"[Effort] is the sense of not having the faintest indulgence toward any form of entertainment. We have to give something up." -Chogyam Trungpa, "Heart of the Buddha".
"Laziness also manifests as busyness. Speediness is laziness when we use it as a way to avoid working with our minds."-Sakyong Mipham, "Turning the Mind into an Ally."
Chogyam Trungpa called the Buddha's Third Foundation of Mindfulness (Effort) "perhaps the most important" for the meditator. This is equally true for the awake runner. Effort is the glue that makes true mindfulness practice possible. So much of what drives neurotic mind is speed, the quest for "the next thing". This drive is often glorified in Calvinist culture as virtuous hard work. "Git 'er done" is the mantra of the harried machine age doer.
Without mindfulness of effort, running as meditation is impossible. But just as runners are well suited to inhabit and work with the previous two foundations, effort and running are closely related. That this is obvious from a literal standpoint only underscores the simple elegance of the deeper truth.
And there are various styles of expressing a relationship with effort. It is instructive to work with children, particularly middle school cross country runners. One would expect such an energetic group to need to be told to "slow down", that surely the same creatures that bounce against the walls of American shopping malls would need a good harness when being introduced to running. Quite the opposite is true. Very young people are often much slower than the actual limitation of their bodies. They are sleepy in their effort, unsure of what direction to even sight the barrel when aiming for their own limits.
Adults, and certainly most adults who take up running, suffer from the other extreme: rampant speed expressed as an inability to run within their aerobic threshold for much longer than 5 or 10 minutes. This is not a deficit in fitness. Rather it is a symptom of how desperate our neurotically conditioned minds are for relief. This manifests as distraction and impatience, some thing that walks hand in hand with the whole panoply of mental habits that create suffering. Running mindfully is very much about waiting, ironically.
The practice of running with mindfulness of effort can be best approached by using a heart rate monitor. This may seem surprisingly technological in reference to running meditation, but these gadgets are great tools for gaining some understanding of our exertion, something most novice (and some expert) runners actually don't really know how to experience.
The object of using a monitor is to become familiar with a sustainable level of exertion. Most people who start using a monitor find that they have been running at a level of exertion that is at or beyond what is called the "aerobic threshold". Running like this is uncomfortable and frustrating when done mindlessly, meaning that when we allow our exertion to get too great, our mind becomes busy and agitated and we struggle. Running with proper exertion means an absence of struggle.
How to run with a heart rate monitor:
1. Determine your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 240.
2. Determine your ideal training pace by multiplying this new number by 0.75.
3. Use the heart rate monitor while running and stay within 2 or 3 beats per minute of your ideal pace. The pace should feel comfortable to the point where you could carry on a simple conversation with someone.
As you work with the monitor, you will begin to know what different levels of exertion feel like, mainly as a sensation of your own beating heart, and when you begin to go beyond your ideal pace. Transition from using the gadget for reading your heart beats per minute to running without the monitor and mastering the ability to simply being aware of the level of exertion you are putting forth at any given moment. This will open an entirely new richness to your running routine, allowing you to truly ride your exertion like a skilled jockey rides a horse.
The heart is not wired to our "feeling" nervous system, so perceiving the heart's level of exertion is not centralized in the same way that we feel our feet striking the ground. Rather it is a "whole body" sensation, and a subtle one at that. In using a heart monitor, you will notice how easy it is to go beyond your ideal range. The "creeping" increase in exertion is the reason so many novice runners become discouraged, and why many non runners think the activity is unappealing. How many of us, as new runners, or as experienced runners who have taken a block of time off, have had the sudden desire to stop and double over? This is because the transition from a comfortable exertion level to one that is unsustainable is largely unperceived.
Running without struggle is actually very challenging because of the level of mindfulness it requires. To the inexperienced, it may appear that struggle is everywhere while running, either the physical struggle of gasping for air while running over one's sustainable level of effort, or the constant effort it takes to keep one's pace in check. This dynamic is a core part of training the mind in classical mindfulness meditation. To go beyond struggle, the practitioner must first become familiar with struggle, to know what it feels like and to make peace with it.
The Buddha's instruction for dealing with the inevitable struggle one must confront when learning to practice is to apply great gentleness to the process. This is the Buddha's way of letting us not make his instructions into ambitious projects, where we drown out the essence of his advice with the entrenched habits of self criticism and ambition.
The running meditation example of gentleness is to simply notice when we have let our pace become too quick, and in that noticing to come back to our experience, be it seeing digits displayed on our heart monitor, or the first sensations of breathing and heart rate begin to run away from us.
Mindlessly letting our pace creep up happens because we have let our attention drift into our discursive mind. Why do we do this? Because the present moment and its simplicity are foreign to our carefully constructed expectations. This manifests as boredom, agitation and distraction.
Holding a truly "comfortable" pace means not indulging the urge to cover your boredom and restlessness with the entertainment of charging forward. Running faster, if done without care and intention, is like our thinking minds-- it is where we go to hide from the present moment. We want to "crank" things up. We actually want to struggle, on a habitual level, because it is familiar.
The task of meditation, including running meditation, is to familiarize ourselves with the absence of struggle. For runners, this is maintaining a comfortable, consistent level of effort. There are no magical realms for us to be transported to in this practice, because it is based in relaxation and utter simplicity.
This simplicity is what the Buddha called "mindfulness of mind". How we bring mindfulness of mind to running is the topic of the next chapter.
