I have been doing a self-experiment. (That’s what I am going to call these things that others might call “challenges” or “streaks” of trying to build a habit over the course of 30 days. Experiments on myself.) I have been meditating every day.

And before you get the images of me all new-age yogi omming on a cushion with incense and such, I’ll tell you instead that it has been an effort much more of a timer-based mindfulness exercise. Me just sitting there with my eyes closed focused on stillness and breath and focus of thoughts. I read a more science-focused book on meditation and the author compared the health-based meditation to mental pushups: just repeating the focus, correcting ones form, adjusting, repeating, and building mental strength and stamina. I mean, it’s all the same stuff in the end, but instead of chanting I have an app on my phone that makes a gentle sound when the timer expires.

I’m working on a whole article about that experiment that I’ll publish in a couple weeks, but I’ve had some reflective thoughts on the effort and how it relates to another kind of meditation I’ve been doing for nearly twenty years, thirty day challenges be damned. 

Running solo and sans music is, believe it or not, meditative. At least, data point of one, it has been for me. I just didn’t really recognize it until my efforts to be mindful on my living room floor and my solo running efforts overlapped. 

Yesterday morning I went for a run in the rain.

I followed a familiar route that led through my neighbourhood avoiding as many roads that I could and focusing on finding a route towards the river valley. I dodged onto the asphalt trail and followed that fo a few minutes until I found the exit into the single track through the trees.

Mindfulness is about focus on the body and a stilling of ones thoughts. It is an impossible feat for nearly everyone, I am given to understand. One can creep ever closer towards the goal that is infinitely out of reach. Running through the woods my mind turns itself over to the trail, each step a miniature obstacle that requires a kind of focus and attention. The meandering terrain of a single track course maginifies that focus, forcing the mind into a single purpose machine tracking the undulating and potentially dangerous footing while modulating the body for pace and breath and the beat-beat-beat of a racing heart.

To be fair, this is not the first time I have made this connection between mindfulness and my chosen sport.

I used to write a lot about the space that running gave me to think creative thoughts, work through problems, or ponder philosophical ideas. (I know, I’m odd.) Going for a solo run has always been a way to slip into a mindful trance of sorts and plod around the neighbourhood working through stuff with an unencumbered mind.  People even ask me how I run without music, to which I would reply that I sometimes do run with headphones but most often I just prefer the space to think.  What I never really recognized until lately was that this thing that the zen folks and the yogis and the chanters sitting atop cushions are all trying to achieve is a state of mental clarity and calm that I already kinda found out there in the river valley trails, and I suspect is a familiar state of mind for countless other runners and trail racing folk.

I am enjoying my daily fifteen minutes of mental pushups. I turn on my timer and find a quiet place to sit and then just listen to my own breath for a spell. When my little experiment is over, this effort to build a new habit has reached its milestone, when the final chime rings I will need to decide if it remains something I find space for each day. Or, instead, does this become another tool in my health toolbox, like strength training or eating well, is it something I just do to make me a better runner.