Week 12: Experiencing flow

Lessons from Katie Arnold + Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The first time I experienced what it felt like to be in a state of flow on a run, I was in my twenties. I was in my hometown of Augusta, Ga., in the summer.

If you know anything about this corner of the world in the summer — a time when sunny, cloudless high-pressure systems hover over the Deep South — it gets hot. Really hot. That day, the temperature was probably around the low eighties, with plenty of humidity.

So, not the most ideal conditions for running. But for some reason, around mile two, my body decided to ignore the conditions. Something kicked in, so that I felt a lightness and an energy I can scarcely describe.

Instead of making me feel weighted down, the atmosphere around me — the temperature, the humidity, the sticky feeling of the air — wasn’t an obstacle at all. I felt like I was cutting through it as cleanly as a knife through air, and that nothing could stop me.

My legs moved in perfect rhythm as my feet skipped across the ground, feeling like one of those insects that skips across the surface of the water on a pond. My breathing felt equally rhythmic and perfectly in sync with what the rest of my body was doing. It didn’t last very long, but it was magical.

I don’t know if what I experienced was the feeling I’ve heard people describe as “runner’s high,” but it’s the closest I’ve ever come to it — a euphoria unlike any drug I’ve ever put in my body, maybe because it originated inside me, instead of from without.

This experience popped back in my mind this week as I was thinking about the training we’re doing together. Already, we’ve run about 200 miles together since the start of the year — a number we all can be very deservedly proud of.

Now, we’re getting to the point where, instead of having to push ourselves out the door for our run, our bodies begin to feel the pull of habit to get out there. Our bodies are so used to running a certain number of miles every week, that they feel it when it’s time to go for a run. Our legs push us out the door, rather than vice-versa.

We’re starting to experience what Katie Arnold, a highly accomplished ultra runner and former editor for Outside magazine, described in her 2019 book Running Home:

“In the early 1990s, the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term ‘flow’ to describe an ‘almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.’ When we’re immersed in flow, cognitive thoughts drop away, creativity surges, and time becomes fluid. Hours may pass in what feels like a minute, or a minute might stretch for hours. Circumstances seem to fall into place, aligning at the right time, and coincidences abound, a phenomenon Carl Jung called ‘synchronicity.’ In sports, flow is often called ‘the zone,’ a state of consciousness where the body and mind move in harmony and we achieve greatness with less perceived effort.

Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people who are in flow become so engrossed in the activity that they don’t notice distractions and they forget to feel self-conscious. ‘We might even feel that we have stepped out of the boundaries of the ego and have become part, at least temporarily, of a larger entity,’ he writes in [his 2009 book] Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. ‘At this point, the activity becomes autotelic, which is Greek for something that is an end in itself.’”

Now, I’m sure this doesn’t happen for you on every single run. It doesn’t for me either. But it does happen sometimes, even if it’s only for a brief stretch. And that brief moment can be what made the whole run, or a whole week of training, worthwhile.

Later in the book, Arnold tells the story of a sect of Buddhist monks in Japan for whom running long distances — very long distances, it turns out — is part of their spiritual practice.

The “marathon monks of Mount Hiei” — as they’ve come to be known thanks to a 1988 book by John Stevens, a Buddhist priest and teacher of Eastern philosophy in Japan — run for a thousand days over the course of seven years as part of their training, in straw sandals through the night, along remote mountainside trails.

Arnold writes of them with awe and admiration:

“By the final year, when the monks run fifty miles a day for a hundred days in a row, they’ve entered a perpetual flow state. ‘At the end, the marathon monk has become one with the mountain,’ [Stevens writes in his book.] ‘He can predict the week’s weather by the shape of the clouds, the direction of the wind, the smell of the air.’”

Now, let’s take a quick breath. I know I’m not about to go out and run marathons at night in my sandals, and I doubt you are either.

But I do think the marathon monks have discovered something they get to experience large doses of — and, even though we live in a much more modern and often-dizzying world, can experience too, even if it’s just in smaller doses.

And that’s what these past 11 weeks have been building up to, getting our bodies to a place where the running starts to become natural, something our bodies yearn to do, rather than something we force them to do. And, we become closer to the environment that surrounds us.

Adharanand Finn, also a writer and accomplished runner, got the chance to run with the marathon monks a few years ago, which he shared in this piece for The Guardian. What he learned from them, I think, is what we’re learning too — in our own way:

“‘I’m interested in why people run,’ I begin. In answer, [the monk] starts explaining the whole process of the 1,000-day training. It’s not just about running, he says. Along the way, each day you need to stop at over 250 shrines and temples. The running is really just a way to get from one to the other. And it is not even running. Much of the time you are walking.

‘But why?’ I ask. ‘Why this 1,000-day challenge?’

He ponders for a moment.

‘All humans are asking the question: ‘Why are we alive?’ he says. ‘The constant movement for 1,000 days gives you lots of time to think about this, to reflect on your life. It is a type of meditation through movement. That is why you shouldn’t go too fast. It is a time to meditate on life, on how you should live.’

‘And when you did it,” I say, ‘did you find an answer to the question, why are we alive?’ I may be pushing it here, but I’m waiting to hear about the sense of oneness with the universe he experienced. I want to know what reaching enlightenment actually feels like.

‘There is not this one point of understanding where everything else stops and you’ve made it,” he says calmly. ‘Learning continues. Once you graduate from university, you don’t stop learning. The 1,000-day challenge is not an end point, the challenge is to continue, enjoying life and learning new things.’”

I think he’s onto something there. And I’d love to know what you think — have you reached a point with your running that you kick into a feeling of being in flow? Have you experienced that, this year or some other time?

I’d love to hear — as always, let me know how your running is going, and keep in touch.

Your friend,

— Terrell

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Our training plan for this week

So, how are the miles feeling so far this week? How did your 8-miler go last weekend? Here are our miles for this week, which add up to a total of 22 miles:

• Thursday, March 24 — 5 miles/50 minutes

• Saturday, March 26 — 9 miles/90 minutes

• Sunday, March 27 — 2 miles/20 minutes

• Tuesday, March 29 — 6 miles/60 minutes

Let me know how it’s going for you and if you have any questions about the plan, your running, or anything else.

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