Race brain: flow and the art of running

Calm, float, detachment, immersion.  One foot in front of the other, again and again, in the predawn mist.  Given that it's been many years since I was last a competitive athlete, and in a different sport, I'd forgotten what race brain is like.

From the points race at the 1995 collegiate national track cycling championships, I'm left with a vivid memory of sweeping from turn 3 into turn 4 just before my teammate Thia and I successfully attacked and stayed away for the rest of the race.  I knew the crowd was roaring, but I couldn't hear them, and I didn't see them either.  I didn't feel any pain or fatigue.  The shape of the race in front of me carved itself into my brain.  I felt both a hundred miles away and everywhere in the pack at once.  My eyes found my teammate's.  Everything was still for a moment.  And then we jumped.

I call that "race brain."  It never operates during training, when I'm often subject to fatigue, mental reservations and self-doubt (I don't think I can make it!), random pains, distraction, you name it.  I almost never have the "perfect" training session that I've heard other athletes talk about.  On the bike, I used to struggle up hills.  On my feet, I struggle to complete a 14-mile run at 9:30.

But put me in a race, and suddenly my everyday brain flips off and my race brain comes online.  Race brain is exceptionally calm, in a strange way both removed from the immediate environment and preternaturally aware of it.  Race brain calculates pack placement, looks for holes to move up, monitors heart rate and breathing, evaluates pains (race brain somehow knew that the sharp calf pain I felt at about mile 5 of the SF half-marathon would resolve if I backed off a bit on Lincoln Hill, and remained unconcerned), reminds me to take water at the stops, reassures me that my arm warmers alone are enough to defeat the fog and wind on the Golden Gate Bridge before dawn even though I'm shivering.  Under the influence of race brain, I ran a 1:40:58 first-half SF marathon and took second in my division, in my second half marathon ever, and almost never felt out of breath.  That's not to say I didn't work hard:  it was a very difficult race, and I'm not sure I could have gone any faster.  But it felt controlled and smooth.  Race brain was in charge.

 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a more elegant term for race brain: he calls it flow.  The "flow" state is characterized by immersion, absorption, and complete attention to the moment.  It resembles mindfulness practice.  Faced with a very difficult task, you must focus, engage creativity, and reject fear, even when fear feels like an insurance policy.

I remember what it was like to let go of fear on the bike.  Bicycle racing is not for the faint of heart.  It's dangerous, sometimes extremely so, and to keep yourself in one piece until the finish-line sprint takes self-possession and a good dose of calm.  For me, the key was not to think about it: "don't look where you don't want to go."  That's not to say that I didn't think about technique, pack placement, trajectory, and line; you have to think about that stuff to avoid crashing in corners and flying off cliffs.  But you have to transform a lot of that into subconscious calculation, reserving the conscious brain for several dimensions of strategy.  And then the conscious body just feels, and deeply, the joy of efficient movement.  It feels as close to flying as we get in this world.

Letting go of fear is really different in running, but you still have to do it.  Certainly, you can't crash, and we may feel relief in that.  But on the other hand, unlike cycling, in running you can't coast; you get no rest.  That means if you miscalculate and go out too fast, you can be cooked for miles.  But if you go out too slow, you've lost your chance at peak performance.  So letting go of fear means letting race brain take over and tell you how fast to go.  No fear--just you, flying and flying.

Now if only I could figure out how to access flow in training...let me know if you have any hints!

In memoriam William Whelen Biddle, 1930-2012

I read this remembrance of my friend Bill at his memorial service, St. Mark's Cathedral, July 21, 2012.

            I met Bill in a way that will be instantly recognizable to all of you who know Bill as an adventurer of the mind.  Bill showed up in an upper-division Romantic poetry course that I was teaching at the University of Washington in 1996 and proceeded to entrance everyone with his enthusiasm for George Gordon, Lord Byron.  When we got to that part of the syllabus, I’d arrive in class, get everyone started, and then hand it over to Bill, who would stand up and declaim the day’s Byron reading to a classroom full of rapt teens and twenty-somethings.  It took me about an hour after meeting him to realize that Bill was the truest enthusiast of the imagination that I would ever know.

