“You don’t stop running because you get old, you get old because you stop running.”
-Jack Kirk
Few years ago, I was driving in the rural areas of Ohio. I made a stop at McDonald’s to get a snack and drink. I’d ordered chicken nuggets and coffee.
I was wearing a T-shirt with a big number 26.2 on my chest.
A cashier lady at McDonald told me, “I never heard about the 26.2 radio station.”
I said, “what.”
She replied, “the big number on your T-shirt.”
I know I’m a polite guy, didn’t laugh externally, and told her, “this number is about a marathon.”
She quickly interjected without a second thought, “I’ve never heard of a marathon radio station, I know a marathon gas station.”
I told her again, “this is about running a marathon, not a radio station.”
And then she said, “oh yeah, my niece used to run that.”
I quietly paid money and left saying “thank you”.
Making people fun on anything is lack of emotional intelligence
In the car I told myself, “why am I laughing now?”
I remembered an incident from a few years ago.
I’d finished my 10K run and I was eating hot dogs under the shade of a tree.
Another race participant joined me in the shade because the day was pretty sunny.
He inquired me and asked, “do you know the recent Badwater sad news?”
I replied, “what?”
“Badwater, what’s this?” I asked.
He said, “never mind.”
To ease my situation, he deviated the conversation to that day’s running experience.
He said that he ran a half marathon the same day.
I could see from his bib number that he ran a half marathon.
When he left I did google search on my phone, what the heck Badwater is.
I saw it as one of the most intense hard running experiences of human life.
Badwater is the world’s toughest foot race, a 135-mile course starting at 86 m below sea level and ending at an elevation of 2548 m high.
I told myself, are you kidding me?
I regretted laughing quietly at the woman at McDonald.
I told myself, head down man, and don’t laugh at people, there are people who might laugh at you too.
I started driving and headed towards my destination.
Making people fun on anything which they don’t know, whatever simple it is, indicates our lack of emotional intelligence.
I guess I’m more mature now, at least a little bit, both mentally and emotionally.
Running improves our emotional intelligence
The reason I shared the above story is related to my running habit and its impact in my life.
Nowadays I feel I’ve improved my emotional intelligence over the years due to running incorporation in my life.
Don’t ask me how.
I don’t know but it’s working. When I accumulate more mileage in a week, I think and feel both differently.
Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author says the exact same thing in his masterpiece book “Emotional Intelligence,” “In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.The fact that the thinking brain reveals about the relationship of thought to feeling.”
My wife and I would argue about anything, and don’t get me wrong, we still do occasionally.
This is how a husband and wife relationship grows bringing and seeing our differences by wearing different lenses, but together.
When the argument would become hot and intense, she would leave the spot with an irritating voice.
I’d get out of the house to run without making any sound at the front door.
I’d run for at least one hour.
I’d be back home, enter in her room and said, ” I’m stupid, I’m sorry, I hurt your feelings.”
I’d not hug because I’d be sweating.
I’d bend down to untie my shoelaces.
My wife would tell me, “if you’re becoming this kind of person by running everyday, I’ll untie your shoelaces everyday for you “
I’d simply smile, no words, and say “thank you.”
I’m pretty sure not only running, any athletic activity improves our emotional intelligence.
Ramona Hacker describes about six steps to improve our emotional intelligence in her TedTalk. One main lesson I learned by adopting running as a habit is “No one on this planet will love you more than you love yourself. Be intentional about what you do.”
Running strengthens our relationship with loved ones
There are many other reasons they hypnotized me to run.
First of all, I enjoy it.
I feel happy and relaxed when I’m sweating on the road.
I feel free and independent from my deadlines, reports, writings, power points, presentations, experiments, and meetings from my professional scientist life.
Even though I feel tired after running, it’s not the mind, only the body that is tired.
I run to avoid my personal pain, discomfort, and many others.
