The Inner Experience of Running
Welcome to running on purpose or run gnosis, depending on how I decide to distribute recording this episode in 2024 as a of as a way of me transitioning away from my Running on Purpose project which has been sparsely added to and not very consistently recorded. Although I do have a good number of episodes, it's just been something I've always struggled with that I felt maybe Well, I guess in a lot of ways, I felt like I was giving really good quality product and doing something that was really unusual and unique and maybe that's hubris, maybe that's thinking I'm a little bit better than I am, but you know, it's just coming as this whole episode will be about, it's coming from my inner experience of that. And I've just decided after long deliberation, some of you may remember if you listened to earlier episodes in the spring, was talking about another project I might be doing, and those of you who have been dialoguing with me consistently around my creative process, you know who you are, then you know I've been thinking about this Run Gnosis project for a long time. I'd actually started a short little took a couple of salvos at it, 2022, 2021, 2022, with Jason Brooks and then some individual stuff I did, and then I sort of put it on the shelf, then I started having weird dreams.
Steve Sisson:And dream is something that's been coming into my life recently and because I invited it in, because I had said I haven't been dreaming very much, I don't know why, my wife dreams like woman, and I can't remember shit. Now, some of this is because of the inebriants I have been consuming for the vast majority of my life, whether they be of the herbal or alcoholic varieties, and I know that that impacts my sleep habits. But I also have kind of felt like I've been missing out. I'm such an avid reader, especially of science fiction and fantasy, very magical realist fiction. While I love non fiction and I'm obsessed with it, I prefer to fall into movies, really worlds that have incredible world building and interesting philosophies.
Steve Sisson:And so I thought, well, hell, the most interesting world I could fall into, I seem to fall into every evening. And I sleep pretty well. I have really long windows of time in which I can sleep. I do sleep mostly between, you know, six and nine hours, depending upon what's going on in my life, a night. And I know I'm dreaming, but I just don't have much reflection on them.
Steve Sisson:And so I've spent the last year or so kind of like digging into dream research and then digging into dream processes, limiting my inebriance, trying to track my dreams a bit more, and I found I'm really not a good REM dream person. I still seem to struggle with keeping track of my, the two kinds of dreams that most people talk about in the deep REM sleep, which are what some people might call tidying dreams, which are sort of cleaning up your cognitive system, going through the varieties of things that have gone on in a day or over the week or over the month, whatever's stressing you out in your day to day life that you kind of need to just work through. I actually think this is an operative principle within the nervous system and something that anybody that's interested in computer science, AI, consciousness in machines needs to be thinking about. If these machines don't sleep, how are they gonna do what they need to do? But anyway, that's a side topic.
Steve Sisson:And then big dreams, which are these dreams that are sort of world building, like world view creating or philosophy changing or changed my life kind of dreams, and I've had a few of those, a few I can remember. But it seems like people in my world that are good dreamers, they seem to have these a little bit more, and they're able to get, what you might say, downloads or, some kind of information from their own psyche in which they can then maybe make more informed and beneficial, efficacious decisions in their life. So I kind of missed out on that. But I seem to do a pretty damn good job of what they call liminal dreaming or in the dreaming literature, hypnopompic or hypnagogic dreaming. I think I'm a better hypnopompic dreamer, which means that I seem to get whatever downloads that are available as I'm waking up.
Steve Sisson:In the hours between when I sort of wake up because I have to go to the restroom, and then I go back to sleep, and then I sort of come and go. You've probably been in these, what they call, liminal states. And I seem to get a lot of great information here, and I could just say, Hey, it's just my brain running off, oh, it's just tidying, oh, it's just cleaning up, but I mean, why would I think that my dream thoughts are any less valuable than my waking thoughts? And if I think my waking thoughts are valuable, and which I do, and I think most people do, why is it that culturally we have denigrated and dismissed our dream thoughts? Seems to me they should be at least on equal footing because whatever biases we have cognitively or habitually through our patterns, they seem to be a little more offline when we're sleeping.
Steve Sisson:So anyway, I digress. I just wanted to say that much of the project that I'm considering here and that I'm introducing in this topic, in this episode, or whatever this ends up being, because it's an extemporaneous episode basically describing and discussing what I'm calling the inner experience of running, or my explorations or an introduction to the inner experience of running. I do not expect to be a completist here, to be definitive, or in any way final in my thinking. In fact, that's the reason for the whole project is that I potentially can, continue to explore personally, and also across, this liminal or digital medium to try to get, I guess I might as well get my thoughts clear, to do my research, to share with others, and I'll go into that a little bit more around the reasoning for this. Anyway, the ideas for Rungnosis came to me, I'd already had the concept, but I just kept getting awakened early in the mornings by whatever is going on inside me to that I had a job I was supposed to be doing that I wasn't doing.
Steve Sisson:And this is very different from the experience I've been having for the first fifty four years of my life. I just turned 55. For the vast majority of my life, I've been thinking that my job is just to do something special, to do something meaningful and that I was supposed to, make that up and to create that. And for some reason, I guess it's just the way that I've framed the initial conversation or opened up to the potentiality of whatever might be helping me in my dream states, that maybe I don't have to do this alone, that maybe it's not all on me, and that maybe my responsibility is less to make something beautiful and perfect, but to make something useful. While I've committed myself to that from a running perspective for the last thirty years that I've been coaching, at a deeper, more existential level, which you might call a soul level, I kind of felt like I'd falling down on the job.
