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Part of the appeal of running is how mindless it is—just one foot in front of the other. But what if you could make it more mindful? It’s easy to talk about that in theory (people have been touting mindfulness for years), but it’s more difficult to do it in practice.
Science is catching up with theory, though, proving that mindful running is not only legit, but also something that any runner can benefit from. For example, a 2016 study published in Translational Psychiatry shows that combining directed meditation with running or walking reduced symptoms of depression by 40 percent for depressed participants. What’s more, a 2020 study published in Neural Plasticity found that mindfulness training can even give your endurance performance a boost.
Which is partly why some of the biggest athletic brands in the industry have gotten on board. In 2018, Asics launched the world’s first “blackout” track to train the mind; in an on-site experiment, led by professor Samuele Marcora, Ph.D., the director of research at the University of Kent’s School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, and Jo Corbett, Ph.D., lead researcher at the Human Performance and Health Research Group at The University of Portsmouth, they found that psychological factors (such as sight and sound) have a significant effect on endurance performance.
Nike also partnered with Headspace on a series of audio-guided mindful runs via the Nike+ Run Club app; Lululemon dropped their #letyourmindrunfree campaign—complete with an 8-week 10K running guide and 14-week half-marathon guide that include guided mediation; and Saucony launched the White Noise collection to honor the sport's meditative effects.
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The sudden push to make mindful running more mainstream has to do with helping athletes gain an extra edge. “It’s almost a last frontier in physical training,” says Headspace cofounder Andy Puddicombe. “I think there’s been this realization that there’s actually a whole domain that hasn't been explored yet: the mind. And if you speak to any elite athlete, they will tell you that 90 percent of it comes down to the mind.”
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What Exactly Is Mindful Running?
Mindful running is a vague term that means a lot of things to a lot of different people, but it really comes down to being present, says Chevy Rough, a mindfulness and performance coach. “It’s purely about being mentally connected within your movement and not being distracted,” he says. “Distraction can come in the form of other people, noise, technology, but it can also come in the form of cultural pressures. You know: ‘How fast do I have to go?’ ‘How far am I supposed to go?’ ‘What is the definition of a runner?’”
It’s important to differentiate between mindfulness and meditation, says Puddicombe. “When we meditate, we're taking ourselves away from everyday life, away from activities, to actually pray in an environment where we can train the mind in mindfulness: how not to be distracted, how not to get caught up in thinking, how not to be put off of feelings of discomfort,” he says. “Then, when we go out and run, we’re taking whatever we learned in meditation and applying it.”
To run mindfully, then, you have to shrug off those external distractions and pressures and really listen to your body: What does your breath tell you about your body? How fast do you feel like going? “People connect to different things,” says Charles Oxley, a mindfulness and performance coach on the ASICS Sound Mind Sound Body team. “The breath is the obvious one, but some people connect with past memories or parts of their bodies with previous injuries, and those connections unlock the door for deeper connections within yourself.”
The point is to get out of the conversation you’re having with society and back into a one-on-one convo with your body, based on how much sleep you’ve gotten, how much you’ve eaten, how good that nutrition was, and where you’re at mentally. “The more connected to your running, the longer you’ll be able to keep running,” Rough says.
How Do You Run Mindfully?
Staying present in an activity that seems designed to help you zone out is way easier said than done. But there are ways you can physiologically prep your body for zen, and tricks you can try on the run to stay dialed in.
Most importantly, there’s the cooldown before the warmup. The what now? Think about it: “Ninety percent of people lead very busy lives, with lots of stress and lots of pressure. When they come running to the gym on their way to or from the office, their thinking about deadlines, meetings, their families,” Oxley says. “They’re already in a stressed-out state, and then they’re going to enter the even higher stress state of exercise.”
To bring your body out of a stress state before working out, Oxley suggests assuming a formal breathing position (back up against the wall or lying down on the ground) and focusing on the breath. “I get my clients to think about deep breathing into the bottom of the lungs, really engaging their diaphragms,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be fancy, it’s just about slowing down the breath—and every time your mind gets distracted, you want to bring it back to that slow breath.” Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of thing you can set your watch for; some people may chill out in five breath cycles, some might take ten minutes. “Focus on your breath until feel the difference,” Oxley says. “When you start to sense that calm feeling, that’s your internal chemistry shifting down some gears.”
If your intention is to run mindfully, you want to shed any anchor points (your GPS watch, your phone, your music) that might distract you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for the entire run; “even five minutes can teach you something,” says Puddicombe.
Once you’ve shed those external distractions, stay present by focusing on two important questions: “How am I breathing?” and “Where am I looking?” It’s not about maintaining a certain breathing pattern, rather decoding your breath to determine where you’re at. Breathing too fast? Slow down. Feel like you could hold a conversation easily? Maybe speed up a bit. Try to breathe through your nose as much as you can. Mouth-breathing is a stress response, so focusing on nostril breathing keeps you in a more relaxed state. And keep your gaze soft and wide, toward your periphery, instead of focused, to stay in that chill zone, Oxley says.
You’ll start to notice more the more you stay in that zone, adds Puddicombe. “You definitely take in more around you; you notice more about your posture; you notice more about your technique; and you learn about your body,” he says. “And if we’re not learning, then we’ve learned something wrong.”
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How to Keep Those Benefits Going
You can use the same breathing exercise from your preworkout cooldown for your actual cooldown. “You have to flush your system out after a run; you can’t go from a state of stress just simply standing still,” Rough says. The more you slow the breath down, the more you connect to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for rest and recovery.
“Recovery doesn’t start until you’re actually in the parasympathetic state,” he says. “People skip the cooldown all the time, but if you’re not recovering, you’re not making adaptations—you’re just learning how to suffer better.”
Don’t let time (or the lack of it) hold you back from this especially-easy step in the recovery process. “Obviously, the gold standard would be to take five to ten minutes after your workout to do some breath work,” says Rough. “But it’s breathing. You can get on with your life and still use the exact same tools—at your desk, in your car—to bring your body out of its stress state and move on with your life.”
The better you get at practicing this during and after your run, the better you’ll be at pulling it up when you need it outside of running, too.
