Running as therapy
Can running help your mental health? Running as a form of therapy
Fresh from reading Christopher McDougall’s immersive book “Born To Run”, I’m left with the feeling that running is the answer, no matter what the question is. The book spans many years of Christopher’s life, as he initially sets out to discover how to run without injury and is gradually seduced by the task of finding and running with Mexico’s ancient Tarahumara tribe, who run 100 miles as if it were a Parkrun. They are introduced to running in the way that we are introduced to eating and sleeping; for them running is survival and survival is running. In the book he writes:
“That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle — behold, the Running Man…”
McDougall went deep with this book, speaking of scientific theories about how and why we run. Why do we have an achilles tendon (which is engaged when we run but not walk) and the buttocks used in sprinting mammals such as horses, but then can’t really run very fast? If we were designed to run then how were we able to kill our prey, as we ran many thousands of years before we were able to make weapons? He concluded that due to our ability to take more than one stride per breath and then sweat to cool ourselves down enables us to run at a slow speed bit for such a huge distance without stopping.
So imagine us chasing a gazelle; they would sprint away and we’d follow slowly. The gazelle would stop and rest and wait until we were near-by before sprinting off again. Over a period of four or five hours, the gazelle would gradually become more and more tired, due to it’s inability to breath well or cool-down whilst running. Eventually it would collapse as it’s core temperature become dangerously high. We would slowly arrive with the gazelle and would easily kill it with our hands.
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What do we learn from this? That humans are a lot more determined that we perhaps give them credit; when our survival relies on it we can run huge distances and focus on a single, life-saving task. That our stamina is in-built and our need to run is essential. That we should be more patient than modern life calls for.
Reading this book (from within Greater Manchesters’ lockdown I must add) engaged my counsellor brain and it made me contemplate the mental duress on a society which has fallen away from its evolutionary destiny. We sit at a desk 8 hours of the day, we drive cars, we grab our food from the supermarket with ease and we go to our kitchen sink for water. Where is the challenge? Where is the grit?
We might speculate that there’s a reason more and more people are drawn towards long-distance running. Ultra-Marathon Running (any distance over a marathon) is one one of the fastest-growing sports. It’s almost as if evolution wants us to get together with our kin and run for huge distances with little or no break.
What can this do for our mental health? Well to be in line with our evolutionary selves can surely do us some good? As if fulfilling our innate human desire which is perhaps as deeply ingrained as pro-creation. There’s also the co-regulation which comes with being together with a large group of people who all have the same aim. As we’re social beings our nervous systems all work a lot better when there’s others around us. Our heart-rates will start to match and the sense of belonging and community release endorphins into our system; these make us feel good.
There’s also the simple therapeutic part of being out on the road on a long, solo-run. Without the distraction of screens, work and responsibilities our brains are free to think; it’s just our body, our brain, us and the pavement. Often on a long-run I might think about everything in the world, or nothing at all. Either way I return home feeling fresh; I might have a new perspective on a client issue, I might have the idea for a new blog, or i might have made a realisation about my own life; a reflection on my childhood or optimism for the future.
Running is freedom, running is survival and running is therapy.
Originally published at https://www.goodtotalkmcr.co.uk on October 12, 2020.
