point in time finish in Shavasana where you're laying on the ground and just connecting primarily to the earth. And each of the forms, each of those holds that you're in, each of those particular forms that you go into in yoga is designed to at multiple levels. It's designed to work physical strength, flexibility, suppleness, but also deep inner knowing, rooted groundedness, or some other aspect that that particular form is trying to encourage you to experience.
Steve SIsson:Another version of this is dance. All dance comes from a primal place. But nearly every dance modality and methodology, regardless of how focused it is on outward viewing by others, some competitive element, even though it may not be for awards or winnings, is just about moving the body in certain ways that are unique either to the individual dancer or to the particular dance steps that are recommended or that are looking, you're looking at whether that's modern dance, the foxtrot, tango. They all have their own systematic, consistent process and a beauty that's underlying all of it. But at the deepest level, I think everyone recognizes in dance, yes, there's a competitive or performative aspect to dance.
Steve SIsson:But much more important is just the movement and the way the dancer feels and the creativity that comes through the dancer. So those are just a few examples of what I'm calling movement practices, and I think running fits in this category. I know for some people, it may seem a stretch, but I each and every day, I recognize more clearly how, at its absolute foundation and elemental root, running is a movement practice. Here's a couple of arguments. Number one: Running's primal.
Steve SIsson:This is something we've been doing, yes, for utilitarian reasons like hunting or gathering or scavenging, but also just because we love to do it. We've been doing it for a very, very long time for the sake of doing it. It has a utilitarian aspect, but it also has a creative aspect. Many people believe, well, there are folks who believe that even being human, what we consider consciousness, has to do with our getting upright, coming out of trees, getting upright, and running. Our entire physiology is designed around running.
Steve SIsson:It's built. We are built to run, born to run, as they say. So there's this primal element that I think that nearly everyone can tap into, that we've been doing this for a very long time. This primal element also unfolds a unique consciousness state that every human, every runner experiences. Anyone who runs beyond, let's say, ten or fifteen minutes recognizes that there's an altered state of consciousness that begins to take place, that takes to happen when we start running.
Steve SIsson:And this altered state of consciousness is unique to the running act itself. It's very different from the act of walking, the act of playing soccer, or any other sport. Running's rhythm helps us fall into meditative and unique meditative states, consciousness states. Now, some people don't like to call running meditation, and I'm with them. I don't think it's necessarily that, but I think this altered state of consciousness, first off, it's brought on by endocannabinoids.
Steve SIsson:At some point, we start to release the same constituent, the same kinds of chemicals that we find in THC, marijuana, cannabinoids, CBD, if you will, and this state of peace and ease that we find at the end of runs is a direct benefit of this. Of course, most people need for that runner's high or getting high on your own supply. It takes a few, you know, much longer than thirty minutes, probably an hour, hour and a half in some cases. But more importantly is the actual act of running itself and the way that our consciousness, the way that our minds operate when we're running. You notice this?
Steve SIsson:You're able to toggle. Sometimes you find yourself in this space of attention where you're able to attend to one particular thing, especially when something's in pain or hurting. There's a tendency, if my knee hurts, to only obsess a focus on what's going on with my knee, so it brings heightened attention, incredible ability to be attentive when you're running sometimes. But you can toggle that or move that along the spectrum out towards what I call awareness or general well-being, general interconnectedness, recognizing your sense of self expands through beyond, just a bit beyond your body, and you're able to be aware of a much larger frame for your body. This is super unique in running, I find.
Steve SIsson:Almost no other activity has this same ability to bring us into this unique altered state of awareness. And I argue because we develop this evolutionarily through need to travel extended distances or to hunt or to bring food, that we are triggered to find this to be in pursuit or in chase of this state. So you don't need to be pursuing a race necessarily to have this experience. And I argue for that altered state of consciousness is a really key aspect to what makes running a movement practice and why we keep doing it and why it can be extremely valuable just for its own sake. It does not need any external reason for you to be excited about doing it.
Steve SIsson:You can do it just because you like to get high on your own supply. You can do it just because it makes you feel capable. You can do it because it makes you feel connected. So this brings us into, transitions us into another aspect that I think of as running as a movement practice that's very, very important to think about. One of the key things I am working on creating a program around is what I'm calling the foundations of running.
Steve SIsson:I think for so many people who are in pursuit, who are focused on having a goal on a certain day of covering a certain amount of ground or distance in a certain duration, that we really focus on all the small little things that are necessary for that, both the fundamental stuff like running at certain paces, getting in long runs, stretching, strength training, these kinds of things. But the vast majority of time that people focus on is they're focusing on what's going on in their training. But there's another piece here which I think is really important, which is the aspect of well-being that is always available and necessary in order for us to actually have a better performance. These foundations are key to the well-being of any human being, and running itself leans into this well-being. Let me give you a few examples of things that I'm talking about.
