Running the same races in ten or twenty years’ time with a cabinet full of medals is not what it’s about for me. I don’t need to win Badwater ten times in a row to get joy from the sport. The real key to my enjoyment of ultrarunning is the journey to new and adventurous experiences, some of them linked to travel and meeting new people, but many of them rooted firmly within my own self.

I love every aspect of the ultramarathon, from the cold, hard solitude of training, through the camaraderie of nervously discussing tactics before the race, right up to the bitter end when you have run so far and laid yourself so bare that all you can do is stare at your withering soul in the mirror. And the race t-shirt that is so well deserved that you never want to take it off.

A taxi driver said something interesting to me the other day. He started talking about reincarnation and told me “In India we have a saying. When a person dies, if they still have desire, then they will come back. If they have no desire left, they will not”. That resonated with me.

Living ‘with desire’ means that I always find an abundance of opportunities and interesting tangents that life throws to me. For me, every day seems to chuck me a surprise gift, an opportunity to better myself or to have some fun. Fundamentally, I think that’s what life’s all about.

4:39 pm on the computer’s clock.

The call-centre buzzed with life, everyone was chattering madly, answering questions and addressing callers’ anger.

Tepid, conditioned air lay heavy on me, stinging my nose and closing my throat.

4:45

“Yes sir, I’m sorry that your bus is late, but I can’t contact the depot”. And while I hurriedly filled out a complaint form, one thought absorbed my mind.

Her.
Her face, her laugh.

The air outside is cool, it’s perfect. A perfect time to run.

4:49

Eleven minutes, and I’m free to see her.

Eleven minutes, and I’m free to run.


The headset clasped my skull and the droning voice on the other end of the line made me rub my face and shift in my chair.

I’m going home to see her.

…going to the forest to run.

4:55

I sat there impatiently, warm with thoughts of greetings, hugs, kisses and small talk. But as I submitted the frustrated man’s complaint, my stomach clenched slightly. A small voice whispered…

Him. The texts she gets. The calls cut short when I come into the room.

I imagined the hard climbs, my ragged breath, the joyful, bounding descents. But the daydream was cut short by an uncomfortable voice.

Your calf.

That twinge in your left calf.
Changing your stride, trying to find a comfortable gait.

5:00

What if she’s not at home?
What if she’s with…him?

I left the office and turned my bike to the right, along the river, homewards. My legs moved up and down reluctantly, and I counted the kilometres that remained.

I stepped out of work and began jogging cautiously along the river. Three ks to the trailhead, now two and a half, two…

My mind wandered as I rode along, and I pictured golden light spilling from the gap under the front door into the gloom of a winter evening. And I thought of her, waiting inside. 
And then I pictured a shadow instead. An absence of light beneath the door. And the cold, dark hallway behind it, leading to empty rooms and quiet spaces.

I was shaken from this trance by the sting of lactic acid in my quads. It was Sankey Street, my street, sudden uphill.
 And as I walked my bike up the steep driveway, I looked up, expectantly, at the entrance.

My body fell into a steady rhythm but a small whisper stopped me from slipping away into the quiet corners of my mind. 
It was a spiteful tickle coming from my left calf. It tightened and loosened its hold as I ran along, and I tried to think about anything else.
 I pictured myself entering the forest, leaping down a narrow trail. My legs twisting and rolling and spinning over the track, animating the landscape.

And then I thought about pain. Pain that moved in quickly. A heavy, thick internal fog that couldn’t be ignored.


I was shaken from this trance by the caw of a crow flying through the twilight. 
The forest approached, and I breathed in deeply.
 As my feet fell onto the trail, the niggling sensation in my calf faded, and a smile crept on to my face.


Light flowed from within the house.
 I ran to stash my bike around the side, then fumbled at the doorknob before bursting in, already calling out. 
“Alice?”

Silence replied.

“Al?”…

My stomach clenched. And I was thrust into flustered thought.
 A late lecture, today she has a late lecture, no, that was Tuesday, maybe she’s at the library, no, she’s finished her assignments, maybe she’s out with a friend, no, not tonight. 
My mind spun and sorted, frantically asking and answering questions. But all the while a voice was growing from deep inside:

Him…What if she’s with him?

The air felt cool and soft. Shapes of green, yellow, orange, brown whirled and blended around me.
 Downhill, step, step, step.
 Uphill, step, step, step.

