How the Power of Now Helped Me Run Longer

There’s two things you have to understand about me before you read this.

1) I’ve never been a very “spiritual” person.

2) I've always been in relatively good physical shape all my life.

Okay, now that we’ve covered those two basics, I can attempt to explain to you the strangest and most lovely experience I had a few months back. It will be very difficult to convey into words the nature and power of this experience, but I’ll try my best. But be warned, if you don’t consider yourself spiritual either, you might find it difficult to grasp what I’m about to tell you. But no matter, because maybe you’ll also find this helpful in your own way.

Anyways, here it goes.

So a few months back, I was in Bangkok. I was trying to be good about working out regularly because I find that I get anxious and sad when I don’t. So I began to run pretty often. I enjoyed it because you don’t need any machines to assist you, you just go. It was simple, and primal, and I liked that. It also feels freeing to just have your feet move you wherever you want on this Earth, and having your mind just get lost in the repetitive motion and the good tunes you put together.

Ah the music! I would work hard to make the perfect workout playlist to get me pumped and ready for a run. I like weird shit, so it was a strange and jumbled mix like all my mixes, but it would do the job. As long as it had a high bpm that got me really psyched up, it’d work. A little Kanye, a little Major Lazor, a little Mary J. Blige (“Work That” is a workout banger!), a little Beyonce (okay a lot Beyonce..), a few electro swing beats, a little Calle 13, Gorillaz, Nas and the occasional Busta Rhymes and maybe some random classics from Rage Against the Machine. I won’t bore you anymore with my specific musical tastes, but the main point is that all the songs I ran to were very fast-paced and upbeat jams.

The point was to have music that would take me into a state of mind where I wouldn’t want to quit. This was because I sucked at running. I tended to give up soon after beginning each session, so the fast music put an extra spring in my step and sort of upped my tolerance for the exhaustion that running put me through. I was surprisingly bad at running considering the amount of time I spent doing it. I kept a pretty slow pace and always tapped out around 4 kilometers even though I went out twice per week.

But something changed one day in Bangkok. I met someone at a hostel who told me they listened to audiobooks when they ran. Huh, fascinating! It got me thinking, if they can run long distances while listening to something that calms them instead of hypes them, why don’t I try listening to really slow music on my next run and see what happens. So I put together a playlist consisting mostly of Ravi Shankar. The slowest and most relaxing music I could think of.

I didn’t have high hopes, but my mission was simply to complete the usual 4km. So I went to the park, put in my headphones and started to stretch. It felt weird, because this was usually about when I would start getting pumped, start singing along to the beats, maybe do a few jumping stretches and prepare myself mentally for the run. But this gentle, slow Indian sitar was a complete 180 to all of that. It could rock me to sleep. I felt more like making a hot cup of peppermint tea, and I thought to myself “How the fuck am I going to run 4km to this?”

But I knew I had to at least give it a try. So I did. I was off to a slow and steady pace, but felt good. I felt surprisingly light, and had a clear head. It didn’t really feel like a heavy workout though, it felt more like slow yoga. I sped up and held about the same speed as when I usually ran, but something was off this time. My heart wasn’t racing. I wasn’t gasping for a breath and constantly stuck in the head game of ‘just a little bit further!’. And before I knew it, I had already run 2 laps on the 2km Benjakitti Park track. That’s 4 kilometers I ran without even a struggle! That had NEVER happened before! It was a mind-blowing realization, really. It’s as if time slowed down with me and never even let my exhaustion kick in because my heart was pumping slow and steady.

“How is this possible?” I thought. “What sorcery is this?” I decided to go on, and realized that my heart rate was so low that the mere thought about how low it was and how well I was doing was the only thing that raised it. So I calmed myself down and just kept a clear head and steady pace and kept moving. I then had an epiphany. A stupid epiphany that was so obvious I wanted to facepalm right then and there during my run. I realized I should really be striving for a low heart beat when I run so I can last for longer distances and not tire out so quickly. But I always associated working out with a high heart-rate and a super-fast pace to get the most out of it, so I never even considered the opposite until now. Wow, I felt so stupid that it took me so long to realize this! “I’m 24 goddamnit, why didn’t anyone ever tell me this before??”

But I decided to consider the why later and focus on the now, well, now. I cleared my mind and just focused on exactly what I was doing and where I was. I focused on my breath, on the feeling of each foot hitting the pavement, what I saw in front of me, the smells in the air, even the taste in my mouth. I focusing on what I was experiencing right now through all of my sensory perceptions. I recently got into lucid dreaming, and I decided to treat this moment as if I had just woken up in a dream. I imagined none of this was real, the track wasn’t real, the buildings weren’t real, the other runners weren’t real, even my own body I was running with wasn’t real. I imagined it was all just a dream. Fleeting and beautiful, and for brief moments of the run, something quite magical happened.

