Running As Flow Practice

“The run is white noise, a way to simply experience time as a body, a piston, that exists away from the mind and only in the body as a live reactive presence.”

Matthew Futterman, Running to the Edge (2019)

At home I move fast and bump into things. Shins knock the couch, flying elbows glance across door frames, hands hit counters. But outside, running, my clumsiness disappears as I glide over roads and sidewalks with aplomb. To run is, ideally, to be fluid in movement and experience the pleasures of a buoyant, revved up body coordination practice.

Watching runners run is a way to observe running form’s elegant flow. The greatest runners tend to look the most fluid, but every runner is a study in movement. Every runner runs differently, and we differ not just in our speed, but also in our style. Some runners exuberantly bound, others dutifully shuffle, some effortlessly cruise, others wobble. Running reveals form as style, style as rhythm, and rhythm as form. It’s circular: how we move is how we are.

Whether one’s running form is a matter of nature or nurture is a perennial debate. On the one hand, we can’t help how we run because it comes out of our physiology and our default sense of tempo. On the other hand, the more we run the better our form gets. At the very least, with practice we become more efficient at being what we already are.

The mechanism by which we improve is the practice of repetition and the repetition of practice. I like the old runner’s saying, Just put in the miles because it answers questions novice runners have about how to run better and how to improve their strength and endurance. It’s actually simple: run more, and make sure most of this running is easy, that way it will be a practice you can sustain. (If it doesn’t feel easy, slow down until it does. There’s no such thing as running too slow.) Just put in the miles is a powerful concept because it guarantees a level of exposure to a valuable physiological stress. Putting in the miles by definition entails spending the time on your feet all those miles require. When you run more you spend more time in rhymicized motion, and therefore more time adapting to the steady-state aerobic demands this motion places on your body. Generally speaking this means that the more you run the more efficient you become with your energy—you’re able to do more with less energy expenditure. This magical equation reminds me of something the French actress Sarah Bernhardt once said: “Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.” When you become more efficient, your moving creates energy and you feel more of running’s musical groove than its everyday struggle. Over time this groove becomes your fluid way of running, your flow practice.

In terms of technique, exemplarily fluid runners share three traits. First, their feet tend to strike the ground under—not ahead of—their body’s center of mass. This means they land on their forefeet, not their heels, minimizing the impact on their body by distributing its load among the ball of the foot, ankles, knees, and hips. Second, fluid runners have a slight forward lean which embodies running’s controlled, falling-forward orientation through space. Finally, fluid runners make running look easy by making it look beautiful. As Shane Benzie observes in The Lost Art Of Running, “the best way to create a body that moves beautifully is to move beautifully over and over again…”

Here are five superb runners:

Eliud Kipchoge: