Meditation is one of the most effective practices for reducing stress, improving your mood, training your mind to focus, and ultimately building a sense of inner peace and calm. 

About three years ago, I began my own daily meditation practice. It’s nothing fancy – about fifteen minutes of mindful, reflective time every morning. My expectations for meditation are modest: I’m not expecting a blissful journey toward mystical insights so much as a calm, focused way to start the morning and look ahead to my goals and priorities for the day.

Mindfulness is simply the practice of being present in the moment, so its principles ought to be applicable to any area of life – including running. As a meditator, and a runner, I’ve always been curious about how running meditation might work. Meditators are typically encouraged to sit still in a quiet place, breathe slowly, and release the mind of all thoughts. Running requires attention and effort, and when running we are often surrounded by distractions from the world around us, from loud trucks to icy trails. Could these two activities be combined gracefully?

In order to find out, I conducted a mini-experiment with running meditation, on an easy run up the Picture Rock trail out in Lyons, Colo. Towards the end of a ten-mile loop, I set out to clear my mind for one trail mile.

My goal was modest – to simply let each thought that knocked on the door of my awareness drift away. I would focus on my breath and my footfalls, and letting all those little stray thoughts disperse themselves into the mountain air.

Just before the designated mile arrived, I switched my running watch to its simple clock face, in order to not be distracted by tracking my pace or mileage, which might add to the mental clutter. Moments later my watch vibrated to indicate the start of the mile, and here I was: clearing my mind, pushing out thoughts, focusing my awareness on my breathing and the dappled forest around me.

I discovered almost immediately how much junk had been floating through my brain throughout the previous 8 miles. My mind keeps up an ongoing dialogue throughout a run. Sometimes the conversation’s about running strategy, like pacing or race goals, but often it’s a random sampling of crap my brain feels it needs to process and over-process – to-do lists, letters to the editor about the future of America, ideas of how to correctly set up that bothersome Excel spreadsheet.

It’s not that that this conversation is bad – it can be a great way to persevere through the miles, to keep myself company, and even to come up with creative inspiration. At other times, though, it can be distracting or even downright dangerous.

Most of the diggers I’ve taken on the trail have not happened because of difficult terrain or reckless speed. More often, they’ve occurred on flat, innocuous portions of the trail which my brain (incorrectly) assumed needed little attention, leaving it free to go off on its own mental tangents. That’s when – boom – my foot’s most likely to clip a rock and send me tumbling down to the dirt.

Throughout my nine-minute experiment, the insistent suggestions of words knocked on my mind’s door, but generally I was able to gently dispense them. Even the idea for this post floated through my head, beckoning for me to follow. But I let that go too, knowing that anything essential would be stored in my mind somewhere, ready to retrieve later.

It turns out that a mile of running without thinking is really quite long. It’s one thing to sit comfortably in my room, legs crossed, breathing slow, and focus on the moment. It’s quite another to do the same thing while my legs are churning, muscles are tired, breathing is labored. But eventually my watch vibrated once again, marking the end of my meditation mile, and my head did feel a bit cleaner, a bit calmer, as I cruised the final mile towards my car.

Resources for Running Meditation

As you’ve no doubt gathered, I’m no expert on running and meditation, with my single one-mile attempt. However, there are a number of resources available on mindfulness and running in general, handful of which focus on meditation in particular.

Mindfulness Apps

One way to keep focused out on the road or trail is a mindfulness app, such as the Nike Run Club app, which offers running meditations through its partnership with the meditation app Headspace.

I decided to try one of these on an easy 45-minute run. I wasn’t sure if I’d find my run stultifying boring or peaceful and focused, but it turned out that the app was a good fit for a mellow run. It allowed me to play my own music in the background, and I selected my New Age-y flavored meditation playlist, which gave the run a sort of gauzy, reflective vibe.

Further Reading

Mackenzie Havey’s Mindful Running brings together scientific research, expert analysis, and contributions from elite athletes.

Running With The Mind of Meditation, by the defrocked Buddhist monk Sakyong Mipham, applies ideas from the Shambhala tradition to running.

Running With Mindfulness, by William Pullen, outlines his name-brand Dynamic Running Therapy, which he claims improves low-mood, anxiety, stress, and depression. 

Zen And The Art of Running: The Path To Making Peace With Your Pace, by Larry Shapiro, takes a performance-oriented approach, claiming to show “how to align body and mind for success on – and off – the track.”

Still Running: The Art of Meditation in Motion, by Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, to be published in August 2020, is written by a runner and Zen practitioner and is meant to instruct readers on how to bring the power of stillness into running practice with meditation, guidance, and inspiration.

This Runner’s World article lists several tips for getting started with running and meditation, including sitting still and focusing on the breath for a few moments before a run; setting an intention; choosing a mantra; counting footfalls; and heightening your awareness of your surroundings.

Just before Halloween last year, I found myself stuffing in my last training miles of the season, preparing for my final race of the year, the Dead Horse 50k near Moab, Utah. It had been a long season, and I was ready to cap it off with a final, strong long run with some significant hills.  I had in mind a 3 ½ to 4-hour loop up Green Mountain in Boulder, which would give me a solid 15 miles and 3,000 feet of climbing – plenty to put an exclamation point on a great training season.

As the gods of climate would have it, we got a thick, wet dumping of snow the night before my planned mountain adventure. From the back deck of my Longmont house, twelve miles away, I could see the north side of Green was covered with drifts – the very slopes I’d be scrambling up and charging down. I knew that trying to scramble up Green Mountain after a snowstorm would entail more slipping, sliding and, postholing than actual running, and today I needed to get in some solid miles.

I realized, after a bit of moping, that I could still do a road run from my house and get most of the training effect I’d wanted, even if I didn’t get the exhilaration of bombing down a mountain trail. So I outlined a 20-mile out-and-back on my slushy neighborhood bike trail. To get some climbing and off-road terrain in I managed to fit in some city trails that cross over farms. Covered with squishy snow, they served as a decent stand-in for the soft, uneven terrain of trails.

The weather was blustery and the skies cloudy as I headed out. Instead of a crisp blue-sky vista of the Indian Peaks under a sunny sky, my view was of defoliated winter trees and the backyards of suburban tract houses. This was not the dream run I’d planned to wrap up the training season.

As I started along, I realized I could turn the very imperfection of the run to my advantage. Developing fortitude and toughness comes not only in overcoming physical obstacles, like tough mountain climbs and sore muscles, but also in developing mental toughness. We run through rain when we’d rather run in the sun; we are cold and muddy when we’d rather be warm and dry. We run under dreary skies in the suburbs, but we push on anyway, logging our three hours, teaching our brains and our bodies that we can observe the imperfection, but don’t need to identify ourselves with it.

Mentally difficult runs force us to distinguish our inner runner – the pure, ceaseless light of our essential selves – from the conditions that surround us, be they emotional, physical, or climatological. This is what Buddhists call non-attachment. We cannot control the outside world, but we can learn to persevere in spite of it.

It’s hard enough to do this when we’ve been expecting a difficult run – before a race or a planned tough workout, for example. It’s even harder when the adversity is unrequested and unexpected. But navigating this type of adversity builds flexibility and mental strength, and allows us to successfully navigate a greater range of emotions when things get tough.

Just as physically hard runs tune up various parts of our running form, mentally hard runs tune up our mental resources. They build our confidence, and reduce our fear in facing seemingly difficult situations. And the more we court them, the less scary these challenging runs become, until, sometimes, they become almost … fun.

Last October, I started my run kicking and screaming, but eventually found my groove and returned home three hours later physically and mentally refreshed, and ready to look ahead to the next challenge.