Steve Sisson:Now a good bit of that is because I've been seeking what it means to be a human or what it means to be a spiritual person or a soulful person or whatever that might be. My god, you should see the bookshelves in my house. They are flooded with books religion, shamanism, spirituality, what reality is, psychology. I mean, this is an obsession of mine. And so the Run Gnosis project basically is one in which I explore my experience of running personally out to the world while at the same time trying to find patterns that might be useful for other people to help them on their running journey.
Steve Sisson:And so you might say, Well, what's the difference between this and what I've been doing all along? Well, two things. The first one is procedural. It's the main thing that I've been working on is getting people ready for races, so that's my outward job. That's how I make a living.
Steve Sisson:For so many years, I confused what I'm now calling the Run Gnosis or sort of knowing myself through running or knowing anyone knowing their self through running or the inner experience, the inner experience of running, with the outer experience of preparing for a race. Now, much of this episode is going to cover why I think that the inner part is so incredibly important and essential, but, know, has it not been easy to parse for me for whatever reason, and I think in a lot of ways, it's made me unattractive as a coach. People are like, Why is he talking about all this weird stuff? Why is he always talking about my inner experience? Why is he talking about the nervous system?
Steve Sisson:Or why is he talking about archetypes or philosophicalpsychologicalspiritual kinds of things? Why does Steve talk about the soul? What I've determined is that while I will continue to utilize body, mind, and soul for what the race requires in the context of my work with Telos running, I need to split my philosophical, spiritual, soul related kinds of thinking apart from my day job that I generate revenue from. And so my thought process here is that I need to create an entity or a channel or a venue, a media project, however you want to see it. I'm gonna use Substack in this case, that's the plan.
Steve Sisson:To address and share and explore and question and kind of be vulnerable and more naive, maybe naked and open, however more angry and involved, in the Run Gnosis project. And then save the specific race related, training related, and maybe the takeaways from the stuff I might do with rhinosis that might be applicable for people that are training and racing. But that these two things, while they're not separate, I need separate channels, I need separate ways of dealing with them so that I've got the freedom and flexibility to go off where I need to go with the rhinosis project and then I can also say, Hey, I don't need to go there here with my individual athletes or any content that I'm creating for Telos running, unless the athlete's comfortable and wants to do that. And I think a lot of times, I've just sort of been smuggling my world view in, smuggling my metaphysics into these conversations with athletes that sometimes makes them uncomfortable. And occasionally it gets them excited, but those who are excited about it, well they'll still be able to do that, but now I won't feel so compelled to actually maybe put a square peg in a round hole.
Steve Sisson:So, that's one reason why I feel it's really important for me to transition running on purpose away and into Run Gnosis. Running on Purpose has been sort of this hybrid that I've done some spiritual and philosophical things with, especially with Kobe. He and I have had so much fun around the spiritual aspects of running, and I feel so proud of the episodes that we have created and the experiences that we've had together, and I'm gonna continue to do that. In fact, this episode is being recorded because Kobe was not able to make it, this week with property. Sort of the way of this new creator, content creator culture is to give away the good shit, is to use these sound bites or this great content to grab ahold of people and then figure out a way to monetize that or to turn that into customers.
Steve Sisson:And I just have to admit that the one thing I'm really good at as a running coach is creating great content and creating great programming and then shepherding or guiding the athletes through that program. I've been really successful at that. I haven't been so successful at community building, and I haven't been so successful at marketing or the entrepreneurial business aspects of what it takes to run a small business when you're the only one doing entrepreneurship is. And I'm not motivated in that way financially, and I'm not feeling, I don't feel the same creativity through seeing those metrics. The metrics I seem to care about are the athletic performances of the athletes that I have, and so I focus on those things.
Steve Sisson:And that's probably coming from the background I have as a competitive athlete through high school and college and my short little pro career. And then the great influence of some of my mentors around being competitive, and then the area I fell into with Rogue, and then Rogue Athletic Club, and my coaching at the University of Texas. These sort of already sort of, they added onto, they sort of layered into this competitive milieu of how you know you've done well. And I never have thought that that was the end all be all, but I do think it's the coin of the realm. Can you get results?
Steve Sisson:Can you get people to perform? And as I said, I think I create incredible content for that, and I give out a lot of that, and I'm gonna stop doing that so much. And if you want that content, you can either join Telus Running, you just go to telusrunning.com, and in the new year, there's gonna be coming, you know, here we're in early October, all the way through to the new year, I'll be doing a little more marketing and pushing a little bit more, to get more good content out or to get your attention onto what I'm doing with Telos Running. There'll be a Boston specific cohort based program, a Boston qualifying cohort program. There'll be the ongoing one on one group work that I do, online with people all over the world.