            I think one of the clearest signs of that enthusiasm was Bill’s utter authenticity.  He strove to uncover and understand the heart of everything he truly loved.  It wasn’t enough for him to just read Byron.  Bill wanted to walk where Byron walked, striving with every step to understand the workings of the poet’s mind.  Bill actually attended conferences all over the world where he delivered his own papers about Byron.  That is the act of a true enthusiast, and what’s amazing is that Bill extended the very same enthusiasm to his pursuit of vintage Mustangs, single-malt scotch, wooden canoes, cross-country skiing, the weather, and, most of all, the hundreds of people in his immediate and extended circles.

            I think Bill loved people–all kinds of people–more than he loved anything else beyond his family.  I was constantly amazed by how instantaneously Bill could make a true friend.  Everyone and everything interested him.  When a friend old or new would mention a new pursuit to him, his eyes would just light up and he’d lean forward and demand to know every last detail.  And then he would remember them

Because Bill truly knew how to pay attention.  He missed nothing, particularly when it came to his natural surroundings and the people that he loved.   John Hanron describes the way Bill saw the “incredible, infinite beauty within each tiny flower” that John brought with him on his visits.  All of us know how closely Bill listened to us, how he shared our joys and sorrows.  “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” Mary Oliver writes in her poem “The Summer Day.”  “I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed. ... Tell me, what else should I have done? ... Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

            Bill chose to live his wild and precious life in exploration and learning, in the company of friends and nature, in the meadows of the Methow, on the trails of the Pacific Northwest, in the streets of Paris, on the isle of Skye.  He loved, he explored, he never stopped learning.  He followed the vein of his wild and precious life into its very heart.

            I close with the conclusion of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Bill’s poem if ever there was one.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

To run like water

And I want to tell you something about the elites on my team: they run like water. Not like loud surf, or like rushing springtime snowmelt. No--more like the quiet summer run of water over creekstones--the kind that veils its own remarkable speed within a disciplined quiet. You don't realize how fast until you look again, with more focused attention. It is a gift in many ways.

Consolatio naturae

     In Consolatio philosophiae, the great medieval thinker Boethius considered the mysterious presence of evil in the midst of a world governed by the ultimate good--God.  In prison awaiting trial and eventual execution for treason while he wrote the book, he had occasion to meditate on the nature of happiness, the fickleness of fate, and the presence and faithfulness of God.  Seekers will not find happiness in wealth or worldly fame, he wrote; happiness lies only within the heart.

     Philosophy perhaps offers less comfort in the modern world, disrupted as it is by tweets and blogs and constant emails and the never-ending bombardment by data.  Though we all are destined for the same end, we have so little time to wonder about our own significance--or lack of it--and so little opportunity to meditate on what happiness is to be found here.  In the midst of life, we are in death.  Boethius knew it.  And it means that striving for happiness and peace is our ultimate end, however complicated and data-driven the modern path.

     In one era of my life, I spent all my time thinking about literature and philosophy.  I can't do that anymore, so lately I have substituted consolatio naturae--the comfort of nature--in the form of a daily run through Golden Gate Park.  This simple act has a way of calling me back to myself.  I strive for calm; I so often fail.  But in the early morning sunlight, the towering redwoods cast the sun into a haze of taffeta rays that looks exactly like the presence of God feels.  The mist breathed out by meadows seems to embody their abiding peace.  And sometimes the fog blankets the park in an audible quiet.

     But the cathedral of trees, blessed by the misty sun, most calls out the presence of God to me during my everyday ritual.  I am alone, uninterrupted, running: the most basic and grounded motion the human body can perform.  And daily I am reminded that the chaos of the mundane has no power to blot out our ultimate identity with the natural world, or the peace that lies at its heart.

Defying gravity

In the past two weeks, I've kicked up my running a notch from long runs at a mellow pace to speed work at Kezar Stadium.  As I posted previously, sprinting made me unreasonably happy--giggly-happy--and that was surprising.  While I often felt that way on my bike when I was racing, I didn't think I'd feel that way on my feet.

I remember how I felt when my bike was an extension of my body, when riding was more comfortable than walking, when flying down a mountain descent or around the corner of a track in a full sprint felt perfectly right and perfectly terrifying in the same moment.  Sprinting out of a turn on a precipitous descent is one of the very best feelings I've ever had, as if body and bike were both following my command, and that order said SPEED.  Just go faster!  And that is all.

