Experiences with effortlessness and flow

In my own athletic days, it would be fair to say performances were variable. Absolutely terrible races could be followed quite closely by (for me) quite good ones. The key feature of these good races were that they all felt ‘effortless’, even though the fact that they often left me destroyed for hours would suggest they were anything but. I could never understand why some races felt so easy whereas the others felt terrible, and I always used to end up thinking ‘just think how fast it would have been if I tried harder’. This could all suggest that performance was determined by perception of effort changing between races for some reason, although I think there is more to it than this. The important feature seems to be that there was NO (conscious) sensation of effort. Instead there was an absolute awareness of what was going on around me and what I actually needed to do at any point. I clearly remember one race in the Netherlands where things seemed to almost be in slow motion and I was thinking extremely clearly and calculatingly throughout. In hindsight all these good races displayed the characteristics of being in ‘Flow’.

Unfortunately it was not possible to routinely get into this condition, and many other races were characterised by over thinking (i.e. worry). However, looking back there did seem to be some common features of events leading up to the good races. The first one (surprisingly) is that preparation for the races were often ‘disastrous’. On the afternoon of my first ever sub 4 minute 1500m I was happily sitting on the grass with my mum and dad eating a Kit Kat when my coach asked me why I wasn’t warming up. I had failed to keep up with changes to the meet timetable and was unaware that the event had moved forward 90 minutes. Cue a panic, swift change into spikes and a couple of strides before lining up. Similarly, preparations for my 800m pb were awful. The race took place on a Wednesday evening in Watford and I was living in Penzance at the time. It seemed a good idea to travel up on the day of the race on the train. Unfortunately the train ran super slow all the way before breaking down completely at Reading. There then followed a wait for a replacement and then a sprint across London from Paddington involving the Underground and a taxi, all the while thinking there was no way I’d get to the venue in time. I got there with minutes to spare, pinning my number on as I ran to the start. Shortly afterwards I’d run much faster than ever before and was busy being sick in the bushes. There were other similar cases, but the point seems to be that poor prep often led to good performances (I guess one other explanation is that warming up is overrated and that the elaborate processes normally followed could have been detrimental).

The other key feature in achievement of these states seemed to be that often there was no clear goal in place. For example, if an event involved heats and finals over two days, I would sometimes scrape through the heats by the skin of my teeth after considerable effort. Often that meant ‘goal achieved’, i.e. made the final. The next day then I’d be happy as Larry and not too stressed at all – any good results were simply a bonus and I was just pleased to be on the start line. This situation ALWAYS resulted in a good performance. Similarly, if I’d be invited to some ‘big’ / international event, then it would usually result in a good run.

So.. in my case achievement of flow appeared to be key to good performance (this is not unusual), but this was an unpredictable business. These performances were not necessarily characterised by low perceptions of effort, but rather by no awareness of effort at all. However, disastrous planning and preparation, lack of warm up, and lack of any real goals seemed to be key.

Life, society, and the herd

Thoughts on the use of psychometric scales

andrewrenfree

Prompted by a recent social media discussion about the differences between perceived exertion and perceived effort, I have been thinking about the use of psychometric scales generally in trying to understand the regulation of exercise performance, and wonder if the time has come to try some other approaches.

My thoughts are relatively simple:

• It seems like the academic community cannot agree on the subtleties of what the various scales are actually telling us. If we don’t really understand what we are measuring then what hope has an experimental participant actually got?
• Even if we can nail down exactly what each scale is actually measuring, I wonder how well participants can really identify what they feel or experience during a maximal exercise test. If I was to invent a general ‘feeling badness’ scale, I am confident that ‘badness’ would increase as exercise progressed. Are we really just measuring ‘badness’ regardless of…

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Thoughts on how to improve pacing ability in runners

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the mechanisms through which athletic pacing is achieved. However, long before doing this I have completed in hundreds of athletic events with varying degrees of success (In fact he whole reason I became interested in pacing and regulation of exercise intensity was because I was not very good at it – some may consider that this invalidates everything I am about to write!). I think it’s really important to try and bridge the gap between science and practice, so based on my theorising and experience thought I would try to summarise my own thoughts on how we can develop pacing ability in runners. I don’t claim that any of this is particularly novel or groundbreaking, but if anybody ever does read this hopefully it might provide some ideas.