Steve SIsson:Number one is, like we talked about, being active, physically active, taking our medicine, getting our altered state of consciousness, if you will, having the sense of accomplishment and benefit that comes from exercise, all those physiological aspects. Also, the sense of relationship, the recognition that we're in a body, that that body is good and can do good things, that that body can be bettered by keeping it well tuned, by allowing it to push the edge and the edges of what it's capable of. We don't need a race for that, but our well-being is essential for that. Another thing is I mentioned that idea of attention and awareness, and I'm convinced that these toggling between these two states of mind are incredibly important for any cognitively high functioning human being to feel good in the world. Many of the spiritual traditions talk about meditation.
Steve SIsson:I think of running as a form of meditation or contemplation where that altered state of consciousness allows you to tap into awareness and attention in a unique way that really benefits us at a deep, deep existential level. We know we feel good when we do it, and if we don't go out, we feel badly that we didn't. You've heard me say before, very rarely does anyone ever regret going out for a run. They may not want to do it. They may fight with themselves, struggle, avoid, but if they actually get their candy ass out the door, they always feel better because they did it.
Steve SIsson:What's going on there? There's something about running that enhances our well-being. I mentioned relationships, the relationship to your body, the relationship that your mind has, the relationship that you have to a self or a soul, whatever that might be, however you might frame that. But it's also our relationship to nature. Running is typically done outside, whether on the roads or the trails, where we're interacting with oxygen, with trees, with ground, with earth, with water, sweat.
Steve SIsson:We are recognizing our relationality to our environment. In a modern era where we're so cut off from being in nature, running offers this opportunity to be outside in the elements. And we are high functioning animals primarily who came from nature. These homes and these walls and this air conditioned experience and these vehicles that get us from one point to another, as we all know, they're relatively recent advancements. Even homes, for many, many people, have only been around for four or five thousand years.
Steve SIsson:People, indigenous peoples, would move from place to place to place, recognizing their relationality to those different places. So there's a deep fundamental human need for relationship that running really taps into. Another aspect of this is interconnectedness. Those relations, recognizing those relationships, seeing the connections we have with those, creates a recognition, brings us back to a recognition that we are connected with everything, that what happens in one place happens to us. Now, many people don't have this point of view on a day to day basis, but I guarantee you that altered state of consciousness, many of you have actually experienced this deep interconnectedness, this deep oneness that you maybe don't recognize in any other place except for when you run.
Steve SIsson:Part of that's the drugs, part of that's the endocannabinoids, but part of it's also that this is our birthright, that this is something we were born to do and something we need to continue to do. There are many other well-being aspects that I could bring up that I could target and show as being beneficial. And again, I'm going to put on a course starting in January called Foundations of Running. You'll hear more about that in the coming weeks. But foundational elements really are things that are happening below the surface that we're not really paying attention to so much.
Steve SIsson:And we wanna be sure that if we take care of those well-being aspects, those aspects of self care that are important, we actually will perform much, much better. But they are not the training. Those well-being aspects benefit but they're actually there to help us be better human beings, not to necessarily be better racers. And once you open that door to recognizing running has this core element of your need to feel connected, to be rooted, to be of the earth in the world, playing out your life in the world, you're no longer focused solely on that goal time that you're trying to run for that race distance. And believe me, I have direct personal experience that the more that you tap into this movement practice element of running, the greater the benefit you receive in all other aspects of your running.
Steve SIsson:Because you've taken care of the foundations, because you're balanced, because you view your interrelationship with the whole world, with the whole of universe, because you're taking care of your body in a way that feels really good and is connected to a human birthright that you have always had for as long as humans have been around, something bigger happens. I think we've all had those few experiences where we notice, have a good run, have a great experience, and all's right with the world. Or we'll be in the middle of a race where that elusive flow shows up, where all of a sudden you don't have to think. You're just in a mode of positive feedback loops where you're not even conscious of what exactly is going on. You're just feeling that you're doing the right thing at the right time in the right way, and you know it's what that body was meant to do.
Steve SIsson:I think that for many people who race, those feelings are far too scattered. They're not stable. Folks don't know how to be able to get into those states at will. They have a challenge of recognizing anything but pain and suffering or suffering from need of identity to get the time or the result that they're looking for. And I argue that recognizing running as a movement practice absolutely increases the opportunities of flow.
