A Case for Listening to Your Body

Every morning my freshman year of high school, I’d hop in my friends car, an old Volkswagen beetle with a broken speedometer, to head to cross-country practice. There was no way to actually check the speed, so he had to rely entirely on feel to make sure he didn’t break the speed limit. My friend didn’t receive buckets of speeding tickets, instead he managed to stay under control simply by the feeling of driving. If he had any question, instead of looking at his speedometer, he used the traffic going by as a secondary check. When most of us drive, we aren’t constantly checking our speedometer and comparing it to the speed limit signs. Instead, we naturally fall into a rhythm. We have a feel for the gas pedal and how far to push it based on the context. We adjust to being on the highway, a multi-lane street or one lane road, even if we don’t know the speed limit. It’s not as if we consciously decide “Now I need to speed up as I reached a larger road with cars moving faster and to do this I need to push down on the pedal by X amount.” It just occurs. The environment we are in, invites the action.

In the world of Ecological Psychology, our surroundings invite actions. So when we subconsciously see the traffic open up or several cars fly by, there’s a natural pull on us to intuitively step on the gas pedal just a touch more. Our environmental surroundings aren’t simply objects to look at and analyze, they help bias us toward actions. We need this ability for rapid decisions.

If the route from perception to action was mechanical, we’d have to perceive the object, process it, decide what it was and meant, then decide consciously on what to do about it. That’s a long process. Especially for split second decisions. Instead, we have built in short-cuts where objects invite actions and almost act as signals to automatically choose a certain action.

In his book The World Beyond Your Head Matthew Crawford suggests that relying solely on objective feedback takes drivers outside of their ingrained skilled way of driving. By utilizing the speedometer, we interfere with our ingrained experience. Using Ecological psychology, we take ourselves out of this intuitive world where the environment invites action. Instead of simply automatically speeding up or slowing down based on what our environmental surroundings and internal feedback tell us to do, we have to rely on slower objective feedback to do so.

In the driving example, it’s only when we are in danger of speeding, whether it’s seeing a cop in the distance, venturing through a “speed trap” in a small town, or when that anxiety of the entire traffic flow speeding along, that we get taken out of this automatic processing and do a conscious double check on our speedometer. In other words, only when we sense “danger” or have a touch of stress do we feel the need to double check our intuitive sense.

In essence, as Crawford proclaims, over reliance on a speedometer “slackens the bond between perception and action.”

A disconnect is created.

Running by Feel

Let’s step out of the world of driving and into the world of running.

When we race, we’re relying on split second decisions to pass, cover gaps, find position in a pack, and all around figure our way through a race. When things are clicking, we feel the subtlety of the race. We instantly know when the pace slows by a half second per 200m, a minuscule amount of time in the grand scheme of things. We feel when the runner ahead of us is about to fall part, whether from the pace change or from a smaller clue like his arm swing opening up just a tad. Now we don’t consciously process and sit there and analyze of all of these changes, our body simply picks them out.

And each of these changes that occurs in our environment invites an action.
Research has shown using a variety of sports, that expert or elites in that sport tend to pick up these action possibilities quicker and have a wider range of possibilities. What’s this mean? Rock climbers, for example, notice what cracks or holds in the wall they can fit their hands into quicker, and notice more possibilities. The experts tend to pick out the better path quicker, while novices only see a very generic path to the top of the climb.

So when we are running a race, we want that race to be ingrained. The fewer decisions that a person has to focus on and make during a race the less amount of mental energy we are expanding on needless choices. Instead, in a perfect world, runners have an innate ability to respond to surges, getting trapped in the back and float their way to a good spot.

When runners shift their focus to pace or splits, you often see them taken out of this intuitive mode. The focus becomes the external. We’ve all seen the athlete who at the 400m mark checks his watch, then instantly slows or speeds up based on that external feedback. Instead of listening to his body and flowing along, he feels the need to take him out of this zone and disconnect. Along the same lines, a subtler thing you see is the athlete who checks his watch and you see a slight hitch in his stride during that moment. It’s almost as if you can see him processing what that split means and whether to speed or slow. It might be a small thing, but doing this over and over again results in a slight disruption of the athlete’s rhythm throughout the race.

So what’s the point? In a world of GPS watches and gadgets that provide us feedback on everything from miles run to steps taken, remember the point of it. It’s a secondary check, it’s not the governor. Just like the speedometer on your car doesn’t dictate how you drive your car, the gadgetry shouldn’t dictate how you run a workout or race.

This isn’t just about running. It’s about the sleep trackers telling us whether we are rested or not. Or the readiness scores proclaiming that we should train hard or take the day off. When we create an over reliance on this connection or even a reliance on the coach to yell and dictate the race, we introduce disruption.

They take you out of a space that leads to performance; as Crawford elaborated on in his book, disconnect the direct link from perception to action, making it a slower meandering route to get to potentially the same place. As we get more and more disruptors in our world, maybe there’s something to be said for trusting and listening to our body.

-Steve