This is the part that gets difficult to explain. Because, from the outside, nothing really changed. One minute I was running, and the next minute I was still running. So what, right? But from the inside, everything changed. In an instant, everything became magical and ethereal to me. The birds’ songs were intensely beautiful, the other runners beside me were fascinating, the sky, the buildings, the trees, everything was incredible to experience. Life was incredible, and all the mundane sights around me suddenly became intensely beautiful and mystical. It was as if I had just gained the gift of sight for the first time and studied and appreciated everything so deeply almost to the point of crying. But it wasn’t just that. To breath, to see, to be able to think thoughts, to occupy this body. It might not be a real body, I thought, but to have the ability to run and have it for this glorious moment right now was enough. Because that’s all the matters. Right here. Right now.

I put my hands out in front of me while still running. I stared at them. But they didn’t feel like my hands. They were this body’s hands but they weren’t my hands. (That one’s a tough one to explain, but it’s really just one of those things you have to experience to understand..) It was all quite transcendental, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t normally experience these types of things. That’s why this moment had such an intense impact on me.

In a way, it felt as if I was wearing virtual reality goggles, and was experiencing a computerized world. Imagine for a moment that you were given these highly-developed VR goggles meant to mimic the real world perfectly. You put them on and look around and everything is as it should be. Everything you see is normal as any other given day of the week. But it’s special because you know it’s all fake. What you see is all computerized and doesn’t actually exist. How would you feel? A bit shocked at how life-like everything looked? Would you marvel at all the mundane things like a simple leaf on the sidewalk and think “wow, so cool!”? Would you feel a bit overwhelmed? Would it be eerie or scary at all? Or perhaps just mesmerizing for the mind-altering experience of it all?

Well that’s what it felt like. At least as best as I can put it into words. The full-blown experience only lasted a few moments at a time, but I held onto those moments while on my run. I cherished them. This is what the power of now does. At least as I’ve personally experienced it. I never really got it until this happened, I’ve heard it and thought I got it, but I didn’t really until now.

Realizing nothing was real, and having my body not succumb to exhaustion made me also appreciate the mind-body connection so much more since it proved that pain and fatigue really were mostly in the head. I was able to complete 3 laps that day, running a total of 6km in one go. I felt like I could have run even more but it was getting dark, so I stopped.

After I ended my run, I was amazed with myself. Shocked. I never knew something as simple as changing my running music would cause such a shift in me. It became such an intensely spiritual and meditative experience that pushed the physical limits of my body further than ever before. I knew I had to explore this further. So two days later, I returned to the same park, Ravi Shankar in my ears, and hit the track. And to my amazement, I ran a full 10km before stopping! So in less than a week’s time, I went from barely making it to 4km each run, to running 10km and feeling fine (obviously tired, but not gasping for air). Holy smokes! I was so thrilled at the results! (Who knows, maybe there’s a marathon in my future!) And if it only took me a week to improve that much, it must mean that I had the physical power in me all along. I just had to unlock my mental power to realize it.

Each time I was deep within the current moment (the power of now), I would stop being tired. I wasn’t struggling as much. My mind overcame the physical exhaustion I was experiencing. My legs were tired, I felt that. But because I didn’t really think of it as my body, my legs being tired didn’t translate to me being tired. As if I was just simply observing my exhaustion, not experiencing it. And that is such an incredibly powerful spiritual tool to have for anyone interested in physical fitness! It almost feels like cheating..

And maybe this was another step on my spiritual path of self-discovery. I don’t know yet. I simply don’t know. This is all new to me, and to be honest, what I’m discovering about myself and the abilities I’ve been unlocking in me contradicts what I knew to be true and possible in this world. It’s like I’m lifting the curtains, and the curtains behind the curtains to see outside for the first time. I have a hunch that this whole transformation, both physical and spiritual, is leading me somewhere to some bigger purpose. I don’t know what that is yet, I just know it’s out there and I’ll find it when I’m ready. I’m just starting my journey now, but I’ll get there in time.

I feel a little lost and confused about all of this at the moment. But I find that I’m starting to meet much more spiritual people much more often in my life. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence either. The old me would have, but the new me feels it can’t be. I’m beginning to understand more and more, how our thoughts really do shape this world. If you believe something to be true, then it becomes true. I know I can run far because of the power of now, and I will. My hopes is someone else can learn from this too.