A Return to Running
Monday. My body almost relaxed into it - perhaps muscle memory, perhaps what my mind or body knew I needed after a long post-pregnancy break. I kept my speed slower deliberately, allowing my body to reengage in the movement.
This is my first practice mapping using the framework - making visible what usually stays implicit in my running practice by attending to the five dimensions of embodied experience:
Sensory experience - the flow of bodily sensations that underlie perception: My inhale cools my nostrils and then hits the back of my throat as my chest rises. The throat feels passive at first, but with attention, it becomes the vehicle connecting my lungs with the air in my nose or behind it. I prefer cold weather because I overheat quickly, though I've learned to hydrate more deliberately now. I settled into the resting gaze, my eyes focused on the base of my throat, my eyelids lowering slightly. I released tension systematically - my ears, forehead, cheeks, shoulders, shoulder blades.
Bodily experience - embodied habits, patterns of movement, sedimented practices: I want my stomach empty or nearly empty before running. This isn't a decision anymore, just how my body organizes itself around the practice. I draw in my belly button without any abdominal hardening, just enough to support my legs as they swing and flow into the next step. The patterns are there, sedimented into muscle memory.
Cognitive experience - individual meaning-making and awareness: I observe without judgment. I recall information and experiences and interactions throughout the day, considering them - my perspective and others' - as I almost appear beside or above them, watching again for clues I may have missed. I consider words that were used and hidden meanings. I consider emotions, visible ones and those floating under the surface or circling around. I categorize and classify. I commit to being more responsive, to breathing before I respond. And a small thank you to the nurse in my doctor's office who reminded me to do the same before taking my blood pressure - take a breath, you have arrived, you're here, breathe, then we'll start it.
Intersubjective experience - our relation with specific others in shared worlds: I think about other people and sometimes put myself in their shoes as I run, considering their perspectives along with my own. This time, my mind wanders to a close childhood friend whose sibling is undergoing stage 4 cancer treatment. I bought myself a pair of Saucony special edition shoes themed for her city of residence as a connection point. With each step and breath I think about her and wish her well, wondering if I can send her support and love to carry her through this as she supports her sibling. I run to support her. I also run for her sibling. Running is a way for me to choose life, to choose positively, to choose breath - the connection of mind, body, and relationship that I need to thrive while she holds her grief and uncertainty. My practice grounds me so I can hold space for her from a distance.
There are times when this relational awareness leads to emotional release - tears, anger, a suspension of breath. But running enables me to breathe through it. With each breath, I scan my body noting where I'm gripping - sometimes in my lower back, but usually my throat. I gently guide my inhale to these places of tension, a strategy I learned from yogasana, to meet and then release it. My shoulders drop. My core becomes an anchor for my pendulum legs. My arms swing evenly from my shoulders, bent at the elbow, hands relaxed with fingers slightly curled, free of grip.
Discursive experience - cultural meanings and institutional attitudes about bodies: There's a family culture at play here from my childhood - a family that needed movement but didn't prioritize it. Running bridges body and mind for me in ways that are both cultural and interpersonal. It could be a shared practice, but it also serves as a necessary escape that helps me stay present with myself and with others. In my experience, academic institutions promote mindfulness and self-care but don't create conditions for sustaining them, assuming introduction is adequate without cultivating a culture that actually prioritizes the practice. Running serves as my version of this discipline, an invisible practice that remains professionally unrecognized even though it helps my mind and body function better at work. As Nicholas Thompson writes in The Running Ground, "I think it makes me better at my job." When I maintain a running practice, I am more focused at work, more disciplined, more mindful of my time and constraints, better able to move through them intentionally, sensitively, and in relation to others.
This return also carries gratitude for having a body that eventually carried a baby to full term. Alongside that gratitude lives a wish that my body could return to its former strength, or even surpass it if I rebuild this practice with intention and systematic attunement. The relationship to productivity has shifted too. The "shoulds" that defined my academic years no longer drive me. Now I ask different questions: What is strategic? What makes the most sense? Where do I want to improve and spend my time? Any time I spend on this practice now means time away from my family, and I'm not willing to trade that as easily as I once did.