Steve Sisson:And then my small group here in Austin, the Alpha Group, where I implement much of this work face to face. And those will be the venues in which people will be able to get in touch with me and operate with me. And there's also so that's the one piece, you can go there. And there may be a lower cost option to that as we go along, but for now I just need to figure out a way to get more people in that group so I can pay my bills and do the things I need to do, and I need to protect protect it? It used to be that the coaching world was kind of like, the musical world.
Steve Sisson:In the late 80s, early 90s, I was a big YouTube fan, the band U2, and Bono had a quote in one of his songs that says, Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief. And I've always thought that coaching was exactly this, cannibalism and thieving. And then putting it together in your own unique way which is an art form and then having people do that work and getting paid for it. But the creator culture, this creative culture, content creating culture has now shifted and changed in where we've got a whole bunch of influencers, posers, I would say, vast majority of them posers, who have very little personal experience, very little knowledge, and almost no ability to problem solve around various challenges that might come up. They just spout off shit, random shit that they either steal or they co opt or they make up.
Steve Sisson:And again, like I said, coaching is that. That's part of it. But it seems to me that when I listen to their content, when I hear what they say, I mean there's very little I agree with and I don't want to get painted with that brush. So I'm just gonna go away. You're not gonna be able to find my content in that way.
Steve Sisson:If you're looking for it, there will be one outlet for it. It'll be the Keep Going podcast. That I do with Michael Kratchick of the Atreyu, who's the CEO and lead designer and Grand Poobah of that fantastic running shoe company called Atreyu Running, which I'm a loyal customer, not because he gives He does seed me shoes, that's for sure, but we're not in any We're in a relationship of friendship and in a relationship of co creating and in a relationship of helping each other. I believe in this product, I race in this product, I train in this product, I love it. But that's not why I'm saying that.
Steve Sisson:What I'm saying is there's a place for you that's gonna be in the world that you can find training related content where it's in a conversational mode, not in a deliverable provide for you in explicit ways. I'm just gonna I just think my shit's pretty good and I haven't been protecting it, and I think because I haven't been protecting it, people don't think it's that good, and that people give me less of their coins because they know that it's out there for free. And while I've been very bullish on that for a long time, it just feels significant change after the pandemic, and especially in the last year to two years. I don't want to be painted with the brush of an influencer. I don't experience and my expertise to be denigrated, and I want to value personally my own product, and if I value it personally, then others will value it.
Steve Sisson:And so for that reason, the running on purpose content will cease. And in fact, good bits of that are gonna go away. I won't be doing that until the new year, but just let this little note be made that it will be in the future, if there's content you're looking for, I'll be repurposing that, placing it in my online experience for my Telos running athletes, or I will be, or it'll just, yeah, it'll just go away. I hate to do that, but I also feel like I have to protect myself, and I have to protect my content. So, that's another reason.
Steve Sisson:Now, that's why running on purpose is going away. Well, that gives us a couple more reasons. Another reason is that I felt like this dichotomy or this stretch between what we might call the inner and the outer, the inner experience of running and talking about the psychology, the spirituality, the soul level, the various aspects that get me really lit up, and I think are really important for competitive running, but they're not valued by my athletes intrinsically, or they don't recognize it. They see the value of that. If I talk to them, some of them come to me with that kind of a viewpoint, but if they don't come to me with that viewpoint, then it feels really uncomfortable for me to bring it forward.
Steve Sisson:And so I can constantly feel like I'm getting stretched across a wider frame than I'm getting comfortable with. And so what I've determined is I'm gonna do this crazy, wild, woo, weird, which I don't think it's any of those things necessarily, although I'm not. I'm growing into it. There's a part of me that just says, Yeah, okay, if that's what you wanna call it, because it seems like the zeitgeist in the culture is recognizing these things as being more real. But it's still not accepted in the day to day operations of my run coaching or in the way that I market or research or get my stuff together or interface or onboard athletes that I work with.
Steve Sisson:And so all those athletes that want that woo can find it for free through run gnosis, and those that don't, don't need it to be sort of thrown onto the plate whether they like it or not. And so that stretching across those two things just make it a lot easier for me to make a clear division. So I'm gonna save my pursuit work, so the work on specific training and racing related content, what the race requires, anything that will fit into the category of what the race requires that's more around performance and pursuit of a goal than it is around a movement practice and a way of being in the world from a running perspective, then we're going to separate those two things. Now I just want to say, just for the sake of consistency and epistemic and ontological clarity. I do believe that these movement practices, the product I'll be creating in rhinosis, is foundational and fundamental to the work I do in TELUS Running.
Steve Sisson:We are all practicers of movement first, we're all souls first, and then we operate at that level, and this episode later in the episode I'll be going into that a little bit more. But we interface with the world primarily, in an inner way, and so I want to explore that. And I want to explore it in a way that feels free and loose, not in a way that feels constrained and, needs to be on point or on message, and so, rhinosis is gonna be a wild and willy place in my hopes, and it's gonna be a place where I can just, like I said, be naive, be open, be curious and share and hopefully that's a rant and rage and all the various things I have a tendency to do. And then Telos running, that avenue can stay a little cleaner and a little more focused on performance and just getting the job done. And all the content that any athlete would need that was inner will be still available for free, and I'll also be putting it in So it's not like the telus running people are gonna get anything less.
