I got up early and drove to San Francisco. On the freeway I was singing happily, and I was in excellent spirits when I arrived at Crissy Field by the Bay. I set off at a slow trot toward the Golden Gate Bridge, working hard to focus my mind, relax my heart, and tune in to the right kind of running for the day.
It was gorgeous, for a mid-November day in San Francisco – sunny and warm even at 9 am, not a cloud in the sky. Climbing the gentle slope of the bridge, I kept my heart rate around 68% of maximum. Halfway across, I felt warmed up and let my heart rate rise to 75%.
When my attention wandered, I brought it back gently to a focus, while I relaxed and talked to God at the point between the eyebrows. As I’ve mentioned, various spiritual traditions tell us that the “spiritual eye” is the physical center of concentration, and the “broadcasting station” for sending prayers. Paintings of saints often show them with uplifted eyes. Neuroscientists now know that the prefrontal cortex is where the most advanced human abilities are localized in the brain, such as will power, concentration, perseverance, and the ability to define and pursue goals and hold positive attitudes. They’ve also discovered that the anterior cingulate gyrus, a brain structure within the center of the forehead, becomes activated during meditative states.
“If thine eye be single, they body shall be full of light,” Christ said. The world’s scriptures mention many connections between bodily centers and spiritual states. The Catholic saint, Teresa of Avila, said that she experienced divine ecstasy at the top of the brain – the “crown chakra” of eastern lore.
Trotting down the north slope of the bridge, I reminded myself to “relax in the heart,” and as I did so, I felt my heart softly open, as if a gate had swung wide. Some spiritual teachings speak of the heart as the “receiving station,” where God’s answers to prayer are received. Many spiritual practices aim at opening the heart, such as the “prayer of the heart” of the Eastern Orthodox mystics, the devotional chanting of the East, and the dancing of Sufis and Native Americans.
Coming off the bridge, my heart was cruising comfortably at 77%. I stopped briefly in the restroom, where a young runner was tending to bloody knees. I said, “Uh-oh, a faceplant?” He said he’d fallen on the Coastal Trail, but that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. I said it looked pretty bad and wished him a good run.
I descended to the pedestrian crosswalk under the bridge, then jogged onto the Coastal Trail. The running felt easy as I ascended the switchbacks to the crest of the Marin Headlands. I walked the final, steep section before, then descended on the paved road that winds back down to the bridge, enjoying views of the ocean, the Golden Gate, and the City.
Back on the bridge, I thought about doing some tempo running, but decided it would be foolish – the run would be over two hours, and I had promised Mary Ellen I’d be ready to go hiking in the afternoon. I relaxed in my heart and resolved to let the “inside” decide how I should run.
Shortly before the first bridge tower, about a quarter of the way across, I found myself running at tempo pace effortlessly, while feeling inwardly focused and harmonious. My heart rate was about 88-90% of maximum, yet it felt sweet and easeful. It was unusual, because while running at such a high heart rate, I’m normally quite aware of the effort – it feels “uncomfortably hard.”
I’d been enjoying that state of effortless ease for a while when I glanced at the heart monitor and saw that I was running at 92% of MHR. Wow, that was flying! I backed off momentarily, but a quiet intuition seemed to urge me to run faster.
Praying that I wasn’t fooling myself into running like a maniac, I brought the pace back up to 92%, and soon I was cruising at 94%, then 96% of MHR, and it was completely easy – I wasn’t breathing hard at all, and there was no sensation of pain. My mind wasn’t struggling or tense; in fact, it was completely calm. I was in a state of silence, where thinking seemed a superfluous distraction. It was deeply enjoyable, although it didn’t have the same quality of heart-joy that I’d experienced at a lower heart rate, or during the “Happy Heart Run” described in the last chapter. I decided that this wasn’t Happy Heart running, but something different.
As I continued to run at 96% of MHR, I remembered that, while running across the bridge the previous weekend, I had been talking to God, and I had asked how it was possible to run aerobically at a very high heart rate, as the top marathoners do. Did that ability come only after years of training at 100 miles per week? Was that the kind of effort it would take to fulfill the runner’s dream of flying along effortlessly?
In Running: The Athlete Within, the respected sports physiologist David L. Costill, Ph.D. reports that some Olympic-class marathoners are able to run aerobically at 90% of their maximum heart rate (MHR) or even higher (75-85% of VO2Max). It’s a figure that boggles the imagination, because most physiologists consider the average, non-elite runner’s “aerobic training pace” to be 60-75% of maximum.
For most runners, 90% is a pace that feels uncomfortably labored and can’t be sustained for long. Yet, here I was, at age 60, running at 96% of MHR with a calm mind and a relaxed and steady heart.
(Of course, the great ones can do it for 26.2 miles – at 4:55 pace!)
Yet, granting my pedestrian gifts, how was it possible? I’m convinced that it had physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. I’m sure, for example, that it was possible, in part, because I took a long warmup and used the time to focus my mind, open my heart, ask for inner guidance, and follow the guidance I received.