To start with, it is important to emphasise that pacing is the ability to distribute work rate over the duration of an event (through the process of teleoanticipation) rather than simply the ability to hit specific paces / speeds over various shorter distances. For this reason I don’t think that the common approach of learning to run at goal pace over shorter distances than will be raced is on its own the best way to develop pacing ability. I’m not suggesting runs of various lengths at different speeds are unimportant, and there are various good biomechanical and physiological reasons for training at a variety of paces. However, what is really needed is to learn the ability to distribute effort over distances close to that which will eventually be raced. This doesn’t necessarily mean a training schedule effectively consisting of continual maximal effort time trials over race distances, but it does mean that athletes should become fully accustomed to runs over these distances at ‘good efforts’. This can be achieved through various combinations of interval / repetition sessions. When racing 1500m I would frequently run 5-6x1500m ‘tempo’ sessions on the track over the winter – these would obviously be well below actual race speed, but nonetheless helped make running three and three quarter laps feel automatic. In Peter Coe’s books about Seb’s training he described one of the main purposes of his famous 6x800m sessions on the road as being to get him used to running fast over the actual race distance on several occasions in the same workout (he also used to use a very slight downhill in order to allow speeds closer to those used in competition).

There are other reasons why I am not a fan of the ‘goal pace’ approach. Firstly, I just don’t see how it is possible to set a goal pace that is an accurate reflection of an athlete’s potential. How could you know? At best this will be an educated guess. If you are lucky you will get it right, but if you are wrong you could either end up with overly conservative pacing strategies, or pie in the sky unachievable goals leading to underperformance / frustration / overtraining. Secondly, ‘goal pace’ feels very different when you have a number pinned on, you are very motivated, surrounded by competitors, and tapered, than it does at a deserted track on a cold windy Tuesday evening. In my own experience I often found it almost impossible to run 200m at race pace in training sessions, when I could stick nearly 8 of them together in a race a few days later. It can be quite demoralising to be unable to run very far at a pace you hope to maintain for a considerable distance in competition.

This all has implications for how the stopwatch is used in training. My own preference (which may well differ from the typical approach) is to suggest the watch is used as evidence of what has happened rather than to prescribe what should happen. So.. rather than prescribe rep times to be achieved along with intermediate splits, I suggest there may be some value in having the athlete run reps without any set target times or feedback on splits during them. Rather, the coach can provide feedback on pacing within the rep (e.g. first half 3 s faster than the second). I can see reasons for and against informing athletes of overall times achieved, but my overall feelings are that the watch is often overused.

Another factor that needs to be considered is that overall pacing strategies are easily disrupted by the presence of other athletes. Again, I will go back to Peter Coe’s sessions with Seb. In the build up to the 84 Olympics, apparently Sunday mornings were spent running very fast long reps on the track at Haringey. Although Seb would run the entire session (I seem to recall a typical session was something like 1200, 2×800, 600, 2×400) a number of other runners would jump in and out of the reps at various points in order to help maintain the high pace and also generally disrupt things by providing a bit of ‘argy bargy’. Of course, nothing is more specific than running a race in developing all of these abilities, suggesting that a carefully planned racing programme is vital to assist in the ability to pace appropriately (as well as assisting in developing tactical abilities which are very different from the overall strategic approach deployed)

So… no rocket science there, but hopefully some potentially useful practical ideas.

Thoughts on the use of psychometric scales

Prompted by a recent social media discussion about the differences between perceived exertion and perceived effort, I have been thinking about the use of psychometric scales generally in trying to understand the regulation of exercise performance, and wonder if the time has come to try some other approaches.