Steve Sisson:It's just that I'm not gonna provide the telus running stuff, the running on purpose stuff, the what the race requires stuff for free anymore. You to pony up. Such is life. So the couple of other reasons why Run Gnosis matters to me, I think it's gonna provide for a lot more creativity. It's gonna really challenge me.
Steve Sisson:It's gonna require me to grow. Now, I'm not sure that I'm gonna be significantly more present. I'm not sure I'll I'm so scared about this project, to be honest with you, that I worry a little bit about whether or not I'll be able to be that vulnerable and to create that level of content. However, I'm confident that the kinds of things I'm so interested in, they keep I can't stop reading, and I can't stop researching, and I can't stop thinking about things as far afield as truth, purpose, energy, dreams, the planetary crisis, alchemy, I mean meaning. I mean, it's just like these things, poetry, beauty, these things matter to me at such a deep level and I need a place to do it.
Steve Sisson:And because I've now made this commitment to being in that space, I'm going to. If you want to encourage me in this regard, I'll be giving you opportunities on Substack to do that, so there'll be an ability for you to kick a little in to the man, buy me a cup of coffee, buy me a book, those kinds of things. But I am planning on keeping running on I mean keeping, rhinosis free and to have it be a gift because that's another key part of why I'm doing this is that I feel like I have a need to be of greater service. I have started to consider myself more a guide than a coach. Not that I don't do coaching, but I feel less and less comfortable with that role of a coach.
Steve Sisson:Sort of seems to be hierarchical, top down, let me tell you what to do, and I'm way more interested in co creating and being together and making decisions and having athletes that have been critical and thoughtful. This is not a one on one, it's not a plug and play, it's not an online program. I mean, it is an online program but it's not a by the numbers kind of program. It's all about this inner experience and using the inner experience to help guide the outer and then taking the outer experience, the external experience of the body and the data and the results and the way those things frame and the experiences you have to then sort of create a great race plan. And I'm pretty good at that, I have to say, I'm pretty good at it.
Steve Sisson:High level operator in that space, but I need this other outlet. And here I have been going on for almost thirty minutes about it, but I just wanted to make sure that those of you who are listening to Running On Purpose knew why I'm doing what I'm doing, and I wanted to justify it at some level and make sure that I did right by you, okay? That I at least said to you, I know maybe some of you have been counting on me, not many, but some of you have been counting on me. I know some of you have missed me posting more or sharing more and what I'll say is I'm still gonna be around. I'll be around in the category of run gnosis where you can find me hanging up my flag and then you can find me in Keep Going with Michael talking about sort of conversationally about the specifics of running culture and training and racing and those kinds of things in a running culture perspective.
Steve Sisson:And then if you wanna find me for the specific point and shoot, get the job done, competitive experience and you want me to help guide you to great race experiences, then you can find me at TELUS Running and that's the way I'll be doing it in the beginning of the new year. One last note to those of you who are former participants in Telus running or considering Telus running, I am gonna be doing a price change in the new year. It'll start, the first of the year. Anybody that signs up after January 1 will be paying $150 a month for my work, unless you sign up for a cohort based program, or unless you have been grandfathered in in the initial six years, seven years, fourteen seasons we've gone through with Telus running, fourteen seasons. And so those who finish out season 14 with me before season 15 starts will be grandfathered in at $115 a month if you're meeting me in the one on one and conversing with me that way, or $65 a month if you're not meeting with me one on one but just doing my generalized training program.
Steve Sisson:I'm convinced, I'm trying to argue for everybody that's doing the $65 model to move to the cohort based program, but I do have a few supporters out there that have continued to be at that rate for an extended period of time and I want them to be I want to honor their long term commitment to me, and so they will not be changed until they decide to sign off. Anybody that decides to leave Telos for any reason for more than thirty days, one billing phase, they will need to then move up to the $150 model. So you can do the math on that, $1.15 versus $1.50. Over a couple of months, that sort of adds up and so, that's just a little sort of kicker to try to get people who may be thinking about joining me or participating with me and want to rejoin the Telus running community just to realize that that community is, yes, it's a product I serve, but it's also a commitment to me showing up and being available, and those of you who drop in and drop out, you're gonna be having to pay that $150 model all the way across, unless I raise it at some point.
Steve Sisson:But those of you who want to commit to me longer term, if you lock and load now, you can get it for $115 a month, for as long as you stay. Details around that will be emailed to the Telus Running community at the 2024, so they all are clear about what that is and what that looks like. There won't be a legal document. It'll just be like, Hey, this is what I'm doing, this is why I'm doing it, this how it looks. But those of you who are interested in joining Telos Running, thinking that you might do it, it's the last I've never made a pitch like this.
Steve Sisson:This is the only time I've ever done this and maybe the only time I ever do. But yeah, need to kick it up, and that rate's gonna go to 150 a month, or be cohort based, or you're gonna be at 115 or 65 because you've committed for the long term. So alright, I think that's enough for the logistics sitting there at thirty minutes in. So, and I will, well, yeah. So I wanted to talk a little bit or just begin to unpack many of the basic, at least the most fundamental and foundational element that I think will be a part of the Run Gnosis project, and what I would consider absolutely core fundamental that's run, any athlete, any human, honestly, but any athlete, and especially any athlete that's trying to have a command level performance on any given day.
