Sound of Body, Weak of Mind

I have only ever run one marathon. The 2009 Rock'n'Roll Phoenix Marathon. I failed spectacularly. My goal time was 3:10 and a Boston Marathon qualification. After mostly walking the last 10k, I limped across the finish line in 3:35. Shortly thereafter I ditched the road scene and started running trails, competing in a few ultra marathons before quitting running altogether and getting fat. 

In moments of self-flattery I describe my transition to trail ultras as a more primal switch to running for the hell of it and to see how far I could go. Oprah ran a road marathon, for God's sake. At the start in Phoenix I lined up with people who intended to walk the entire thing. I was clearly above that. 

In reality, though, I had it handed to me by a road marathon. I left, licking my wounds, gratifying myself with the enhanced social clout that came with the ultra. Everyone knows the marathon distance and can probably guess at a good marathon time. No one knows how in the hell long it is supposed to take to run 50 miles. They are just impressed that you did it at all (even though I was slow and weak and would still have come short of my goals at the road marathon). 

But what has haunted me persistently since that bad race in January of 2009 is the question of what went wrong that day. My training was incredible: I regularly cranked out sub-1:35 half marathons in Saturday morning training runs, broke 19:00 minutes in a 5k, 40 minutes in a 10k, and my 20 mile training runs came in around 2:20. In other words, I was primed for success. Yet I crumbled.

There were physical issues. I have a finicky gastrointestinal system and when taxed in long runs it is a crapshoot (get it?) as to how it will turn out for me. However, what haunts me isn't the fact that physically I broke down, but the question of whether or not the breakdown was purely physical. What haunts me is that I toed the line that morning strong of body and weak of mind. That I simply wasn't ready to shrug off the pain of those last, grueling miles. That, despite being fast in training, my training itself was plagued by runs where I ran well as long as I felt well and ran poorly as soon as I came under duress. In other words, I was never forced to grit it out a training run, and therefore was unprepared for the day that grit was required.

Fitzgerald talks about the ways in which we conflate actual real physical fatigue with simply our perceived effort. We mistake feeling bad for actually doing bad. He writes: "perception of effort. . . is the primary source of the discomfort that causes athletes to slow down or quit when they hit the wall in races." We are not actually physically at our limits, as is amply displayed by the fact that we feel immediately better once we stop expending the effort, i.e. once our perception of effort returns to a low level. Fitzgerald's conclusion resonates: "Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition."

My physical fitness should have allowed me to run a great race: I was lean, fast, and confident. However, without having stretched my mental fitness during training, I was unable to get my body to respond when I found myself in the unfamiliar territory of mental duress. I buckled, and none of the fast, easy training runs in the world would prepare me for what I needed: the mental power to tell my body it was just fine. And that is something to keep in mind, so to speak, as I try to recover what I lost when I gave up my best habit.

Mind With Matter: A Brief Lesson in Prepositions and a Word on Athletic Training

As an English teacher I am by nature concerned with the way we frame words. The way in which we speak matters. For example, during our chapel lesson at my school a few weeks ago, the young man who was speaking made a disconcerting verbal lapse repeatedly: asked to speak on the subject of worshiping (God) with our bodies he made the linguistic error of dropping both the implied direct object (God) and the quite necessary preposition (with). His subject, therefore, became "worshiping our bodies" (caveat lector: in case you have already tuned out, know that the actual content of this post is wildly divergent from a grammar lesson). 

While this was a humorous (for those whose level of attention caught the error) and quite, I am assuming, unintentional misspeak the broader lesson holds: the way we frame things matter, the way we say things has consequences. My post title is a play on the oft-heard mantra "mind over matter," which has been used to will countless thousands through seemingly endless windsprints, laps around a track or in a pool, and hideous sets of lifting plates of metal off your chest. The idea, of course, is that our mind (our wills, our grit, our mental toughness) is somehow separate from our matter (our bodies, our capabilities, our physical strength). This idea is prima facie ludicrous. No amount of mind will allow me to run an Olympic-qualifying marathon time or lift a ridiculous piece of metal weighing 300 pounds off my chest. But we repeat it. Grit it out, boys. Rest is for sissies. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Grrrr.

What the opposition of mind to matter obscures is the fact that without substantial matter mere mind is grievously incompetent for some tasks. What it also obscures, and from quite another angle, is that our minds and our bodies are simply not separated from each other in the least. The West, by and large and in innumerable areas of life, still is besieged by a Platonic dualism that separates mind/body, soul/spirit, physical/material. But mind over matter is actually closer to the truth than simple biological determinism. Some people are better competitors than others; some are simply able to will themselves through pain in a way that similarly trained athletes cannot. This much is undeniable. As an athlete who best fits in the Clydesdale category of racers, I have whooped people much fitter than me (from the outside). Likewise, I have had it handed to me by people I could no doubt take to task in a wrestling match. What gives? Why are some people able to double down in effort while redlining and others start walking? Why do we separate mind and body, giving primacy to either one or the other?

It is this basic misunderstanding that Matt Fitzgerald counters in his new work How Bad Do You Want It? Fitzgerald's work could actually smack at first glance as further strengthening of mind over matter drill instructor aphorisms, but Fitzgerald is instead promoting a newer psychobiological school of endurance athleticism. Mind, body joined. Our brain guiding our bodies. Our bodies responding to our conscious mental activity. I started reading the book this evening. It is going to be hard to put down. I want to be better. I want to run faster when I want to run slower. I want to want it more than I want comfort and easy-breathing.