Chapter 6: The Harmony Zone

Many years ago, I began to notice that my runs were more enjoyable when I warmed up at a specific pace. There was a feeling of harmony and “rightness” when I started my runs at that pace. It was a subtle feeling in my heart, a bare, faint whisper that grew stronger if I ran as those inner feelings guided me.

It took me years to learn to trust those inner feelings. At first, they were so subtle that I impatiently brushed them aside. It was a tiny flicker of feeling in my heart, and although it never actually told me what to do, I sensed that it was quietly suggesting what my body could do healthily, or “wanted” to do, on a given day.

The problem was that it would often send messages that I didn’t want to hear. My training motto had been: “Everything to excess, nothing in moderation.” I enjoyed the extremes of running – hard speedwork and very long runs – and when I first began noticing the messages from my heart, they nearly always seemed to be telling me to run more moderately.

I thought, “Well, that’s interesting, and maybe those feelings are valid, but they don’t jibe with the latest research on training, or the advice of the great coaches. And, anyway, I just don’t feel like running slowly today!” So I ignored them. Yet, over the course of perhaps 10 years, I gradually realized that when I paid attention and followed that guidance – or when I was so battered and bruised from overtraining that I had little choice but to lend my body’s messages a more receptive ear – my runs were invariably more enjoyable and I made better progress in my training. And so I slowly, reluctantly came to respect the wisdom of the heart.

In time, I learned of coaches whose methods were more or less compatible with my experiences. They were people like Arthur Lydiard, Philip Maffetone, and John Douillard, whose ideas were far removed from the mainstream but had been tested at the highest competitive level. I’ll have much more to say about Lydiard later.

Year after year, triathlete Mark Allen failed to win the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon, until he hired Phil Maffetone as his coach. Allen then won the Ironman six times. Intrigued by Allen’s success, short-course triathlon world champion Mike Pigg began consulting Maffetone and soon experienced similarly improved results. Another Maffetone client was former women’s master’s marathon world record holder Priscilla Welch (2:26:51 at age 41, London Marathon, 1987).

John Douillard is a former professional triathlete whose coaching clients include former world-champion short-course triathlete Colleen Cannon. Douillard’s methods have been used successfully by high-school cross-country teams and many adult runners.

Although the details of their programs differ, the systems that Maffetone and Douillard teach are fairly consistent with the “harmony-zone” principle that I discovered by listening to the guidance of my heart. Yet the messages that I receive when I’m running in the harmony zone can’t really be confined to a formal system, because they’ll occasionally give me “permission” to do things that contradict any fixed training plan – like breaking out of the box and running much faster or farther than my schedule calls for. Yet I always come out of those intuitively guided, “outlaw” runs feeling wonderful. (See Chapter 17, “The 96% Run” and Chapter 34, “Nightingale.”)

For a long time, training in the harmony zone wasn’t easy. It was an exacting discipline, because it demanded a commitment to do whatever the heart “wanted,” even if it meant jogging slowly through an entire two- or three-hour run.

Also, I had a hard time correlating the harmony zone pace with any specific heart rate. At the beginning, my personal “harmony zone” seemed to hover between 70-78% of my maximum heart rate, though it might be higher or lower on a given day, depending on fatigue, diet, the weather, etc. Later, I realized that the feelings of harmony seemed stronger at 77-78% of MHR. But then I discovered that, on long runs, the harmony zone was generally much lower, around 70%. And, to confuse matters even further, I would occasionally have those feelings of “rightness” while running very fast, above 90% of MHR.

I was baffled. How could there so many harmony zones? Over time, I realized that it wasn’t a question of a single “best” zone (or heart rate) at all. Rather, those feelings of harmony were my body’s way of telling me what it could happily and safely do on a given day. If I ran at the speed and distance that my heart “suggested,” I was invariably rewarded with deeply enjoyable feelings, and steadily improving fitness and health.