I suspect that another important factor was fine-tuning my heart. In their research on heart-brain-body “coherence,” the HeartMath Institute scientists discovered that zone-like states can occur at any heart rate – what counts isn’t the speed of the heartbeat, but the pattern. Disharmonious feelings such as anger and hatred make the heart beat with an inefficient, erratic rhythm at any speed (“incoherently,” as the researchers put it). When we’re angry, upset, depressed, etc., the heart changes speed chaotically. But positive feelings make the heart change speeds “coherently” and harmoniously – that is, the heart beats at a steady, harmonious, rhythmically changing rate. Graphs of heart-rate variability reveal these coherent and incoherent patterns – the curves generated in negative states are visibly disharmonious, while the images generated in states of love, kindness, etc., are smooth and regular. (See Figure 1, Chapter 6.)
I’m convinced also there was an earthy, physical foundation for what I was experiencing. For months, I had done nearly all my runs at an easy, aerobic pace. I then introduced a weekly 20-minute threshold run at 85-92% MHR. It was a variation on Lydiard-style, periodized training, although I skipped the hill work.
When I mentioned this experience on an Internet forum for ultramarathon runners, several people immediately wondered if I had measured my maximum heart rate accurately. In fact, I had followed the standard instructions to the letter, warming up with several miles of easy running, followed by a mile on the track at a hard pace, then two nearly all-out half-miles, and finally, a full-out quarter-mile. My heart rate measured 174 on the monitor, and I couldn’t make it rise further, even by running up the stadium stairs as hard as I could.
Coming off the bridge, I slowed in the parking lot, which was clogged with tourists, then picked up the pace on the road back down to the beach. Normally, at this point I would slow to a jog, but because there was no suggestion of fatigue, I continued to run effortlessly at 96% MHR.
Toward the end of the run, I decided to try an experiment: I would run all-out, as hard as I could, and see what it felt like. Would I experience the raw pain of the maximum heart rate run? Or would my heart retain some vestige of relaxed, harmonious feeling? I broke into a full sprint, and my heart swiftly rose to 175 and wouldn’t budge. There was a feeling of struggle, but it was nothing like the pain I had endured during the all-out test run. The feeling in my heart wasn’t notably harmonious, but it wasn’t disharmonious, either.
The sequel is that I recovered very quickly. On the day after such a taxing effort, I would ordinarily feel nervy and on edge, and on the second day I would feel sleepy in the afternoon, incapable of mental work. But, this time, there was no letdown. I drank tons of water for the remainder of the day, and it may have helped my recovery, but after other hard runs, not even drinking like a fish had prevented the “second-day blues.”
I came across an article recently about Eddy Merckx, the legendary Belgian cyclist who won the Tour de France five times in the 1960s and ‘70s. The article described how Merckx would warm up with no less than 20-30 miles of easy riding before each stage of the Tour. The other riders, meanwhile, were only too happy to catch a ride to the start, intent on conserving their energy. It’s easy to imagine them shaking their heads as Merckx pedaled by; yet I wonder if those long warmups didn’t contribute to Eddy’s success. They were, in fact, about an hour and twenty minutes, roughly the same duration of my warmup during the 96% run.
On the weekends that followed, I returned to San Francisco, hoping to repeat the experience and learn more about the art of fast, effortless running. But those runs were, at best, qualified successes.
I repeated the steps in the same order – focusing attention, working to open my heart, etc. And, indeed, I was able to run at 96% of MHR effortlessly – but with little enjoyment. In fact, those runs were a disappointment. I was grasping too hard at the experience, instead of cultivating it with a sincere heart. I wanted it – and my “wanting” was tainted by a galloping selfishness. With one part of mind, I did want to let go of ego and run selflessly, in the “now,” but with another part I was focused on the results, living in the future, and unable to immerse myself fully in the present moment.
Instead of offering myself to a higher power in a spirit of simple sincerity and love, willing to run slowly or fast, I couldn’t escape the restless desire to “get” the experience. And that desire prevented me from receiving it fully and enjoying it.
I wanted it too much. My labored efforts at sincerity and self-offering weren’t sincere all the way down to the core of me. In some inaccessible region of my heart, I was going through the motions in the hope of a reward. I wasn’t relaxing into the experience. I wasn’t willing to hand over the reins.
During the first 96% run, I did a good job of preparing the five tools of a runner for performing at a high level. My body was well-trained, and during the long warmup I focused on harmonizing my heart, concentrating my willpower and attention, and offering myself humbly to receive the soul’s guidance. I wasn’t expecting anything.
What’s it worth to run fast without genuine enjoyment, if all I accomplish is to impress myself with cold physical performance? Those runs taught me a valuable lesson: that no amount of merely physical, outward success can satisfy me. Any rewards I’ve reaped from “spiritual running” have come when I succeeded in purifying my heart.