Steve Sisson:And that's the difference between the inner experience of running and the outer experience of running? What's going on internally and what's going on externally? You might also think about this as subjective and objective. I'm a little skeptical of anything that anybody says is objective outside of pure numbers, math and data, ones and zeros, because once we get three and four and five and six involved, then there's gonna be different participants watching, and then there's gonna be, you know, physics talks about this, I'm not a physicist, I'll just say, there are challenges around even looking at data objectively from the human perspective of subjectivity, so I can't go into that too far, but let's just say that this idea of objectivity and subjectivity, if there are clear boundaries, which I'm not sure there are, but if there are, then the subjective is the place you're coming from as a human. So the numbers might be objective, but as you relate to them, you'll be doing that through the neural network, through the hard and wetware of a human lived experience, the blood and guts, the nerves and ligaments, the brain matter and breath that is a human body, born of the earth, coming from the earth in some way, shape or form, and animal at its core.
Steve Sisson:The human experience, we are just an evolved animal. We have a tendency to think of ourselves as a little bit more special than that, as elevated in this hierarchical thinking that I absolutely do not believe in. So what I will say is your subjectivity is crucial to your running, and that's what I'm meaning by the inner experience. Some other ways to think about this might be to think about this from the perspective of science, and what you might call psychology. Now I know science, and psychology gets really weird about this.
Steve Sisson:They really want to be a scientific protocol, and they are, cognitive science, neuroscience, these are scientific processes and protocols. But because the human is an interface in those and not quarks or biological things, just looking at the biology or whatever else, but because we're talking about the human and the human has the ability to be metacognitive, which means to be able to think about thinking, to be able to be aware of awareness, which seems to be unique in just a small subset of mammalian population, and then humans seem to have really, advanced pretty exponentially over the last two hundred thousand years to be able to really, really operate at a really megacognitive level, higher it's seeming, at least as far as we can tell, or as much as it looks like, given our very partial perspective, we're kind of at the top of the heap related to that. Now, don't think it's about that, but I do think that that's the way that many people think. And what I'll say is that that, even the ability to create science, requires what we call psychology. Now, there's another whole aspect to this, which is this question that I like to raise around, and so that might be what you call mind, okay?
Steve Sisson:That's being minded. That's what's going on in what we determine as the mind, and the mind is super confusing. If you even look in the psychological literature, there's not a lot of common agreement. I do think that the work of Greg Enriquez, and his UTAC, Unified Theory of Knowledge, I have talked about this with my athletes in the past, he's making great strides in trying to create a really rigorous, historical, scientifically grounded frame for what is going on around what we call mind, and so I do think there's great strides being made here. There's also the work of Russell Holbert.
Steve Sisson:I'm a huge proponent of this man's work, psychologist out of UNLV, who does research on what he calls pristine inner experience, and his research, which is available freely online, if you're curious, then just let me know and I'll let you know where it is. I might put some of that in the show notes. He's arguing that we're not really, as much as we know about our bias, that we're really not very good at even knowing what our thoughts are. And he's done thousands of hours using his process, specific process that he designed, to try to pinpoint people's inner experience and to get as clear about it as possible. And his basic findings are that we don't all think the same way, and we really aren't very good at being able to describe what we're thinking, and we're kind of operating way below the hood.
Steve Sisson:So it's not something, it's something that's going on inside of us, what we would call inside of us. It's an inner experience, and that inner experience is mediated by the complex nervous system, culture, language, symbols. There's just so much that is, and so if we're not working this lane, if we're not digging deep on what our inner experience is, if you're not bringing that into your training on a consistent basis, then you're not being as effective as you could possibly be. Not only that, but when you get into command performance kinds of events where the shit hits the fan, we tend to drop back into this inner experience because it's our nervous system that's mediating things and it gets really simple and it gets really narrowed down and we're not able to use the same complex thinking processes, decision making, thought processes, clarity, I mean, discrimination. We just get kind of bad at thinking, and maybe that's because the brain, it's super expensive to use, and so when we're trying to move fast, and our fueling is going down, and our body begins to understand that we are gonna maybe be in this for the long haul, and it'll start throwing us curveballs.
Steve Sisson:And I've talked about this in my work consistently. It's something I talk about all the time, but all that's happening at an inner experience, and when we get late in races from the five ks all the way up, every race has this issue. How are you dealing with your mental stuff? And people will say, I choked, or I wasn't ready mentally. What does that even mean?
Steve Sisson:And I know what it means. I have a lot of ideas about what it means, but I wonder if you know what it means. And so I just feel like the lane of the external, the exercise physiology, the energy systems, the science, the lifting, the protocols that are revolving around getting the body ready, there's a lot of people out there doing that, and they do it well. Yeah, there's some jackasses, some posers, some people doing it, but there's also people like Steve Magnuson, great coaches out there in the world that you can find that are absolute And Steve's really interested in the psychology part of it, but, you know, there are people out there that you can find to get lots of great info on the physiological part, who also think a little bit about the psychological part. But I'm more interested in the psychological part, and I'm only gonna provide the physiological part.
