The mind-body connection: Push it (or not)

I would bet that everyone with a decent level of fitness has had those days when running felt so amazingly easy it took on a Zen-like quality. My mind has never felt so entirely at peace as on the Fife coastal path on a clear day. The usual buzz of thoughts, of tasks undone, problems unsolved, melts away and there is just the sea and the sky and the ground moving smoothly beneath my feet. This is as close to pure meditation as you can get without candles.

Yet it has taken me years to realise that I run best when my mind and body work together, not when I use my mind to overpower my body, to force it to move faster and for longer than it ‘thinks’ is a good idea. It is true that in order to improve as a runner you have to get quite close to the edge, to push out one more rep when your lungs are burning and you feel like there’s a monkey on your back. But it is also true that there is a really fine line between success and failure, between improving as a runner and getting injured.

Be your own harbour master

I missed a month of marathon training because I didn’t listen to my body. I had started a new medication for the arthritis that had made the mastocytosis worse. My resting heart rate was 20+bpm higher than usual. The amount of ALT (a liver enzyme) in my blood was doubling by the fortnight, suggesting that my body was not coping with the new medication. It was still within the normal range so I wasn’t aware of this at the time, but whether the normal range, but rising, is okay for someone running over 100km a week is another issue. I run my easy runs and fartlek by heart rate (to prevent overtraining!). The day I picked up the injury that would put me out for 4 weeks my morning easy run was over a minute-a-mile slower at my usual ‘easy’ heart rate. Two red flags. In the evening I went to the track and hit my maximum heart rate on the first rep whilst also being 10s slower (over 800m) than usual. Three red flags. I felt ‘off’. Four red flags. There is absolutely no point in using tools to prevent overtraining if you completely ignore them. The mind can be an astonishing tool (the last 5K of a marathon, for example, is all in the head) but it can also be destructive if misapplied. There is a difference between using the mind and body together and using them at the same time. That evening at the track it was the role of the mind to spot the red flags and make a rational decision: yes, pain at training is normal, but in the presence of four red flags it was absolutely not.

If you were riding a horse and it felt unresponsive, tired or lame you would pull up. You would not take it off to do interval training. Only you can be responsible for your body because you alone know how it feels. 

I have had to rethink how to work with both mind and body, to not set them up in opposition to each other. It is harder when there are other factors like mastocytosis and arthritis in the mix but it is not impossible. On a practical point I’ve reconfigured my training diary to raise the red flags more clearly. If I enter a resting heart rate value over 59 that cell turns red. If my Forerunner 620 claims I need more than 48hrs to recover from a session, that cell turns red. If I have fewer than 8 hours sleep the cell turns red. If my perceived energy level is less than 5/10, that cell turns red.

Ultimately though I hope to learn to get my mind and body working together, but not in some antagonist adult-child relationship where one whinges and the other ignores it or colludes. But this means not only learning to read – and listen to – the body, but also understanding how to use the mind effectively, to recognise when it is helping and when not. I know for instance that there will be moments, or miles, during the London Marathon when my body will hurt from fatigue and feel like it cannot go on, and in that case it will be the role of my mind to step in and reassure it that I’ve finished 6 marathons and all of them had their moments of darkness. But in order to do that I need to be able to get my mind to focus on the positive and not take the feelings of the body and agree that the task ahead is indeed insurmountable.

An annotated version of the official marathon map!

If you have read Dr Steve Peter's The Chimp Paradox (and everyone should!) this is a practical application of his three-part brain theory: my Chimp will tell me I can't go on, the Computer will give me examples of previous occasions when I have felt the same but carried on and the Human part of my brain will listen to the Chimp and Computer and decide, on balance, to keep going.

When I had a session with sports psychologist Dominic Clarke (his website) last year he told me how important it was to prepare for the worst. I didn't really understand this at first, tending towards creative optimism, but I get it now. Practically, this means preparing for the insanely long toilet queues (although I am told they aren't bad at the Championship start) so you don't get stressed before the start, and thinking through how you are going to respond if you are running too fast or too slow, or you get so tired you don't want to go on. It means accepting that you might get caught up in bottlenecks (Cutty Sark) or elbowed in the head (more likely in Berlin in my experience).

Because I was only able to run 7 miles in February, because I have mastocytosis and early inflammatory arthritis, but more importantly, because in a marathon anything can happen, I will shoot for a time as close to three hours as I can but be happy with sub-3.15.