My thoughts are relatively simple:

• It seems like the academic community cannot agree on the subtleties of what the various scales are actually telling us. If we don’t really understand what we are measuring then what hope has an experimental participant actually got?
• Even if we can nail down exactly what each scale is actually measuring, I wonder how well participants can really identify what they feel or experience during a maximal exercise test. If I was to invent a general ‘feeling badness’ scale, I am confident that ‘badness’ would increase as exercise progressed. Are we really just measuring ‘badness’ regardless of the actual scale used?
• My final thought is that we may be overlooking a fundamental problem with using scales to investigate how performance is regulated. The root of the problem is that we cannot measure everything, so therefore must decide in advance of our experiment what we are going to measure. So… if you ask a participant what their RPE (or any other measure you like) is they will be ‘forced’ to give you a number, regardless of whether or not this reflects their thoughts immediately prior to you holding the scale in front of their face. Now, I’m aware that this is very anecdotal, but when I’m exercising I’m not thinking in terms of numbers. What I actually think about could be any of a number of things ranging from what the opposition are doing, how fast I’m going, how my techniques is holding together, what I’m having for tea tonight etc. None of these involve my (conscious) awareness of exertion / effort / fatigue or anything else that can be measured on a scale. If these things are somehow how I regulate myself then they must be doing so at a subconscious level, so there is no point asking me about them as I don’t know about them!

How do we get around these problems to further our understanding of how exercise performance is regulated? Maybe a good way to start would be to let participants tell us what they were thinking about instead of measuring the things we think they should be thinking about!

Thoughts on how to have a ‘good’ run

It seems to be fairly well established that effective training routines for endurance athletes are characterised by the fact that the majority (~80%) of the work is performed at low to moderate intensities. Put simply, this means that runners should be spending most of their training time ‘jogging’ around relatively slowly rather than performing ‘exciting’ interval sessions. It therefore seems obvious that ideally these runs are as enjoyable as possible. If they become a chore then I suspect that continuing to persevere for days / weeks / months on end is a sure-fire route to ego-depletion (defined as depletion of a limited pool of mental resources due to continual engagement in tasks requiring will power or self-control) and a consequent loss of motivation to continue with the work. Here then are some of my thoughts on how we may best reduce the likelihood of this work becoming a ‘chore’:

• Do the running in a nice natural environment. This suggestion is backed up by both scientific evidence (e.g. this paper suggests exposure to a natural environment may counteract ego-depletion http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25310796) and my own experience. Just this morning I ran for 90 minutes along the banks of the River Severn. I’m a bit of a ‘twitcher’, and during the course of this run was able to see Canada Geese, Long Tailed Tits, green Woodpeckers, and Buzzards in addition to the usual sparrows, gulls etc. There were also plenty of cows and sheep to talk to! Despite being a relatively long run, the time on feet seemed no ordeal. This is in complete contrast to the typical run around the roads in town on a dark evening after work. Most of the time is spent dodging traffic and it’s very tempting to cut the run short, as frankly it’s often not even slightly enjoyable. When I started running I used to run on the beach and dunes at Gwithian (below) on a near daily basis, and still do now whenever possible. Its often worth a longish drive in order to get to somewhere nice to run.
• Whenever possible try to do your running at the time of day when you are least mentally fatigued. This issue of training when mentally fatigued has received a considerable amount of attention lately. I look at things slightly differently to some people in that for the typical athlete with a full time job and kids etc I think there is little need to deliberately train in this condition. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of us are continually mentally fatigued to some extent anyway. My thinking is therefore that the best ‘bang for your buck’ is likely to come from maximising physiological adaptation to training by making the quality (or in this context I guess the volume) as good as possible. In the case of an elite full-time athlete I think there is sufficient evidence to suggest occasionally training in a mentally fatigued state is a legitimate additional training tool. (I suspect there is some degree of overlap between this suggestion and the one above – when running around in the dark after work, not only is the environment not the best, but mental fatigue is also high. For this reason I personally find it best to do the majority of training early in the morning before the working day)
• I don’t know why, but it seems to be far superior to run a designated ‘route’ than it is to run for a set amount of time. By doing the latter you tend to spend much of the run looking at your watch wondering how much longer you need to carry on for. I’m also not a fan of timing every single run – this just leads to becoming competitive with yourself and potentially running too fast.
• Bad weather and terrain often leads to a good run. Provided you are dressed properly, there’s something about battling into a howling gale or trying to keep your footing on rough ground that tends to keep you in the present rather than thinking too far ahead. I suppose you could say that this type of environment is more likely to lead to the achievement of flow state.
• I m neutral on the need for the presence of training partners, and suspect this depends on the individual personality. I’m notoriously antisocial and miserable and am therefore happy to rack up the miles largely alone. However, I can also believe that others will get more out of running with a group.

