How The Scientific Attitude Can Help Your Running
The Scientific Attitude has three core elements: Curiosity, Skepticism and Humility.
When working in a scientific field, these traits are elemental to doing good work. If you aren’t curious about why something is, you will not start to think about it. If you aren’t practising healthy scepticism, you will take every piece of information for face value. Last but not least, if you aren’t humble, you will have a hard time recognising where your assumptions, thoughts, or beliefs might be wrong.
I came across the Scientific Attitude when learning about psychology. Since then I regularly think about it. I realised I should apply it to my running.
In the end, the Scientific Attitude is a mental framework. It helps you to think critically. It helps you to uncover your own biases. It helps you to do things you might not have thought possible. Especially for running, I realised it can unlock a new level of motivation and purpose.
The Mental Trinity
When I thought more about the different elements, took them apart and thought about what they mean for me in the context of running I realised that they play together very well.
It is like a little flywheel.
Curiosity takes the role of lighting a fire. Placing a spark.
Scepticism helps to keep the fire under control.
Humility will help you light new fires even if you (inevitably) lose control of the last one.
This all still sounds very abstract. Let's get concrete.
How to Light a Fire
It never occurred to me that I started running because I was curious. I thought I started because I was feeling drained and kind of depressed and was looking for something that would bring me joy and help me feel better in my own skin. But actually, it was because someone made me curious about it.
My sister started running a few months before I started. Hearing her stories about struggling to get out of the door and then struggling to run (because let's be honest every runner's journey starts very humbling) but then coming home with a better mood and a deep sense of accomplishment sounded interesting.
I was curious if it would help me the same way. If it could lift me out of the hole I was in back then. (It did).
Curiosity lights a fire. It’s essential questions like “Can I do this?”, “Why shouldn’t I do …?”, “When I do X I imagine Y is going to happen”, or a simple “What is my dream?”.
The questions you ask yourself are personal. I can’t tell you yours. Everyone is curious in a different way.
I’m curious about the human potential. How can it be improved? What is mine? What can I learn from the top of the field? How does heat training work? Why is every top performer not only working on their physical fitness but also their mental one? How can I strive for my limit but still have fun?
I guess the only question would be: What are you curious about?
How to Control a Fire
You could boil down curiosity to being the why you run. If so, you could say that scepticism would be the how.
Skepticism helps you ask the right questions. It’s reading about training philosophies and asking yourself how this fits with your values. What it makes you feel. What do you agree with? What you don’t.
You ask yourself questions like “Is my current training approach the right one for me?”, “Do I really need to train more?”, “How hard should I push in a training session?” or “Do I actually need to race?”.
You don’t assume that what everyone is doing is the best way to do it. You start to evaluate if you should change your approach. You fine-tune what you are doing. You test new things and observe what happens.
A few years ago I started training by Jason Koop’s Framework. My sessions were all roughly the same intensity. Over a block, I reduced the volume of said intensity to not get injured. I regularly cycled through different intensities. It's a super simplified run down right now but generally, this worked super well for me. I wasn’t injured often. I pushed my limit regularly. I was getting faster week after week. But after roughly a year I started to get injured more often. I pushed a bit too much during some blocks. I didn’t recover well anymore. Blocks also got longer the lower the intensity, meaning I would sometimes run six weeks without even touching my threshold.
So I had to be sceptical about my current approach. I needed to ask myself if this approach was the right one.
Scepticism isn’t about being cynical and questioning everything just because you can. Skepticism is about inspecting something and using your curiosity to see gaps you don’t yet understand or grasp. To ask the right questions to fill this understanding. Maybe even try it out to widen your knowledge.
It’s finding your personal how. Iteration by iteration. Question by question. Experiment by experiment.
How to be Okay with Being Burned
I love the principle of humility. It allows all of the above to even happen. Humility in this context means that you should absolutely leave your comfort zone but with the understanding that it is okay to fail.
Humility will help you be flexible. Be adaptable. Be fluid.
Live is full of nuances. New ideas. New perspectives. It’s generally a good idea to question your own beliefs from time to time. You are changing all the time based on your surroundings.
Just two weeks here at my new home I already realise that I might held a belief too closely over the past years. I was living in a small town and hadn’t many like-minded people around me. I know I’m leaning towards being an introvert. It was an easy story to tell myself: I have a super small social cycle because of it and I’m happy with it. Just now having met several new people the past week through social runs I have started to realise that there is nuance to it.
Social gatherings will always drain my energy but I’m learning that feeling connected to a group of people can give you a sense of belonging. I hear new stories. I see new perspectives. I grow. I enjoy that time. I will not suddenly stop doing solo runs but I see myself being involved in the local community.
Without humility and the idea that I might be wrong about something I might not even go to one of those runs.
The same can be said about aiming for big goals. You might aim to run a sub 40min 10k. You might not achieve that on your first try. It requires you to be humble to analyse what you have been doing leading up to the race and what you could improve. Going back to looking at your curiosity with scepticism. Humility enables this look. It’s essential.
Be Curious
Curiosity kickstarts this journey. Always try to be curious. Rarely assume. Often ask. Drill down on answers. Better your understanding through scepticism. Be humble enough to realise you did hold wrong assumptions, thoughts or beliefs. Be excited about being wrong. Stay curious.
Be open-minded. We need people like you nowadays more than ever.
See you next week!