But one thing was consistent: the harmony zone pace was nearly always slow at the start of a run. It also struck me that I never got those good feelings if my body wasn’t truly ready to run – if its message was “Help! I’m trashed! Take me home!” On the days when I was deeply tired or mildly ill, I might experience the good feelings for several miles, but if I went farther or picked up the pace, they vanished. And, very often, they would return if I slowed down.

In several of the stories, I tell how those feelings grew strong when I “did the right thing,” cutting short a run where my body was tired and my heart told me to pack it in and head for the barn. From these experiences, I realized that the harmony zone is more than a purely mechanical “feedback loop” between my body and my conscious mind. Those feelings in my heart were expressing a deep, interior wisdom that was mindful of my highest welfare. When I ran in the harmony zone, there was a wholesome sense of health and well-being, and I more often had runs where my body, heart, and mind seemed deeply synchronized.

Finding the harmony zone became an enjoyable preamble to each run. No mystical mumbo-jumbo was required, or much rational thought. Yet a variety of wonderful experiences grew out of that simple, earthy attunement that began with the body – from answers to questions about my training, to feelings of inner guidance and joy.

As I explored the harmony zone, I discovered that I could often deepen the experience by deliberately cultivating positive feelings. It wasn’t a question of thinking my way into a good mood, but of using “heart means” to amplify any pleasing sensations that were already present in my heart. In fact, too much rational thinking only seemed to get in the way.

One “heart method” that worked very well was silently sending good thoughts to the people I encountered on the trail. Or I might take a phrase that held heartfelt associations for me and repeat it silently. It might be a few lines of song, a short prayer, or an affirmation or chant. If I couldn’t find anything to “wrap my heart around,” it usually worked well just to cultivate a smooth, harmonious flow of physical energy. I might pay attention to the movement of my running and the sound of my footfall – nurture a pleasing running rhythm and let it soothe and cheer my heart. If I didn’t meet anyone on the trail, I could always send good thoughts, feelings, and prayers to friends and acquaintances.

I enjoy the practice of repeating a positive thought, affirmation, or short prayer when I run. Positive thoughts are more powerful than negative ones; they can sweep negative moods away. Positive thoughts, repeated for a long time, stimulate positive feelings, even as they prevent the mind from falling back into negativity.

If I’ve learned one thing as a runner, it’s that good feelings and good training go together. The best training produces steady improvement and a good mood, while runs that “feel bad” usually result in failure to improve. Frank Shorter believed that runners get more out of their training when they run in places where they feel happy and at ease.

Many years ago, I experienced the harmony zone in a particularly striking way during a 20-mile run in the foothills of the San Francisco Peninsula. Halfway through the run, my gas tank ran dry. I didn’t want to walk home, so I kept plodding along. I was wearing a heart monitor, and I noticed that when I tried to hold my heart rate at the scheduled 78% target pace, I felt stressed and strained, but when I slowed to 72%, I felt – and this is what greatly surprised me – wonderful – even though I had crashed badly. That run lingers in memory as one of my best ever. Why? Because I paid attention to what my body was telling me. I listened to my heart and ran as it suggested, and my body-mind-soul rewarded me with feelings of joy.

Seventeen miles into the run, I was climbing the last big hill, jogging on a sidewalk next to a street with heavy traffic rushing by. The hill was long and steep, and I had to slow to a shuffle to keep my heart rate down and preserve the feelings of rightness. I’m not a big fan of shuffling, but I was feeling so wonderful that I actually couldn’t refrain from singing aloud. That run gave me all the evidence I would ever need that the quiet joy in my heart is a trustworthy guide for my training.

I can’t explain the harmony zone rationally, except to imagine that the heart may be the loudspeaker for a higher wisdom in the brain, or perhaps the soul. It’s as if body, heart, and brain intuitively know “We’ll be running 20 miles today. If we go at Y pace we’ll feel fine, but if we go faster, we’ll crash.”

