'Mindfulness'  isn’t all about sitting quietly in a lotus position? It's something you can do on the move helping your mental health and physical performance at the same time. 

So what exactly is Mindfulness? Mindfulness is the intentional non-judgemental awareness of the experience we find ourselves in at a single moment in time.

BE FOCUSSED, BUT NOT
Running mindfully means being aware of one thing at a time as you run. This could be something in your environment or it could be sensations in your body. It’s often easier to focus your attention outside of yourself onto what we can see as you run. 

However, if you can be more mindful of your bodies too then we are able to capitalise something called biofeedback. Biofeedback is the process of training your body to control involuntary reactions such as breathing and heart rate. Controlling these means you have some influence over your autonomic nervous system and if you can do this, you can also influence the stress on your body. For  example, there is some evidence that focussing on your breath increases parasympathetic nervous system activity, the more relaxed branch of the nervous system, thus reducing stress.

Mindful2

During training it may be more helpful to focus our mind on internal cues such as our breath (a process called association in the field of sport psychology) so that we can learn from our training session, get better at interpreting exertion and also be more 'in the moment' which has been proven to lower anxiety. 

During racing (or doing a high intensity/hard session) it may be more helpful to be more mindful of external cues (disassociate) such as nature or objects in our environment which might help take our mind off the exertion we’re experiencing and get us through the session/race.

HERE'S HOW

Want to be a more mindful runner? Here are some different ways you can try it out:

  1. Try doing one tech-free run/training session per week. That's it. Don’t try to ‘do’ anything to ‘be mindful’. Just get used to running with no music or watch.
  2. Pay attention to one part of your body at a time (breath, heart rate, sensation in your feet, hands) take in as much information as you can.
  3. Notice what your automatic thoughts/judgments are about how you feel.
  4. Notice how long it takes before your mind wanders to something in the past, or something on your ‘to-do list’. Don’t get frustrated by this, just bring your attention back to whatever you wish to be mindful of. This is likely to happen A LOT as you run. That’s totally normal and natural. The skill is noticing it and bringing your attention back.
  5. For harder/threshold sessions switch your attention to the world around you. Try to be mindful of what you see, focus on the different shades of green you can see, wildlife, or maybe even architecture that you never noticed before. 
  6. For slower/recovery sessions try to be in the moment as much as you can. What can you feel? How do your shoes feel as you run? What does it feel like to move across the terrain? And also what can you see in nature around you? Try to appreciate the world you are moving so freely in.

Read more on the subject, here.