Why was speed, albeit sometimes death-defying, so alluring?  Perhaps because I have never felt so completely alive.  All energy, all focus has to be concentrated right there, right then, to maintain any control.  That kind of speed defies the siren song of gravity, but it also allows you, just for a second, to brush the face of God.

Sprinting on my feet, of course, doesn't involve the same death-defying thrill.  It's also unlikely to land me in the emergency room--a feat that cycling actually accomplished.  So why is it so reminiscent?  I think it's two things.  First, the entire concentration in the moment.  While you're sprinting, you don't have a family, or a job, or really any responsibilities.  Much as my complicated life grounds me in this world--and as thankful as I am for all that I have--sometimes I want to defy its gravity.  So I run, fast--not by objective standards, but in my frame of reference, it's as much speed as I can get.  I take it and ask for more.

And then, there is play.  How often do we adult professionals get to just play?  Almost never, I'll bet.  But don't you feel invigorated when you do?  My 4-year-old daughters play tag, and chase, and they race each other.  Can't I do that every once in a while, and collapse in breathless giggles after? I'm not sure what my running companions would do, but I might try it, just to see.

And sometimes it just feels good to run, as if gravity and time and weight were nothing.

It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity

Living an intentional life

Does living your life intentionally make it meaningful?  What is "intention"? 

          In 2005, gave a talk about living an intentional life to the Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program (I serve on its Board of Advisors).  I thought I'd post it here. 

Address to College Scholars dinner, September 26, 2005

 By Mary Kelly Persyn

I’m a law student, but before returning to school, I taught poetry for a living. Often when I speak to an audience, I think of what poems would be appropriate to the occasion, because to me there’s something about the richness of poetic language that sets the stage for a message better than anything else.

            For you, I wanted to talk about the power of choices and the meaning of living an intentional life. And so for you, I chose a poem by Adrienne Rich, one of America’s foremost poets, who has been writing and participating in political activism for a very long time. This one is called “Inscriptions,” and you can find it in her book Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995.

Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean's light

Talking of angles of vision             movements             a black or a red tulip

opening

Times of walking across a street             thinking

not I have joined the movement but                I am stepping in this deep current

Part of my life washing behind me            terror I couldn't swim with

part of my life waiting for me      a part I had no words for

I need to live each day through      have them and know them all

though I can see from here where I'll be standing at the end.

...

When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?

How do you know you're not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia,

stagnation

but entering that deep current             malachite, colorado

requiring all your strength wherever found

your patience and your labour

desire pitted against desire's inversion

all your mind's fortitude?

Maybe through a teacher:      someone with facts with numbers with poetry

who wrote on the board:      IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES OUR DREAMS

[…]

           

When does a life bend toward freedom? How do you know you are on the right path? Of course, the answer is: it bends toward freedom when you start understanding what the meaning of life is for you. To the extent that you consider your options carefully within the context of your own values, you are living an intentional life—one that will lead you to understand its meaning more and more as you move through it.

Wise individuals have tried to define the meaning of life since humans first stood upright. Monty Python lovers in the audience probably thought immediately of the film The Meaning of Life, which mercilessly parodies the very thought that life might have coherent meaning. And it’s very easy to give up on the idea and retreat into more immediate concerns, especially if you’re lucky enough to live in New York City and go to Columbia University. The meaning of life can seem almost banal in the midst of that creative explosion.

And, of course, the meaning of life is completely personal. No one can formulate it for you, though consulting great spiritual and religious thinkers and philosophers can help. Ultimately, though, you make the meaning of your life by living intentionally.

What does it mean to live intentionally? I can only tell you what it’s meant for me. I’ve found that three principles have helped me learn how to construct the meaning of my own life: failure; the fascination of difficulty; and attachment to a principle larger than myself.

First, failure. Yes, failure. Failure is so painful that many people do everything they can to avoid having to confront it. Highly capable and talented people can easily find ways to not fail. Given your talent, abilities, and privileges, that includes all of you in this room. From this day forward, you can find ways to avoid risking failure if you really want to. I counsel you instead to seek out failure. Actively give yourself opportunities to fail, as frightening as that is. Scare yourself a little. Try to do what you aren’t yet able to accomplish. Take risks. And don’t let fear of failure control your life.