Ernst van Aaken: Bonkers or simply ahead of his time?

I like reading old coaching & training literature, and have a good collection of the classic texts on training for endurance events. However, one stands out as being particularly interesting because although on first reading it may come across as very ‘extreme’ (absolutely bonkers in some respects), to some extent the author may be considered to have been proposing ideas years ahead of his time.

The book I refer to is The Van Aaken Method, which is not really even a ‘proper’ book – it is actually a collection of separate articles translated into English from the authors native German. Ernest Van Aaken was a German medical doctor who became convinced that long duration low intensity endurance exercise in combination with a diet consisting of very small quantities of minimally processed foods was the route to good health. Although he was more concerned about health than performance, a number of his athletes achieved remarkable success through following his methods.

With regards to the exercise part of the Van Aaken method, then the recommendations are incredibly simple. He summarised them as:

-Run daily, run slowly

-Run many miles, many times your racing distance if you are track runner

-Run no faster during tempo runs than you would in a race

He also gave more detailed advice in that “endurance mileage” is related to “tempo mileage” in a ratio of approximately 10-20:1.  In this respect his recommendations seem very similar to more recent proposals by Stephen Seiler (http://www.sportsci.org/2009/ss.htm) and Carl Foster (http://journals.humankinetics.com/ijspp-current-issue/ijspp-volume-10-issue-1-january/in-quest-of-the-unified-field-theory-of-exercise-training). Van Aaken gives very few precise details of exactly how this ratio is achieved. Within the book he suggests a 5k runner could run e.g 12x400m or 5x1000m at target race pace (with full recoveries), but elsewhere also suggests the same benefits could be achieved with one ‘tempo run’ at the end of each days endurance run. At the 2009 ECSS Conference in Oslo after a presentation at one of the symposia I asked the speaker if he had any opinions on whether it is preferable to do all the quality work in one dedicated session, or to spread it evenly throughout the week. His response was that he thought it best to do it all in one go in order to allow full recovery from the quality work before repeating.  I can fully understand this point of view, however I’m not so sure exactly what my opinion on this issue is at the moment.

Another point that Van Aaken continually emphasises throughout his writing is that training should be ‘playful’. At one stage he says:

“Training that takes a playful form…constantly regenerates the organism, while continuous repetition of near-maximal stresses…become dangerous because of psychic stress”

Interestingly, he noted that the athlete who trains too intensively:

“suffered insomnia, nervous irritation, and also more and more lacked the will to train”.

At the same 2009 Oslo Conference I referred to earlier, another speaker gave a fascinating presentation on Long Slow Distance Training. If I recall correctly he seemed to suggest that he did not know exactly how it worked but did propose that it may have had some effect on the brain that allowed it to tolerate higher levels of physical stress. He also quoted Joe Henderson’s 1969 book ‘Long Slow Distance: the Human Way to Train’ (http://www.joehenderson.com/longslowdistance/) when saying “LSD is not so much a training method as a recovery method”. When reading Henderson’s writings he frequently refers to Van Aaken’s work himself.

I don’t intend getting too much into the details of his dietary recommendations other than to say that he was recommending training with low glycogen stores and very much suggesting that the need for a high carbohydrate intake has been exaggerated (I’m staying out of that debate).

As stated at the start, some of his suggestions were frankly ‘bonkers’ (e.g. 5 training sessions a day, 2-3 hours sleep a night, and 1000 calories a day for hard training athletes). Nonetheless, he did suggest that the most important factor determining the extent to which an athlete improves is the quantity of the training performed. There seems little outlined in his general proposals that do not appear to stand the test of time (he also refuses to write sample schedules, something that I like very much).

Can we view the runners body as an economic system?