Steve SIsson:There's no doubt about it. Recognizing these core well-being aspects that we can go through and train and work with and focus on will allow us to access that elusive state of perfect rhythm, of feeling in the zone, of feeling anywhere in a natural state. Because ultimately, that's what we're talking about here with running as a movement practice, that we can use running to allow us to reaffirm, to find, in some cases, to reaffirm for those who have had these experiences our natural state, what it is to be deeply connected in relationship with others and with our world, and your performance will enhance, and you'll have this greater sense of well-being, and very rarely will you not wanna get out and do the thing. Great. So that's my pitch.
Steve SIsson:That's my thesis. Now, the way I like to frame a movement practice is to consider it in three basic aspects. The first is the body, the somatic element. Obviously, when we're running, we're using our bodies. It is primarily a somatic activity, using the body in a particular way, which sometimes we call exercise, but which is really just pattern, finding pattern with the body in a certain way that feels, as we said, like a birthright, like we were born to do it.
Steve SIsson:But that body really requires us to have a relationship with all of our body parts, to listen, to pay attention, to have a feeling of what it is to be on the ground, what it is to breathe the air, to have a salient touch for that. I like to call it a felt sense, an experience of being in a body that you can deepen and expand and channel in on through attention and awareness to gain more insight body, about being an animal, a high end animal, a higher functioning animal, if we want to say that. I think that that may be a little too hierarchical for my taste, but you know what I'm saying. That we have this gift of a body. So many people in our world, especially distance runners, use this body in such a way that it's abuse.
Steve SIsson:Number one, they don't recognize its core value, its core importance, that they're in a battle with it, that they're trying to overcome some aspect of what's going on somatically in their body. For many people who have been running for a long time, both male and female, we have body dysmorphia. Many of us view our bodies as being not good, not excellent. Many of us know that that's not a functional, happy place. And so I'm arguing from a movement practice perspective, coming into being in a body is one of the most important things we possibly can do, and then learning to love our body, learning to be in deep concert and alignment with the different aspects of our body, to see its parts parts as really operating within a much larger whole, and basically making friendly with our bodies.
Steve SIsson:Cannot overemphasize the change in your life, the change in your life experience that will occur if you recognize your fundamental natural goodness, and that that is housed in this temple, this body, and that this body is essential for any activity that you want to do. Any pleasure, any pain, anything you wanna do needs this body, and we're always in a battle with it, especially in the West. We find it to be some kind of evil. We know where the theological roots of that come from, where we can unpack them, but that's not the purpose of this conversation today. The purpose of this conversation today is to remind you and help you recognize that your body needs to be treated well, preferably to be seen as good and essential and necessary for being human.
Steve SIsson:And I think that our twisted, fucked up society has really made us lose touch with that. But there's never a run that I go on that I don't reconnect with the wonderful, amazing parts of my body. And sure, there are those all those times where my hip is bothering me, my calves are bothering me, I'm trying to get through a certain distance or at a certain time and my body feels like it's failing me. And I think this is where much distress that comes from that we talk about in mental training techniques and what's going on from a nervous system perspective. It's happening around this area of lack of love, lack of recognition of the beneficial goodness of being in a body and how important it is.
Steve SIsson:The second part of this is thinking of the mind. The second part of a mental sorry, a movement practice is the mind aspect. This is an area that I'm really, really interested and have been in for many, many years. But primarily the way I see this now is we've got brains that are overly valued by much of what we call cognitive science or neuroscience, thinking of the brains as the place where we are. And our Western society has us focusing on our brains as the central location from which we operate.
Steve SIsson:But I think our mind is much broader than that. First of all, it significantly expands beyond our brain because our brain would not even have anything to be processing or working through if we didn't have feeling states nerves that ran all up and down our body that were communicating what's going on throughout our body. And so the nervous system becomes really, really important. In my way of looking at running as a movement practice, nervous system regulation or co regulating our world, our lives, our running, our bodies through kindness with our nervous system, recognizing how it's there to help us stay safe. But when we push the edge too far, it will also throw curve balls at us that will make it challenging for us to achieve our goals.
Steve SIsson:So recognizing and being kind with our minds, being engaged and active, aligned, aligning our mind and our body together. I also think that there are three intelligences that we have as humans. In fact, I think that there are probably more than these, but I'm just going to use these three just to start with. Obviously, we have our brains. This is an incredible intelligence center.
Steve SIsson:But we also have our heart. Everyone recognizes the heart as an intelligence center. We say the heart knows best or what love is. It's that feeling, that intelligence that's about connection and interrelation, about compassion and empathy. Our heart knows.
