Issue 2: An Inner Map

In episode two, Ryan Lynch and Ryan Willms pick up some threads from the first episode, reflecting on pain and pleasure in endurance pursuits, before diving into a work-in-progress map for exploring the inner world through movement. Following the mind into the emotional body, into the physical body, and the different ways these inner dialogues can emerge, what is the point of exploring this map and the benefits of space and differentiation in sport and the human experience. You cannot separate what is One, but as the Buddha noted below, it is important to remember that the map is not the terrain.

* Mental Body: Who is speaking to whom? I am vs You are.

* Emotional Body: What am I feeling? How am I relating to “others”, as the experiencer?

* Physical Body: Our primal physicality, our cells, our nervous system. Our feet on the ground, the smell in the air, the sound of the birds. How are we relating to Mother Earth, as part of the environment, not separate from it.

“The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”

—The Buddha (From the Lankavatara Sutra)

PROTOCOL: Running as a Spiritual Practice

By Ryan Willms

Running as a Spiritual Practice is something I’ve been exploring the last couple of years with more intention. While running can be meditative, I don’t believe that it is meditation. But through moving contemplation, we can turn our running experience into something deep and meaningful. In this video, I share the 4-step protocol that I’ve been experimenting. The process requires curiosity and openness; we see what works for and refine, and be curious about how our running practice can take you deeper into your Self, body, and Universe.

* Microdose (20-40 minutes before run, be conservative to begin)

* Activating Breathwork (5-10 minutes of active breathing)

* Run (drop in, curious, feeling, exploring, a question to ask)

* Shavasana (lay down, let go, recover, listen, experience whatever is present)

ESSAY: Pursue nothing, Surrender to all

By Helena Postigo

At the beginning of this year, after a few weeks of feeling a strange pain in my right leg that I couldn’t pinpoint where it came from, an MRI confirmed that I had a grade 4 stress fracture in my femur, probably one of the most uncommon bones to injure, given that it is the strongest and longest bone in the body.

The injury forced me to give up my spot in the London Marathon, which would have been my fourth marathon and my attempt at going sub-3 after a very bittersweet result of 3 hours and 1 minute at the Boston Marathon last year. And despite how frustrating and hard it was, months before, during my peak training phase, something inside me knew that one day I would have to face the reality that progress in sport is not a statistical line that goes endlessly up and up the more you train, but a mysterious and unpredictable journey where a pitfall can happen out of nowhere at any time.

Having centred my identity around running over the last two years, finding myself all of a sudden incapable of practising the sport triggered some uncomfortable questions about who I was. I found myself lacking a purpose, not having a race to train for or a tough weekly run to write a Track&Record newsletter about. I found myself lonely, not being able to spend time with the community and friends I had built around the sport. I found myself guilty, knowing how much I had shaped my diet around my training, and how toxically correlated my food consumption was with the amount of exercise I would do. I found myself full of questions and doubts, trying to fill the gap that running used to fill in my life. I found myself facing the uncomfortable position of accepting things as they are, existing without seeking or chasing, presence after all.

Luckily, my interest in exercise has always been wider than just moving one foot after another, and the injury gave me the chance to focus on some things that I had always wanted to do more: swimming and cycling.

Through swimming, I found the mental clarity I used to get from solo runs, but also the excitement and novelty you experience with a new sport, when every day you get a small sense of progress and you don’t judge yourself so harshly because you have little knowledge of what is “good” or “bad”, “fast” or “slow”.

Through cycling, I found space to gather with friends again, to spend my weekends having silly conversations and getting lost on the roads instead of getting trapped journaling through my own thoughts.

Somehow, unintentionally, I was preparing myself for the triathlon I had signed up for at the beginning of the year, a goal I have had since I was a kid and one that I had been finding excuses not to pursue over the last few years.

When the physio gave me the green light to start running in May, as well as confirming that I could do the triathlon, instead of suddenly obsessing over the race and the training as I would have done in the past, I simply continued my training without doing anything crazy, aiming to get to the start line with one single purpose: having fun.

Commonly, “having fun” is the typical form of self-sabotage amateur athletes resort to, a coping mechanism to avoid facing the possibility of a race going wrong or not getting the result they had in mind, but also a mechanism that stops us from truly having faith in what we could be capable of if we surrendered to the goal we initially had.

But yes, this time the goal was no other than that (... and crossing the finish line, I guess). Nevertheless, there were still nerves and tension before the race, the kind of nerves you get when you do something for the first time.

The growth I experienced during the months I couldn’t run made me comfortable with the idea of not having anything to aim for; it translated fear into excitement, insecurity into ease. There was no longer a pursuit of something, or something to prove; all that was left was a state of play, joy and a true and honest love for the practice of sport.

DESIGN: Three Layers of DIALOGUES are One

This shirt was designed for the upcoming Run Retreat and taking the themes of DIALOGUES into consideration. We dive deeper into the layers in this issue’s podcast episode above, but the idea is that, through movement, we can bring our awareness to the three layers of dialogue. It follows the path of the subtle bodies- Mental, Emotional, Physical and how each connects with our Self and our environment. If you look into the Gene Keys, it also mirrors the inner path of IQ, EQ, and SQ, as a spiral journey leading to our Heart. I’m excited to share the shirt with our community this weekend, and it was interesting for me how the design of this shirt has actually led to a useful and functional inner map discussed in the episode this month.

The shirt is designed with Pat Palacio, and limited quantities are available through seeding at our upcoming runs.

PLAYLIST: Natural High

Find your runner’s high with this playlist by Guillaume Berg featuring a selection of ‘tunnel’ music. Starting off at 118bpm and working up to a smooth 123bpm, Natural High will help you find a state of mushin for your next run.

COMMUNITY: Monthly DIALOGUES

We have started our monthly DIALOGUES in Los Angeles. Each month we are running and riding together. We’ll explore different themes in performance, recovery, mind and body. Some workouts will be on the road, the trail, some will integrate intensity, some ease. This weekend we’re sharing the experience of 10km on a flat trail and the polarity of hard and easy. Next month we’re partnering with 2XU for a Long Beach Half/marathon fine tuning session, where we’ll speak about racing mindset and fueling as well.

Follow Mindful Endurance Program on Strava for updates.

INDEX Things I learned this week

* Nutrition: I’d been taking Collagen peptides or powder after my workouts, mixing them into my smoothies. And this can be a general protein boost, but I found out that it misses a lot of the unique benefits of collagen. By taking it 30-45 minutes before the workout and mechanical loading, the collagen can really be utilized for strengthening the tendons, ligaments and structural pieces of the body.

* Injury Prevention: There has been a general ‘rule’ in running, not to increase your weekly volume by more than 10%, or else you will be at much greater risk of injury. And now there are newer studies that say its less about your weekly volume, but more about a single run being too long or hard. It says that your longest run now, should not be more than 10% longer than your longest run in the last 30 days. This makes sense to me experientially as well, and is super helpful insight as I dig into week 1 of my marathon training for CIM.

* Listen: Wu Wei – A practice, simple and helpful explanation of how to apply the practice of Wu Wei in our lives, meditation. Un-conditioning the urgency to ‘do’ is not as easy as it sounds, but it yields peace, surrender and alignment with the Way. But the more we can drop into this space of Being, everything happens without our ‘doing’.