Many running texts seemingly make what is a very simple sport appear very complicated. This is especially the case when it comes to physiological explanations for energy supply and fatigue, training, and training adaptations. In order to make some of these ideas a little more user friendly, I have wondered if there is any mileage in attempting to use an economic analogy to summarise the way the body adapts and responds to training and competition. It’s a long time since I did A Level Economics, so there are almost certainly some errors / misconceptions in here somewhere – nonetheless, how about this for a starter? What needs to be added?

The runner’s body contains a vast array of physiological ‘resources’. These consist of energy substrates such as glycogen & fat stores, as well as the bodies ‘machinery’ (i.e. muscle cells, blood, major organs etc). If (and this is a big if!) they are effectively utilised in competition, then the athlete with more resources should beat the athlete with less resources. The aim of the athlete wishing to improve performance should therefore be to maximise the number of resources available to them so that they have more to ‘spend’ on the day of competition.

The primary means of increasing physiological resources in the long term is via training. Training in itself is actually costly in terms of energy and resources (e.g. energy substrates are depleted), so should actually be viewed as an investment. This is defined as “Time, energy, or matter spent in hope of future benefits actualised”. In order to see any benefit from this investment, the athlete hopes to see some returns on it, but this will depend on the general economic conditions. This is a really important point. General economic conditions are the general state of the economy, and are influenced by numerous micro and macroeconomic factors. With regards to the competitive athlete then, this would cover elements such as quality and quantity of nutrition and hydration, sleep, and general lifestyle stressors. It would seem that the better the general economic conditions, then the larger investment the athlete can safely make and the greater the returns that may be realised.  Of course, if the athlete makes too big or too frequent investments, or the general state of the economy is poor, then there is a risk of default, and the athlete’s body is effectively bankrupt.

One other element that I think can be built into this model at this stage is the overall feel good factor. It seems that when this is high, people are more likely to make risky investments. This would again fit with the growing body of academic research suggesting exercise performance is related to general mood and emotional state.

That’s a starter anyway – anything else obvious that needs to be added to this model?

About this blog…

I consider myself to have been a ‘runner’ since the age of 13. During this time I guess I have run over a 1000 races with varying degrees of success. I started running purely because I became the proud owner of a pair of New Balance 424’s (red white and blue) and thought that because I had a pair of proper running shoes should put them to use by entering the Penzance Pirates Rugby Club annual 6 mile fun run. At this event I was approached by a school Rural Science teacher (Ben Penberthy) who told me he was trying to put together a team to take part in the English Schools Cross Country Cup and asked if I would like to be involved. Things rapidly progressed to the point where I was training after school on a daily basis by running across the beach and sand dunes at Gwithian Towans with the rest of the team. Things continued like this until I left Cornwall for University, and I’ve continued to attempt to train and compete ever since.  I achieved some moderate success, but never moved beyond National level competition. The highlights of my career:

Personal Bests of 1.51 for 800m and 3.44 for 1500m

English Junior indoor 3000m champion

2 x Scottish Senior 1500m Champion

2 x finalist at British Senior 1500m Championships (4th indoors and 7th outdoors)

At University I studied Sport Science and Biology, and I currently lecture in Sport & Exercise Science at the University of Worcester. This seemed the obvious thing to study as I was sure it would lead me to the secrets of success that would propel me to international level. Unfortunately this never happened, as I now realise their is no magic training schedule that simply needs to be performed dilligently. However, in recent years I’ve been working on the regulation of exercise performance, and the decision-making process during self-paced endurance activity. Whilst I’m sure that the ideas I’ve developed are also by no means a magic bullet, I do think they help explain many of my own experiences and observations as a competitor (usually with the benefit of hindsight).

This blog then is a way in which I can from time to time commit my random thought processes to ‘paper’ as they come to me. The aim is to reflect on my own experiences (and those of others) in light of current thinking in the sport sciences and beyond. Because the plan is use this blog as a mechanism to allow the occasional ‘brain dump’, I have no intention of producing bibliographies for every post I make. Therefore I am more than happy to be corrected if anybody who actually reads this would like to point out any innacuracies or disagree with anything I say. In fact, given that a blog allows me to be more cavalier in writing and theorising than is possible in a peer reviewed academic journal, it would actually be nice if it were possible to generate some healthy debate.

Coming soon…. my thoughts on goal setting