Steve Sisson:I do provide that for my athletes because they trust me, and I trust them, and I know I can get great performances. I'm good at doing that. But I'm most interested in what's going on, and I'm actually interested in what's going on with our dreams. I'm interested in what's going on around the ability to use psychological concepts like Jung's archetypes, or why our getting clearer on our pristine inner experience, what our inner experience is, what meaning is, why we care, what our world view is, where are you coming from, what is creativity, and what is beauty? I think these things, what is mastery, what is art, these things are so important.
Steve Sisson:And in my opinion, these are not supernatural. They are not mystical. They can be. And I don't think mystical is a bad word, but I know people say supernatural is a bad word. I will just say that I think these things are supernatural.
Steve Sisson:They are absolutely natural to us, but they are effects and skills and attributes that we have had in the past or we can develop in the future if we aren't so limited in our awareness and our attention. Our attention and our awareness, these two things I'm not going to go into today. I'm going do an entire episode at some point on attention and awareness, the differences and why they matter and what's important about them. Again, this has been a topic I've been wanting to write about and record about for years, and I just haven't had the right venue. I felt like if I got down that road with running on purpose, people would be like, how does this relate to running?
Steve Sisson:And if I went down that road with my athletes, they'd be like, okay, but how do we practice this? That's why I created the mission protocol, which is absolutely practicing attention and awareness and toggling between the two, but anyway, these are inner experiences, and I'm just so much more interested in this. And so the creativity and my own research and my own directionality is gonna go in that direction for the content I put out to the world. What I hope is that there'll be more and more people that pick up that baton, who want to either be interviewed by me, or go through this process with me, or talk with me, or discuss it. I'd love for anybody that's interested in this and would like guidance or would like to be with help, I'll have the ability to be able to do that with me at some level.
Steve Sisson:That won't be free because my time can't be free, but it'll be done in a way that's like, Hey, I know this is really important and are you interested in engaging in this way? And so this inner experience is something that I just feel like is so, so important. So why does it matter? Okay, let's just go through a few basic things. Alright?
Steve Sisson:And this, again, this is just an introductory episode. This is just me riffing and deciding that, hey, I'm just tired of not getting some ball in this court. But why does inner experience matter? Matter? Think about this.
Steve Sisson:What are your feelings? What are your emotions? What are your thoughts? Where do they come from? Think about it.
Steve Sisson:What are they and where do they come from? There's no way that you can tell me that they are not Well, would say the vast majority of the human population would categorize these as inner, part of their inner experience. And so, if they are, and let me ask you a question, do you think and your emotions and your thoughts have anything to do with it? I mean, what most people call the mental aspects of running, running and training and racing, As I said, I just kind of consider them this inner experience of running. And it's the subjective, the intrinsic, esoteric, hidden aspects of being human that interestingly enough are kind of what we most think of as real.
Steve Sisson:And I think that the understanding of the mechanisms and the processes of these inner experiences are underrated, grossly misunderstood, criminally sidelined in the typical intermediate and advanced running communities that I've been a part of for the last fifty years. So let's think about it. Like, is a feeling like nervousness more or less real to a runner than their watch or their shoes? Just take a second second to to consider consider this. This.
Steve Sisson:Some of you have or will be experiencing this particular feeling state, that of nervousness, with the plethora of races that are coming up this fall. So it's kind of a functional little thought experiment. So again, I just encourage you to take five minutes. Yeah, pause this audio and just consider. In the few hours prior to your race or comparing performance, whether it's happened or it's gonna happen, you will experience nervousness, and you will experience putting on your shoes.
Steve Sisson:Which is more real? Real? Think about it. By real, I mean present in your experience internally or externally. And nervousness is great for this, by the way.
Steve Sisson:I think it's the most conflicting feeling state, that we experience, especially going into races because it's equal parts. The excitement is equal parts distributed across the positive and negative poles for most of us. Some of us handle the nervousness more positively or negatively, but ultimately can see that the nervousness is feeding us and providing us an energy that we might not otherwise have. And those of us who are, who feel positively about it, we know that that sort of electricity, that sort of that sort of uncomfortableness, which might be considered negative, is really, really valuable. So, just take a second, if you haven't already, and think about that.
Steve Sisson:What's more real? The feelings of nervousness in your belly and your whole body, the shaky, cringey, I don't know how to say it, always feels like scattered and a lack of coherence and cohesion, the dryness of mouth, needing to go to the restroom repeatedly, the inability to concentrate, the lack of care that's available for the core people in your life, unless you're just really, really, really, really in love with them. So did you take time to think about it? Now, don't have an answer for you about which of the two is more real, your shoes or your nerves, but I do think you'll have to agree that in that exact moment, they are at least equal, equally real at some level. If you agree with me, then the inner experience of running is critical and crucial for your performance.