Steve SIsson:There's unbelievable amounts of scientific data that indicates that our heart is an intelligence center. Finally, there's our gut. Since February, we've become much more aware through the scientific literature of how important our gut health is, is an argument that there are as many nerve endings in our gut as there is on our skin. So they're processing information, taking information in, using that information to help the heart, the blood, the lungs, the brain, to everything to function. We talk about intelligence at a deep level around gut.
Steve SIsson:I trust in my gut. I have a gut feeling. Now, I'm not saying that we jettison other scientific modalities and methods. I'm very pro science. But science works at a really slow level, and science is trying to reduce through objectivity.
Steve SIsson:But if you're in a body, you're subjective and you're having these subjective experiences that you call feelings, emotions, pain. And using just your brain or considering just your brain as a way in which a mind operates just doesn't even get close to the reality of the situation. And so having a movement practice will allow you to begin to connect those three different intelligence centers as a way of making choices and decisions that can be very helpful. And this will benefit not only your running, but the rest of your life. Again, as I mentioned, considering running as a movement practice is much bigger than just getting faster.
Steve SIsson:Getting faster is a small part, an important part, but still a small part of the overall big picture of a running as a movement practice. So finally, the third area that I want to talk about in terms of running as a movement practice is the soul. You know, the byline of this podcast is training the body, mind, and soul for what the race requires. I came to that term because I've been working on this movement practice stuff for many, many I really started focusing on running as as a movement practice after the pandemic, as I realized how many people didn't have races. And so the pursuit rang hollow.
Steve SIsson:The number of people that dropped out of my training programs was so alarming that I was afraid I might not be able to have a business and I didn't know what I was gonna have to go get another job. Thankfully, I had loyal customers and loyal clients, loyal athletes who worked with me and stayed with me. I'm very grateful for that. But it forced me to pivot and to look at running from a different perspective. This aligned with a lot of the work I was doing on purpose and thinking about purpose work and what it is that we really care about in our worlds.
Steve SIsson:And I kept struggling with the idea of a soul. I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian and went through a phase in my 20s where I became, I would say, an atheist. And so the idea of a soul never really made sense to me. But now I'm exploring soul in a much more interesting way. And I think that running as a movement practice is a really amazing way for us to tap into what it means to be a self, what it means to have the experience of being Steve, or what it is for you to have the experience of being Mike, or for you to have the experience of being Sarah.
Steve SIsson:We assume that we all have similar experiences because we've got cultural constructs like language that allow us to relate, that we're having similar feelings. So we think cucumbers are green and koala bears are cuddly. We agree on these things. Perspective is not so cut and dry. But we do have this experience of being a self, of having a subjective experience of being Steve.
Steve SIsson:And I think running is an unbelievable testing ground for growing in our sense of self. Now, I'm equating self and soul. You might think of this more as a capital S Self from the, like Carl Gustav Jung likes to say, the big S means that there's some big self, this larger self. That's not just this limited extension, but all of the ways of being, Steve, come into play. I like to call that soul because there's a spiritual element to it that I find really important and necessary.
Steve SIsson:You don't have to go to soul if you don't want to. You can stay with self. I think it works just fine. But I really do believe that this is an aspect of the pursuit that gets really twisted and turned around. So many people, when they move quickly from just running for the pure love of it or for the exercise of it, for the well-being of it, and they pivot to focusing much more on running as a pursuit, they tend to atrophy this aspect of self or soul, or it solidifies and concretizes an identity structure that's not fluid or flexible enough to handle the kind of creative circumstances that beauty and being alive and mystery are a part of.
Steve SIsson:And believe me, these aspects are a part of our day to day life. Mystery is baked into the fundamental nature of reality. And I think when we focus our pursuit on a pursuit primarily, we really narrow the scope and we don't attend to much larger construct that we need because humans need meaning in life. And running as a movement practice really, really unfolds this and in a beautiful and amazing way. There are so many examples I can provide for you, ways that I see the creativity, the beauty, the focus and concentration, the zone, the flow.
Steve SIsson:These are very important to human beings. We feel it on race day when we're standing on the starting line. We forget a little bit of what we're going after. We just recognize the absolute beauty of all the people around us. So anyway, I've already gone a lot longer than I thought I was going to go in this episode, but I hope I've unpacked this in some way that makes it understandable.
Steve SIsson:And I hope you enjoyed this episode. I certainly needed to get it out to the world. I needed to be able to put a basic primer out, a foundational statement about the foundational aspect of running as a movement practice. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'd love to hear from you.
Steve SIsson:Whether you loved it or you didn't love it, you can reach me at sissentelosrunning dot com. Godspeed, y'all. Godspeed.