I sprung off a rock, and the malicious tickle returned. I kept running and it tightened its grip around my calf.
 My stomach clenched and my mind frantically probed the sensation to find out more.
 Pinched nerve, it’s just a pinched nerve, no, it hurts too much, maybe it’s a cramp, no, it’s too sharp, maybe it’ll go away if I run faster, no, don’t be stupid.
 My mind spun and sorted, frantically asking and answering questions.

But all the while a voice was growing from deep inside: 
 A tear…What if it’s a tear?

The pain forced me to slow to a limping walk.

Her bag lay still on the kitchen bench, but her wallet and keys were gone.
She’s gone,
With him.

I’m sure,
It’s torn.

Mindless running is like daydreaming. The mind is chattering but it’s a stream-of-consciousness free-flow – wandering back to past events, forward to future possibilities, chopping and changing so much it’s hard to even remember what you thought about at all during the run. Happily, our body is familiar with the act of running so we don’t fall down while we’re immersed.

In this mode our attention is away from the present moment, which can boost creativity and reduce stress. Like listening to music when we run, it helps time pass and can make our harder or longer runs to feel a little less painful. Sports psychologists call it dissociation. A distraction draws our attention away from fatigue or pain or worry.

But sometimes being in the moment, the now, is itself a release. It’s what Eckhart Tolle calls “that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality”. A special kind of awareness called Mindful.

Clinical psychologists define this as a state of “curiosity, openness and acceptance”. It includes being aware of the mind itself: an “awareness of being aware”. In the work of scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn, he refers to this as an awareness that surfaces “by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally to the unfolding of experience, moment by moment.”

These are common concepts in modern and ancient philosophies and religions. Praying or meditating require a state of mind outside of the everyday way of being. Sport psychologists would say that mindfulness in running is closer to the principle of “association”  – focusing on bodily sensations and monitoring the changes. The cues we take from our breathing and physical sensations help pace ourselves and adjust our effort.

So what’s so special about running and its potential to promote mindfulness? There’s overwhelming evidence that mastery of mindfulness is incredibly good for your well-being and general enjoyment of life. Studies have demonstrated that being mindful improves healing, immune response, stress reactivity and well-being. The work of clinical psychologists has shown that mindfulness can directly shape the activity and growth of the parts of our brain that are responsible for our relationships and our emotional life. Mindfulness can also improve our mental health through the alleviation of depression.

Mindfulness and Running Performance: Acceptance and Action

As well as being good for your general well-being, mindfulness can potentially improve your ability to deal with “setbacks” in races, particularly in longer races where the mental component becomes dominant. Consider this:

“Mindfulness is not a practice in thought suppression; all thoughts or events are considered an object of observation, not a distraction. However, once acknowledged, attention is directed back to breath, thereby preventing further elaboration. This is thought to inhibit secondary elaborative processing of the thoughts, feelings, and the sensations that arise in the stream of consciousness.”

This “secondary elaborative processing” that psychologists refer to is the negative self-talk and classic downward spiral that I often see in ultramarathon events when pain and/or fatigue and nausea start to take a strong hold, or a runner is falling behind the goals they’d set. We’ve had a lot of social conditioning to “tough it out” and to “steel” ourselves in these settings. The mindfulness approach, however, is counter-intuitive to this conditioning – it encourages acceptance and surrender.

A true acceptance of your immediate situation – surrender – can alleviate the internal battle that can come up when your rigid expectations of “how life should be” don’t match up with “how life is”. Author Eckhart Tolle notes:

“Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.”

This doesn’t mean that we give up on our race and throw in the towel. The act of surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. On the outer level, we can take action and change the situation. Indeed, when you’ve accepted the situation and focused quietly on your breath, you’ll inhibit unhelpful mind chatter and instead have the focus and poise to instinctively take the right action – and thus avoid the escalation of negative thoughts.

Mindless running is not clearing the mind of thoughts but a stream-of-consciousness, a great escape from the limits of a time-constrained, orderly, analytical world. Lots of great ideas can surface and if you try to hang on to them, there’s a chance you’ll remember at least some by the end of the run!