Steve Sisson:And should be considering it. And where are you going to get help with that? It's what I'm hoping this Run Gnosis project will be all about. So, now, there's a gap between where people feel about the inner and outer experience. This gap in terms of people feeling like the inner is less important and the outer is more important, the external is more important.
Steve Sisson:And I'll admit, I used to think that maybe there was a vast, nefarious conspiracy related to this. But now I just think it's cultural ignorance. I just think that, our materialist worldview, our physicalist worldview, the way that we've bought into a capitalist model, the way that that economical model has reframed our abilities to think and how we operate and how we make choices, the patterns that we select. On top of competitiveness of our culture and the misattribution of a survival of the fittest kind of approach. There's a whole bunch of reasons for it, but mostly I think they're all cultural.
Steve Sisson:But it doesn't really matter because while I'll be unpacking some of those things, hope, or depending on the interest and my own interest, where that will go, I am on a mission to bring more clarity and depth, to where these shadows and imaginary beings, that we call inner, have continued to lurk. So I was talking about why experience matters, thoughts, feelings, emotions, memory. A lot of times, an athlete will be talking with me about their preparation for a race, and they'll go back to a race that they ran in the past, and they'll be talking with me about that race and what happened and how it went by and all the things that happened, and they're not doing it from their notebook or a log in which they kept copious detailed databased things, they'll be sharing it with me as a memory, as an inner experience. And so you think it doesn't matter that all of your reflections around particular sessions and workouts? Sure, you'll go back and look at your Strava a little bit.
Steve Sisson:You'll go back and look at your data. In fact, in my mission protocol and my race strategy meetings, ask people to do those. I do think the extrinsic matters. I do think the data matters. The clearer we can get, the more real we can be about what actually happened is helpful, but that's not how we operate.
Steve Sisson:Memory is a psychological, experience. It's a story you're telling about what happened in the past that's framed by all kinds of different things, and so it's really important. So, while sometimes we talk about our body, and we're able to delineate my tendons and ligaments and bones, tendons, ligaments, and bones, we don't see. You might see your bones, but very rarely. Now your muscles, you see, but you don't see them literally.
Steve Sisson:You see them, you see with their functioning. You don't see your bones. So you're having an inner Yes, they're extrinsic. Yes, they're external, and you break it, you know it. You feel it.
Steve Sisson:You know it. You can see it, but you're having an inner experience of pain. The pain isn't extrinsic. It isn't external. In fact, we know from cognitive science and neuroscience that you can turn off the areas of your brain that actually are receiving those signals of pain.
Steve Sisson:And so, is pain internal or external? Are your bones, tendons, and ligaments internal or external? I do think they are external, I'm not trying to argue that they're not. Well, I might have an idealist ontology that I believe might be true. I also do know that we're actually seeing physical, and we do have the ability to do fMRIs and x rays, and we can see these things, blah blah blah.
Steve Sisson:I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that to denigrate or just not focus on the fact that there's inner experience around this is really crucial. I have an athlete that I work with. I have a huge amount of respect for her. She's in medical school, finishing up, and we had an argument a couple of weeks ago around this topic where she was injured, and I just asked her maybe she could communicate with her body and try to create a better intention and open up the mind space to allow for greater healing, and she just fundamentally thought that that wasn't gonna be a useful way of doing things.
Steve Sisson:And while I disagreed with her, I appreciate her point of view, and I do understand why she has that point of view. And I don't think she's less effective or Well, I think she might heal a little faster if she was open to that concept, but I might be wrong about it. But I'm willing to explore it, and I think that that's one of the things that's most challenging for a lot of us is we aren't given permission by our cultural constructs. That's our education, our scientific system, the way that we process and value empirical data over sensorial data, or what we call the acquired data from our inner experiences are lesser valued. While I do think that they maybe aren't the way that we do the best science or the best medicine, that they are still pathways in which we ought to be able to explore.
Steve Sisson:And so I do think it's really, really important when we think about what we're talking about with a complex nervous system, which we don't have a full, complete understanding of. We do think we know how it works, we're pretty clear on the mechanisms and the way it operates and what it looks like. We're not entirely sure what it does. We certainly know that our brain has way more power than we actually use for it, and that it's computing data that's way beyond what any supercomputer could ever do, and it's an organic natural system that came about from an evolutionary process and is sitting in this tiny little space of our skull. Shit's weirder and stranger than we could ever imagine, and to me, the inner experience of running is the area we need to spend time exploring, and whether or not that's of value to you right now, I hope you'll consider my thoughts and ideas around this, the directionality I go, the way I might explore this over the coming years in the Rungnosis project to be something you find interesting.
Steve Sisson:Okay, so I'm gonna wrap up here. Again, as I said, I have a few notes but I was really kind of extemporaneously riffing. But I do wanna end on one note. And this is my last and final, today, my last and final argument. And again, I'm not saying we don't have the external experience.
Steve Sisson:I'm just arguing for us to give some time, effort, and energy, which many people already recognize they need to do because they talk to me about mental training. They want to know about mental training. They want to know how they can be better prepared for the psychological aspects of what happens on race day. So I know this matters to a great number of people, but the space that we have to go in is number one, currently occupied by what they call sports psychologists who I think are basically falling down on the job. Not that every one of them are, but I have very few sports psychology books that I refer to.