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The ease of this return was not something I expected, but I appreciated it. This kind of ease has not always been there. For most of my life, my body resisted running rather than relaxing into it.
But I am beginning to understand how containment itself cultivates ease. The schedule means committing to specific days and times with consistent preparation and attention. Muscle memory builds through repetition. The observation of breath and body becomes more refined each time. Containment is not restriction - it is the structure that allows something to settle, to become familiar enough that ease can emerge.
The year I moved to New York City, I bought a pair of special edition Saucony sneakers with the subway theme on them. It was a moment of transition. I hoped running would carry me through, though I did not know if or how I would be running in the city. I embraced the life transition with a commitment to a practice that had given me space to reconnect my mind and body through the repetitive, simple, rewarding action of putting one foot in front of the other.
Running in the city didn't work for me, however. There was always something pulling my attention outward - a restaurant I had not noticed before, a building I had been curious about, a new coffee shop I wanted to remember for later. The visual stimulation was constant, and my mind stayed engaged with the external world rather than turning inward. The mind-body connection I was seeking kept getting interrupted by everything the city wanted to show me. Without access to a track or a consistent outdoor path, I turned to the treadmill instead.
The treadmill provided the containment the city streets could not. It eliminated the external stimuli that competed for my attention. When the equipment had a cable connection, I would put on repeat episodes of shows I had already seen, programs that required no real attention. Sometimes I ran at eleven at night when the gym was empty. The familiar images on the screen gave my eyes something to rest on without demanding cognitive engagement, leaving my awareness free to turn toward my body. The container - predictable, repetitive, unchanging - allowed me to draw inward.
At my peak, running multiple miles comfortably, I found myself gazing at my own reflection - sometimes in the mirror, sometimes at the window in front of me, sometimes at the treadmill screen itself. My focus settled on my throat, the place where I have always held my emotions. I could feel it clear and open as I breathed. My eyes would rest at the base of my throat where it meets my chest, and I would simply go. My body rose and fell with each step while my throat remained steady.
I developed a breathing rhythm over the years, though it took time to discover what my body needed. When I was younger, I would gasp for breath while running, exhaling through my mouth in a way that felt desperate and uncontrolled. At some point during those treadmill sessions, while my gaze rested on my throat in the reflection, I experimented with breathing through my nose instead. The shift was subtle but significant. Nasal breathing helped me direct the breath more deliberately - drawing air from my belly into my lungs on the inhale, then releasing it fully on the exhale before beginning the cycle again. The rhythm became natural only through repetition.
Sustaining the practice for me, however, has less to do with technique than with far more mundane barriers. If I miss my morning window, I worry about having to shower twice or change clothes an extra time. These concerns feel trivial when I see how other people manage to fit running into their lives. People run during lunch breaks, squeeze in miles between meetings, lace up their shoes after work or class. They carve out time whenever space opens in their schedules. A friend of mine - a mother of three and a professor - ran once for the full forty minutes we chatted on the phone. When people prioritize themselves and what genuinely sustains them, they choose not to settle for substitutes that might not provide the same nourishment.
Today has been packed with meetings, and I have not yet managed to run. I might fit in a session tonight, even though it falls outside my preferred time. Or maybe I'll choose another form of moving meditation today and commit to resuming running tomorrow. The discipline I am building emerges through exactly these kinds of decisions - choosing the practice even when circumstances are not ideal, adapting when necessary, committing to what my body and mind genuinely need rather than what feels most convenient.
Will I ever run a ten-miler or attempt another substantial race? The answer might be yes, or it might be no. The uncertainty does not trouble me because I have stopped needing external benchmarks to validate the practice. What matters now is showing up routinely, maintaining my commitment even when it would be easier to skip, choosing this practice because of what it gives me rather than what it proves.
When I choose to run, I am choosing myself - choosing the integration of mind and body that allows me to be present first with myself, and then with others. This is the healing I need: a return to myself, to my breath, to what my body has always known it needed. This is the practice that helps me unlearn the "shoulds" about external achievement and embody the choice to prioritize what actually sustains me.
Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D., is the founder of Ecological Learning Partners LLC.