As for mindfulness, it can be gained many ways – running is just our favoured path – and we should strive towards it. The profoundly deep bonds that I see form between runners, and the development that I see in their general happiness suggests that the mindfulness promoted by running enhances our capacity for caring relationships with others. It helps us develop the discipline to stay calm, focussed and at peace during the tough moments of training and racing. In a broader sense however, the idea of mindfulness is an opportunity to create a better world, by embracing a life of curiosity, openness, acceptance and love: 

“We can nurture in each other an access to a core deeper self than personal identity, that core of being that we all share beneath the adaptations of everyday life and the constrictions of habits of our personalities … At that mindful place there may be a path toward healing our global community one mind, one relationship, one moment at a time, since kindness is to our relationships, on this precious and precarious planet, what breath is to life”.

Out of my brooding came a resolution to set myself apart from the other preppies, a strong urge to do something with my life. I set myself a goal to get an “OP1” – the highest possible ranking for a high school student, awarded to only the top two percent of students in the state. Rushing through this crazy final year, I weighed an extra 15 unwanted kilos. Running seemed like a practical way to ditch them. So one afternoon I jogged 3km around the neighbourhood, despairing the pain for the whole twenty minutes.

The runs got progressively easier and after a few weeks I’d developed a dependable routine. On the short holidays, I went for a few 20km outings and longer bike rides. My days were structured around running, riding and nightly study.

My final exam was for Accounting, on a Tuesday. Leaving high school for the last time I thought “What now..?” Two days later, without thinking about it too much, I laced up my shoes, put two packets of sugar in my shorts and stepped out of the door. What followed were the most torturous and revelatory seven hours and 46km of my entire life. At some point, hobbling between drinking fountains along the Brisbane River, I realised this was about more than weight loss. Unconsciously, I had been exploring a deep internal chasm that opened up when my family split apart.

Over the next 18 months, I moved out of home and read more about the marathon and beyond. I became more engrossed in the idea of myself as an ultrarunner. I embarked on a few more solo forays past 42k, but in order to truly immerse myself in the world of ultrarunning, I decided I had to race. I signed up for a 12-hour track event.

Those 12 hours hurt. Swapping between hurtling and waddling around the track, I felt an eye-opening, mind-blowing, soul-deepening pain. But that was balanced by a beautiful sense of camaraderie and belonging. I shared some great moments next to those other runners, moving around in circles, letting my soul unwind into the abyss.

At the end of twelve hours, it was a huge relief to stop and sit down. Completing the event was momentous: I’d run an official ultra, covered over 100km, and pushed myself harder than I’d ever imagined. But more importantly, I’d entrenched this new way of making sense of the world and my place in it.

I’d become an ultrarunner. And I’d found others – other people who affirmed this peculiar understanding of life. Now I revel in discomfort and suffering, put up with the early starts and push through the lack of sleep. I eat weird food, piss while on the move and love the wilderness. I’m part of a close-knit community. This pleasure, this freedom, this pain and this struggle have become my bedrock. I can do things that few others can, and I run.

Part of the problem with alcohol abuse is that you lose your self-respect. You tell yourself “today will be the last day”. You make a solemn promise to yourself and then you fail, day in and day out. You can’t even keep the vow you’ve imposed for 24 hours. You break it. And so your self-worth, your self-respect disappears.

At alcoholics anonymous, a lot of people get up and say “I was an alcoholic for so many years and x,y and z.” I’m not sure how listening to other people’s devastating stories makes you recover. That’s the theory behind AA, but in truth I got bored listening to the stories.

I decided that to recover I have to be comfortable with myself, whoever that truly is. Warts and all. When I went into rehab in 1997 I asked the doctor if I could run each morning. He wasn’t happy about giving me permission to leave the grounds, but I convinced him that I was a safe bet. And so each morning, I’d get up at 5.30 and run.

Becoming comfortable with myself brought me peace. When I stopped drinking, I was happy with the person I found.

Since 1997 I’ve run 147 marathons and counting. I’ve done two 100 km races, six 100 milers and a 240km race. I’m not addicted to running, necessarily, but I’m comforted by the effect that running has. My health, the self-worth, the respect of others for what I do and the knowledge I have. And I respect myself because I believe I have a value that’s external to me and appreciated by others. My self-worth is reinforced by achievement. It’s not running that’s the addiction, it’s the consequences of the running. I need these things reinforced on a regular basis.

Alcohol took me away from the person that I was. Running brought me back.