Steve Sisson:In fact, at this point in time, I feel like you're way better doing it yourself or doing it with a guide than you are to do it with a sports psychologist. They're just narrowly constrained, not willing to open up to the spiritual, the soul level, the mythical levels that are important for narrativizing and telling stories, and the inability to see internal family systems or other kinds of multi ways of being that in one are sitting in one person. So anyway, I'll stop. I'll just keep riffing on that if I need to. But I just think that we know we need it, but I'm not sure that there's great guides that we have.
Steve Sisson:And so what I'm trying to do is to learn how to become a guide for that. Do I think I am right now? I think I'm okay at it, but goddamn, I wanna learn more, and I wanna be badass, right? Want And to be really good at this, and so I'm gonna start by doing explorations and reading what others have to say about it, talking about my experience myself, my experience with my athletes as a coach, but more importantly, the part that's most scary about the Run Noses project is I'm gonna be running myself, trying to prepare for a race or two, failing, succeeding, getting hurt, falling back, but being willing to keep a continuous record, an online audio record of my experiences with that. That's my commitment to the project.
Steve Sisson:I hope I'll stay with it, but that's my commitment. The reason is because, again, my final reason for this, my final argument is that I think that while we all have bodies, we tend to act as if we are not our bodies. While we understand that we have legs, arms, heads, hearts, kidneys, feet, plantar fascia, IT bands, piriformis, we tend to more readily associate who we are not with our bodies, but with a concept that really relatively new. It's only 200, 300 years old. It's only been really explicated and really worked hard on as a science and or humanities project for the last 150 or so, and that's the self, what we would call the self, now kind of formulated into the ego or your personality.
Steve Sisson:Then when we have inner experiences, we usually experience them as emotions or feelings or pains. And so I think I would argue that we almost all, if you think about it deeply, you probably associate who you are more with a concept. Even as you look at yourself in the mirror, you're reflecting on that's you, but you're more relating to yourself around that inner experience of how it looks and how you feel about what it looks like. So at both the subtle, and I would argue even the gross levels, we're experiencing our bodies primarily from the inside. And yeah, we have our feelings and emotions, But the place that we absolutely, nearly to a person, unless you've done deep, deep, deep psychological and or spiritual work, you consider yourself your thoughts, and what's coming up inside your head around your thoughts, what's showing up inside your inside, wherever that is, that you call a thought, is an inner experience.
Steve Sisson:If it is and we are primarily thoughts or we primarily associate ourself with performance? Shouldn't we think about that at a minimum if it's where we're coming from a human perspective? So again, again, this is why I'm transitioning from Running on Purpose to Run Gnosis over the coming year. It's to highlight and focus on the inner experience, my inner experience, the experience of others. I'm calling it rhinosis.
Steve Sisson:Gnosis is the word for experiential knowledge or things you know in your body, what you know viscerally, experientially, not what you think, consider, conceptualize, but what you know. And that's my guiding purpose, my guiding light. What is it to know myself? And the project will be how do I know myself through running? How do I know myself as a person and then how do I relate that to running, both as a runner, as I am running, but also as a person who identifies as a runner and also as a person who may or may not be able to run because of injuries or other challenges, which I know, based on my experience of thirty years of coaching and fifty years of running is something that's really, really debilitating and a deep inner experience that's so challenging.
Steve Sisson:Remember her. So anyway, that's my pitch. That's my story. That's where I'm coming from. Probably.
Steve Sisson:I hope you'll join me. Listen here next week for more on this topic, and again, I'm gonna keep this under the running on purpose, umbrella until it's time to switch it over to RunGnosis but then eventually everything will be under RunGnosis. Whether that's a different RSS feed or not, I'll give you full instructions but don't worry about the logistics. I'll make sure it's clear. There will be a Substack associated with this.
Steve Sisson:If you don't know what Substack is, do a Google. It's basically an online resource for writers and creatives to share their creative content. It has a very quality It's like a Patreon for writers basically and creatives. But it has a really cool podcast feature which will allow me to work more on my writing, is something I really want to do. I've got a goal of writing a book in 2025, more on that in the future.
Steve Sisson:But if I'm gonna be a writer, need to write, and Substack is a great way to get writing out to the whole world. Basically think of it as a blog or a newsletter that goes out and has its own algorithms to try to keep people to get people to who people need to see. So it tries to get you to you to read and experience the experience of writers and creatives who you're most vibe with. And so I'm gonna be using that. It'll have the option to it'll all be free, but it'll also have the option to kick some money my way for those of you who have been listening to the Keep Going or the Running On Purpose podcast or have always valued what I do but have never been really ready to pull the trigger on being coached by me, there'll be opportunities for you to kick me a couple bucks here and there, either on a monthly basis or on occasion, if that's what you'd like to do.
Steve Sisson:And if not, then of course, don't do so. That's totally fine. So I appreciate all of you for listening. If you got to this point, then you are a true believer. You're a diehard.
Steve Sisson:And yeah, this is for you. Godspeed, my friends. Godspeed.