Few years ago, I lost my maternal grandma. I grew up with her. Truly speaking, she raised me in so many different ways which is almost impossible to express here.
The last time I spent time with her before her death, her memory was very thin, many times she couldn’t recognize me so I had to describe myself to her as who I am.
I would tell myself, “am I going to be the same with no memory when I become old?”
“Am I going to be a child again?”
These questions would come to my mind after spending time with my grandma, after seeing her activities, after listening to her quietly when she was in her mid nineties.
She would behave like a ten years old child, pure thoughts, no regrets, no shame, no opinion, no judgements, nothing hidden, emotionless, and truth.
I remember, at one time, while I was sitting by her bed, she told me, “Nati means “grandson”, I don’t like white bed sheets, can you buy yellow colored bed sheets for me?”
I became teary and told her, “of course, grandma, I will.”
After five minutes, I told her, “ I’m going to get a yellow bed sheet for you.”
She replied, “why, I like this white color so much.”
I’ve read that about 3.4 million people in the USA aged 71 and older, have some form of dementia.
I’ve read about my mentor Tony Robbins’s biological father that he died from Alzheimer’s disease, he couldn’t recognize Tony when he passed away. That might be one reason he is investing and doing so much in the area of preventing disease, and extending human health span.
Tony Robbins in his must read book “Life Force”, “Each one of us should be the CEO of our own health especially considering that many doctors find it difficult to stay abreast with the latest developments in the medical field.”
I couldn’t be there with my grandma in the final days of her life.
There are multiple unavoidable reasons for that because we’re separated by more than 7000 miles away from each other.
This was a very complicated grieving period for me.
She was the center of our whole family, she was the reason for our family gathering, and now we have to make up some reason for those kinds of family gatherings.
The reality is that the spirit of our family cohesion has ended.
Whatever I told about my maternal grandma also applies to my maternal uncle, who is my first teacher in this world. I’ve so many memories with him.
Unlike my grandma’s situation, I was there with my uncle in his final days of life. His death was untimely due to chronic disease.
When I get out of my home and run, I bring those lost loved ones close to me, close to my heart, so many of my memories about them come to mind and become vivid.
I absorb those memories that strengthen me with different vibrations and I become emotionally more mature.
I don’t want to explain who our parents are in our life, everybody knows the importance.
I remember them a lot when I run.
I bring a lot of activities that my dad and I did when I was in middle through high school.
Sometimes, immediately after coming home from a run, I make a call to my parents, otherwise, I more likely forget to call them due to another set of busy life that intrudes us.
So, I simply run to comprehend and strengthened my relationship to my parents, to my wife, to my kids, to my brothers, and to my sisters. I run to remove my depressions and anxiety.
Scott Douglas, lifelong runner and author of “Running Is My Therapy” says “Any run is better than no run when it comes to short-term mood improvement or long-term help with depression and anxiety.”
Running is a meditation to filter our random thoughts
I also run to experiment my personal limits.
I just don’t love running, it is my keen desire to see and explore the bravery and beauty of my body, my endurance, my nutrition, and my thoughts.
I believe that physical enabling is a part of the process of mental growth, and endurance is a demonstration of my trust.
Sometimes I become tired, I want to stop but if I ignore it and continue, amazing things start to appear in my mind.
Running itself becomes a meditation. In reality, anybody can do meditation in the activity of their choice, it only depends on that person how to see things around that activity.
When I reach a flat surface in my running, my breathing becomes normal and smooth but when I reach a hilly surface breathing becomes quick and shallow. I do nothing, I keep running and my body goes into next level.
The beauty is to observe what’s going on in my body and mind.
I focus only, breathing in and breathing out, sometimes with open mouth to get more oxygen.
In marathon, I focus the planet, Himalayas, road, my body, my steps, my inhale and exhale of oxygen and carbon dioxide, we all human beings are sharing to each other.
When oxygen and carbon dioxide flows in the air, it goes everywhere, I see it and I feel it.