Several years ago, I asked Timothy M. Noakes, M.D., the author of Lore of Running, for his thoughts on some of ideas I wanted to include in this book. Here’s Dr. Noakes’s reply:

In the new [fourth] edition of Lore of Running you will see that our new research suggests that the major effect of training is to induce a superior pacing strategy which is determined centrally in the brain. We now believe that the brain controls performance, not the muscles, although with training, the increase in aerobic enzyme activities tells the brain that the body is capable of more. However, the principal determinant of performance remains the adaptations in the brain which must be fooled (or trained – you choose the appropriate verb) to allow you to run faster than it would normally allow.

I understand that this sounds like a foreign language, but the evidence we have is absolutely clear; the brain is in charge, and it decides when to reduce your speed as you get tired, and [the evidence also suggests] that this reduction in pace probably is in response to numerous stimuli coming from the muscles and other parts of the body. However, it is the subconscious brain that chooses the pace that it will allow you to do, and it always chooses a pace that will ensure you do not collapse or die before the finish of the race. The very fact that there is this safety factor indicates that the brain is ultimately in charge.

These views appear to be confirmed by later research conducted by one of Dr. Noakes’s colleagues at the University of Cape Town:

Traditionally, fatigue was viewed as the result of over-worked muscles ceasing to function properly. But evidence is mounting that our brains make us feel weary after exercise…. The idea is that the brain steps in to prevent muscle damage.

Now Paula Robson-Ansley and her colleagues at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have demonstrated that a ubiquitous body signalling molecule called interleukin-6 plays a key role in telling the brain when to slow us down. Blood levels of IL-6 are 60 to 100 times higher than normal following prolonged exercise, and injecting healthy people with IL-6 makes them feel tired.

To work out if IL-6 affects performance, Robson-Ansley injected seven club-standard runners with either IL-6 or a placebo and recorded their times over 10 kilometres. A week later, the experiment was reversed.

On average they ran nearly a minute faster after receiving the placebo, a significant difference since their finishing times were around 41 minutes. The findings will appear in the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology.¹

Our rational, logical minds can help us decide how to train, given adequate data. But when the data are lacking or deeply hidden, we can augment our decision-making ability with intuition – the inner, empirical data that the body communicates through the heart. The logical mind isn’t the only valid tool for directing our training.

One of America’s greatest middle-distance runners, Bob Kennedy, is aware of the need to go “beyond the brain” in training. Kennedy, the only American to run 5000 meters in under 13 minutes, says that feelings are a valuable help for avoiding overtraining:

[Interviewer:] What about the idea of pushing oneself in a good way, versus pushing too far. How do you tell the difference between challenging yourself and going overboard?

Bob Kennedy: You have to really pay attention to your body, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally. As soon as you start not enjoying what you’re doing – or start really struggling and go for a run and think “what am I doing out here” – if that starts becoming the norm, then you’re pushing too hard and something’s not right. You know, back off, take a rest, or reorganize yourself. But if you’re pushing hard and doing some speed and some longer runs, and you’re really fired up about it, and you’re giving yourself some recovery time, then you know you’re pushing yourself in a good way.²

World-champion age-group Olympic weightlifters Jerzy and Aniela Gregorek write:

The slogan “No pain, no gain” characterizes bad coaches and ignorant athletes. Lance Armstrong in Every Second Counts describes how he rode uphill in the rain for more than an hour to learn every turn on the mountain. At the top, he realized that he knew the mountain but he did not feel it. He turned back and repeated the climb to learn exactly where and when to accelerate or slow down. That knowledge helped Lance Armstrong to avoid the crash and win the race. Intelligent weightlifters learn to follow the signs given by the body. They analyze every feeling to adjust training daily to ensure recovery and smooth progress.³

The birdwatchers have a saying, “When the bird and the book disagree, believe the bird.” The heart’s intuitive feelings can be a valuable addition to a runner’s toolbox, one that we’ve neglected for too long in our reason-addicted culture.