Why? Because while success validates what you have done and keeps you going on the same track, failure brings you up short. Confronting and taking responsibility for your own failure makes you powerful. You might have failed because you’re just not good enough yet, or strong enough yet, or knowledgeable enough yet. It could be that you are the wrong person trying to solve a particular problem. Understanding what you need to do to improve, or understanding that you need to step aside and let someone else manage the problem for a while, is tremendously empowering because it pushes you further in your own development than you were previously able to envision.

For example, I failed as an academic—not because I failed to get a job; I did end up with a tenure-track position after an extended sojourn on the academic job market. No, I failed because once I got the job, I couldn’t do it as well as I knew I should. Why? Because I hadn’t done my homework. I didn’t pay enough attention to the fact that I really was not cut out to be an academic. And it’s not because I didn’t have the intellectual firepower to do the work. It’s because my personality wasn’t right for it, and my skill sets are not ideally suited for it.

The costs of acknowledging such failure were enormous. I had to move back across the country from Virginia to California and find another job (I taught high school for two years). I had to endure the disappointment and pain of having trained for and participated in a very demanding profession for ten years, only to seemingly lose everything I had fought for. I had to start all over again, with all the uncertainty and worry that choosing yet another career path brought with it. It took me four years to decide finally that I would return to school and train to be a lawyer. I had to let down my advisors and mentors, who had sunk so much time and effort into developing my career. I faced a significant amount of debt without knowing how I’d pay it.

I could have taken the easy way out by staying at my private high school job. It paid well and I was near my family. But a voice inside me wouldn’t let me do that. That would have been the larger failure. It’s always a good move to fail because you tried to do too much, but the failure of trying to do too little can destroy you.

I don’t know anyone who has accomplished great things who has not failed at some point, sometimes spectacularly. And a word to the women: men have always known this and have been undeterred by failures, especially in management and public service. Look into the careers of the great majority of elected officials and representatives, and you’ll find out they’ve lost at least one election in their lives—usually the first. Studies show that men learn from that failure and keep going, often winning on the second or third try. They never seem to pause and wonder whether they are cut out for the job; they simply try to figure out what they should do next to improve. Women are far more likely to quit after a loss, perhaps because they feel they’re not cut out for the job. I hope that your generation of women sees failure differently. I believe that, given the continually growing prevalence of women’s sports, the popularity of failure among women will continue to grow. In sports, after all, failure—losing—is the primary tool for improvement.

So fail. If you want to have an interesting life, failure is inevitable anyway. And this isn’t some Pollyanna story—failure hurts, and it doesn’t always teach you something. But most of the time it does. Take the risk.

Second, the fascination of what’s difficult. It won’t surprise you to hear that this is a quote from a poem by William B. Yeats. The speaker of Yeats’ poem complains about such fascination, accusing it of having distracted him from the bones and structure of the problems he has confronted. The fascination of what’s difficult, he states, has “dried the sap out of my veins, and rent / Spontaneous joy and natural content / Out of my heart.” But as the reader of the poem trying to understand the larger situation of the speaker, you see that such complaints come from the frustration of entanglement. Ultimately, the speaker returns to the simple, but can only do so because she has confronted difficulty. The greatest ideas and creations and inventions are beautifully simple, but arrived at only by untangling the skein of marvelous difficulty through which inspiration will inevitably lead you.

Look for difficult problems to solve, because they are the ones worthy of your time and effort. You will be infuriated by them, often stumped by them, and you may fail multiple times as you try to untangle them. But there is no way that the great problems of our time will be solved by anyone who has never worked with difficulty. In a sense, seeking out the difficult is another way of thinking big. And one more thing: if you stick to the difficult, you may by turns be confused, discouraged, infuriated, or dumbfounded—but you will never, ever be bored.

Listen again to Adrienne Rich: you know that your life bends toward freedom when you enter “that deep current            malachite, colorado            / requiring all your strength wherever found / your patience and your labor / desire pitted against desire’s inversion / all your mind’s fortitude”. How do you know? Look for a difficulty requiring all your strength.

Third, a cause, principle, or value larger than myself. This is not wholly or perhaps even primarily an idealistic point, though it does encourage altruism. Living for yourself alone is essentially empty, and that way lies despair. Living for those immediately connected to you can be completely satisfying for some, but it never has been for me. Of course my family and friends are fundamentally important to me, and I hold them close. But they cannot form the entire substance of my life. Rather, there are causes and principles to which I hold that better explain the logic of my life beyond the immediate reference point of those closest to me.

Social justice, the principle beyond myself that drives my life, is a cause that millions of people have pursued through time, and, if the human race survives far into the future, millions more will pursue it when I am dead. The call to justice is a call motivated by a belief in perfectibility, and we all know that perfect justice is an impossibility. Still we must strive for it, so that’s what I do. That goal pulls me along through very tough times when it would be so much easier to just go home and relax. I find I can’t—I have to keep going, and it isn’t because I’m indispensable. I’m not even a blip on the radar screen. I contribute what I can because this is what I can do. In the face of the blank annihilation of a meaningless life, this goal gives my life content because, however little I contribute, I participate in a much larger project that makes progress because I work alongside thousands of others. And that, I think, is the key not to the meaning of life, but to a meaningful life.

And there’s a great thing about service to a goal bigger than you. It does not matter what you choose to do with your life: you can still serve justice, or whatever other goal seems paramount to you. The old saying holds an especially poignant truth in this post-9/11 age: everyone can be great because everyone can serve. Each one of you can find a way.

The greatest spiritual and devotional writing is also poetry. The Talmud, the ancient book of Jewish wisdom made up of interpretations of the Torah, gives me the prose poem that closes my remarks.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Now I’m going to stop, but while you’re eating and talking with your table mates, I want you to think about some things, because after dinner I’m going to ask you to talk about them briefly to the group. I’ve shared with you three things that contribute to the constantly evolving meaning of my life: failure, difficulty, and a focus outside myself. What are the factors that give meaning to your life? Here’s a hint: if you answer the question with a statement that sounds like a Hallmark card, you aren’t there yet (and believe, me I have had my own Hallmark-card struggles to define life meaningfully).

 You might even think about experiences you’ve had that conclusively demonstrated to you that some aspect of existence is not meaningful to you. Or maybe you’ve found that one of the factors I’ve identified is also significant to you. Whatever your thoughts, please take some notes.  We'll talk again in a little while.

One wild and precious life

Over four and a half years ago now, a friend took his own life.

If you want to know what that feels like, if you want to know how that phone call sounds: imagine yourself sitting in a chair, reading the latest headlines, listening to music, talking to a friend, minding your own business.  Suddenly, without warning, a shadow materializes from nothing and hits you in the gut with a baseball bat, as hard as it can, harder than you thought possible.  Your desperate gasp after you hear the news is the first halting, searing breath of the rest of your life, but nothing will ever be the same.

My husband was very close to this person, and so I battled to insulate him from the destruction of an entire community.  But I had also been close to this person's fiancee, though I spoke to her only twice after his death.  My sense of guilt was sharper even than the pain that I felt for both of them.

I think of this now because tonight I met someone who was intimately connected to that community, years ago and all the way across the country.  I understand from her eyes and voice that this is not over.  She lost her fiance and the plan she thought she had for her life, because her fiance, like my husband, was in this person's intimate circle.  And after the death, he just drifted away. 

I suppose this is the point when I could wax philosophical, but I won't.  I learned far less than I had hoped from this whole experience; mostly, it was a grinding and terrible experience of grief, loss, devastation, shock.  Mourning.  In it I recognized crushing despair, the antithesis of any joy or creativity held within this life. 

One month later, I was pregnant with twin girls.  Was this coincidence, or the universe laughing?  How can I know? 

But a few things I know for sure:  my husband is still here, and my girls are nearly four, three reasons to cling all the more stubbornly to life.  I know that death will not fail in its presence.  I felt the baseball bat in my gut again in April 2009, when my mother was diagnosed with advanced cancer.  And the first desperate gasp after that blow was the breath that introduced me to the rest of my permanently-altered life.  Death, and life: joy, creativity, love, an unfailing commitment to something larger than myself. 

One wild and precious life.

...It's not of aging 

anymore and its desire

which is of course unending

it's of dying     young or old

in full desire

Remember me . . . . O, O, O,

O, remember me

these vivid stricken cells

precarious living marrow

this my labyrinthine filmic brain

this my dreaded blood

this my irreplaceable

footprint vanishing from the air

dying in full desire

thirsting for the coldest water

hungering for hottest food

gazing into the wildest light . . . 

These are the extremes I stoke 

into the updraft of this life

still roaring

                    into thinnest air

--Adrienne Rich, "Inscriptions," Dark Fields of the Republic