This year’s San Francisco Marathon marked the eighth time I have completed 26.2 miles and the first time I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  This is, in large part, thanks to my training partner, Lucie Spencer Murray.  See, this was her race. As one of the select few Ambassadors of the SF Marathon, Lucie had serious VIP status, and she was pumped.  I planned to tag along for moral support, basking in my good pal’s glory day while adding another notch on my marathon belt. 

I usually run marathons solo.  Sure, I have friends on the course.  But when the gun goes off, I dive deep into my own world and swim in it for as long as it takes to complete the race.  And transformative experiences have come from that. Meditative states achieved accidentally at first, and later, deliberately.  But I have always had a time goal that hoards my focus.  Not so, this time.  Hill training took a back seat to yoga training during the last few months, and I was in no way prepped for a Personal Record.

It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that releasing all expectation of a PR would lead to a kind of silly bliss, and ultimately freedom.  But honestly, it was. .  Instead of wearing blinders and pounding the pavement, I actually took in my surroundings.  Yes! I have always loved San Francisco but now I understand why people write songs about it.  Going over the Golden Gate Bridge was a surreal kind of rush.  So was seeing Bison in Golden Gate Park (am I hallucinating?).  And the architecture! The smell of the Haight!  I ran past the Red Victorian Inn- the place where Brian and I took our first vacation nearly 19 years ago, and briefly flashed back to us jumping on the bed like a couple of kids.   Snap! Here I am again, almost 40 now, running and smiling and free!  Who the F cares if I am slow?  I am just so happy to be here.

Yeah, yeah, if you are curious, the hills are steep and basically never ending.  But I was focused on the present moment, which was rich with so much more than searing quad pain and a slight hitch in my giddyup.  Rich in connection to my environment, to an uber joyful Lucie by my side, and to my breath.  Richest of all, because I was really, truly THERE (And so was the San Francisco Chronicle, which is where this picture is from)!

I would love to hear about your racing experiences lately too.  Feel free to post ‘em up here!

Wishing you joy, on the road and off~

Laurie

I have a long-time client – let’s call her Liza – who works for a big entertainment company, and the other day she complained about how challenging it is to manage the deluge of emails that flood her BlackBerry every day.  “You can’t read every line, you’d never get through all your mail; so you end up scanning for key words.  In fact, my boss refuses to read anything constructed in complete sentences.”

Liza says she’s often distracted, and has to take medication to manage her anxiety.  She even says she can’t read books anymore because they’re composed of huge obstacles: paragraphs.  “It’s driving me insane. The only way I can rest my brain is to sit at Starbucks and daydream for fifteen minutes.”  Such is the cost of modern digital life.  But, it turns out, daydreaming might not offer as much stress relief as Liza thinks.

Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert recently published a report in the journal Science on the trait of “mind wandering”, or “stimulus-independent thought”, defined as “thinking about what is not going on [around you], contemplating events in the past, [what] might happen in the future, or will never happen at all.”  In a creative bid to employ digital technology to determine the effects of real time daydreaming in daily life on mood, Killingsworth and Gilbert used a novel application downloaded to subjects’ iPhones.  Samples were analyzed from people in the United States (n= 2250, mean age 34) who were contacted via their iPhones at random times throughout the day to be posed questions from 3 categories: 1. “How are you feeling right now?”; 2. “What are you doing right now?”; and “Are you thinking about something other than what you are currently doing?”  The answers were recorded in an online database, and the analysis is fascinating.

People’s minds wandered frequently, fully 46% of the all samples; 30% of the samples showed mind wandering in every activity except for sex (good news for people who fear their partner’s fantasizing about someone else).  In addition, it was clear that people were less happy when their minds drifted than when they didn’t, even though they were more likely to wander to pleasant topics than to unpleasant or neutral topics.  And, they were no happier dreaming about pleasant topics than they were when attending to their current activity.  While negative moods are known to cause mind wandering, time-lag analysis strongly suggested that a drifting mind was the cause, and not the consequence of, unhappiness.

What’s a modern info-overloaded spacehead to do?  Mindfulness meditation might point to a possible remedy.  A study recently published in the Journal of Alternative and Complimentary Medicine by researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine compared college students who were given brief mindfulness meditation instruction (20” during three consecutive days), ‘sham’ meditation, or who were assigned as controls, to see the effects on stressed mood.  The mindfulness meditation group showed the most improvement with an 88% drop in stressed mood compared to only a 32% drop in the sham meditators, while the control group exhibited no change at all.  Not bad.

As for Liza, I advised her to power off her cell phone and savor that cup of coffee.