After making running a part of my life I’ve improved my cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is to have conflicting beliefs, to have discomfort so that we go to ease our feelings.
In the past, I used to think “just imagination is bad” but at the same time I also used to think “I need more creations.”
I knew from the core of my heart that it could take many years of hard work and sacrifice to make more creations.
So the simplest way I would take was an easier and safer path-” just imagination is bad”; “imaginative people are not real”; “aiming to have more creations never ends.”
This was my pure cognitive dissonance.
When I knew and read about creative people, their studies, habits, struggles, and their contributions to society, I gradually moved away from my unexplored and vague beliefs.
During my running, my cognitive dissonance started to fade away. Many times I accepted my strengths and weaknesses as a scientist, a runner, a creator, or as a family person like dad or son or husband.
For me running not only helps me to lose my body weight and make me healthy, but also cleans my overactive mind.
Remember, what we accomplish in life is not the only important thing, it is equally important how and why we accomplish it. I’ve received the answer of what to accomplish at home when I’m relaxing but I’ve received the answer of how and why to do it while running.
When we dissociate our body from normal state and associate it with excited state, something unusual happens in our mind. For me, one of the excited states of my body is running.
I cannot become a great scientist just by spending more time in the laboratory, I have to detach myself from the laboratory, I have to go in an excited state so that my mind can think, create ideas, and strategize them accordingly. When I’m running, I’m quiet but I’m in mental flow, me and my pure thoughts.
I’ve gathered many ideas regarding my professional scientist life not in the laboratory or at home or reading literature somewhere in the quiet room, they came from seemingly unrelated dots connections during my early morning runs.
I filter a lot of randomness in my mind. These random thoughts come into my mind during running.
When we filter random thoughts based on already known information, we create so called new knowledge.
This is one example how it works.
If I ask you to predict the weather for tomorrow, your probability of saying correct prediction would be only 50 percent because you are purely guessing.
But if I ask the same question to a meteorologist, his or her probability number would be different because he or she has done many studies and observations even if that particular study to determine weather hasn’t been done. This clearly indicates that meteorologist has much more information which you don’t have.
Meteorologist can filter the random thoughts more easily than us to guess the weather.
For me running has become pivotal to filter my random thoughts to improve my personal and professional life.
Remember, nature has given our body to run.
Alice Roberts, professor and author of “The Complete Human Body” discusses the evolutionary adaptations that allowed us to become efficient long-distance runners. Her words “Look at our two legs, hand motions, torsos, sweat glands, and hairless skin. What all of these tell us is we can run and we have to run.” We have a vertical body that helps us to retain a very small amount of direct sunlight. This simply means we can run longer.
Conclusion
Why do we run when we see any danger or any threat to us?
Because our body is designed to run to protect us and this is natural.
Nature from evolution says we become happy and healthy when we run. When we are far from any danger or threat, we obviously become happy. This is only possible because we can run.
Children always run, they become happy when they run, they never feel tired if we let them run.
Our children chase their friend or dog or cat and they run.
The crux is, humans are to run.
That’s it.
Running is a natural and basic activity, purity to our being.
Abraham Lincoln was a very smart foot racer, Nelson Mandela used to run seven miles a day when he was imprisoned. Both were emotionally very intelligent and both are iconic figures of humanity.
If we run, the number of deaths from degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, obesity, hypertension, blocked arteries, and diabetes would be significantly lower.
There is one more advantage of a longer run.
It helps to increase the number of happy mitochondria as well as capillaries in our active muscles.
It improves our muscle’s ability to remove and utilize available oxygen.
Running also recruits our muscle fibers that would otherwise go unused and it also removes our fatigue in our central nervous system.
Daniel Lieberman, professor at Harvard and author of “Exercised” said “if there is any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.” Lieberman, a leading scientific expert, explains in “Exercised” how exercise can promote health; debunks persistent myths about sitting, speed, strength and endurance.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
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