Many of us start running to get fit or relieve stress, but for two exercising philosophers, the experience is much deeper than that. Mark Rowlands and Damon Young both say running is a liberating struggle that opens up experiences of existential choice and 'flow state' mindfulness, as Amanda Smith writes.

Mark Rowlands remembers a Saturday from his childhood in south-east Wales, when he ran all day across a nearby mountain.

'I left the house that morning with my dog Boots,' he recalls. 'And we just started running, and ran pretty much all day. Not for any particular reason but because there was no particular reason not to.'

'You don't need reasons to run when you are a kid or a dog.'

The joy you have going for a run, is not for anything, it's just a glimpse of what it is to be alive and to be happy for it. Damon Young, philosopher and runner



As adults, though, we mostly do need reasons to make the effort to exercise—usually for health.

But Rowlands, who's authored a book on the philosophical highs of running—Running with the Pack: Thoughts from the Road on Meaning and Mortality—says that at a certain point our reason for running has to return to this state of childlike joy.

Rowlands believes that amid all the things we do for the sake of achieving something else (work is the most obvious example), it's worth finding an activity that is an end in itself.

'Running was the medium through which I explored this idea that the meaning of life or what's important in life are those activities that we do for their own sake.'

In 2011, at 48, he ran his first marathon. Mostly Rowlands runs long distances independent of the formal structure of public races, but decided simply out of interest to register for the Miami marathon. A calf injury two months beforehand meant he'd barely run at all in the lead-up to the race. As he puts it, he just showed up and picked up his race package to keep his options open. With the same attitude, he found himself at the starting line embarking on the 26 mile (42 kilometre) distance with the pack.

'I started struggling around the 14–15 mile mark and it got worse and worse.'

Hitting the wall, however, led to a philosophical awakening.

'I have all these reasons to stop, but still they can't make me stop.'

Rowlands believes this is what the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre calls the purest experience of freedom that's possible for creatures like us.

'The freedom consists of the fact that I am beyond the authority of reasons.'

The Australian philosopher Damon Young has had similar experiences with ecstatic exercise. He says that what gets you started on an exercise regime as an adult isn't necessarily what keeps you going. In his own case, he says 'I just realised I was getting old and fat, and part of having children was that sense of seeing myself in the future as a parent and wanting to be active and fit.'

Somewhere along the way though, the instrumental reasons started to fall away.

'The joy you have going for a run is not for anything, it's just a glimpse of what it is to be alive and to be happy for it.'

Young finds something similar with indoor rock-climbing. 'You can't say the ref was against me or the other player cheated. It forces you to confront your pettiness or your flaws or your lack of attention.'

In this state of coping mindfully with a challenging physical activity, you can achieve what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls 'the flow state', Young says. This is the extraordinary feeling that you are perfectly in the moment and perfectly able to skilfully execute the activity. What fascinates Young is that in order to find this state he thinks you need the humility to know that it's just you, the wall, gravity and nothing else.

'The humility is what allows you that existential payoff', he says.

Philosophical running Sunday 14 July 2013 Two modern-day philosophers who are also runners meditate on the physical. Listen to the conversation at The Body Sphere. More This [series episode segment] has image, and transcript

But what about fun? After all, public runs are often called 'fun runs'. Rowlands acknowledges that running can be fun. When everything is going right it's the closest thing to flying that he can imagine. However, these are fleeting moments and it's a mistake to run in search of fun. The word, he notes, comes from the Anglo Saxon 'fonnen' which means to befool or trick. It carries the sense of being a lure.

'It distracts us from just how much of our lives have become dominated by an endless cycle of doing one thing for the sake of something else in order to get something else and so on.'

Rowlands remains more interested in thinking of fun, or happiness, as a recognition of certain things that are worth doing for their own sake.

'Long runs can be very, very unpleasant.'

'But still I'd say even when I'm struggling badly, I'm happy.'

Mark Rowlands is the author of Running with the Pack: Thoughts from the Road on Meaning and Mortality, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. Damon Young is in the process of writing a book about exercise for the School of Life series by Pan Macmillan UK, tentatively titled How to Exercise Intelligently, due out January 2014, and is an Honorary Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Find out more at The Body Sphere.

