Replace With Running

How to find running wisdom in anything you read.

I’m about to enrich the way you read—or ruin it. You won’t know which until the next time you sit down with a good book. But then, you’ll know pretty quickly.

Gather ‘round and let me tell you about a time before Canva, when a college professor warned an incoming class of would-be Graphic Designers that the way we interacted with the world was about to change. After three years of deep learning in layouts, logos, and ligatures, he said, we’d see design everywhere (especially the bad stuff).

Turned out to be true. Suffice it to say, you don’t want me critiquing your wedding invitations. But looking at the world through a lens of color, form, and type has added a layer of nuance and texture to my life that I wouldn’t trade.

You might read Running Lightly because you’re interested in a similar depth of insight. After all, nobody’s here for training plans and shoe reviews. We’re scratching at “the soul beneath the surface,” and I’m guessing that resonates on some level.

I’ll let you in on a secret. Some of the explorations here originated from a simple technique I exercise—now almost subconsciously—while reading for pleasure.

Running and Not-Running

I consume all kinds of books, mostly non-fiction, but therein cutting a wide swath from memoir to motivational, self-help to spiritual. For the purposes of this article, let’s lump them into two categories: running and not-running.

Running books are typically pretty straight-forward. You have a challenge and a hero's journey. The challenge is usually to run faster and/or farther, and the hero is either the reader (in a technical book) or the author (in a biography or memoir).

I’ve read a handful of fabulous running books this year.

But, when considering my subsurface relationship with the sport, I tend to find more insights in the obscure corners of not-running. That’s where I tangle with the philosophical, emotional, and existential questions that build my why, and that I want to give life on Running Lightly…

• What role does running play in my sense of self?

• Why do I keep going, when it’s so often inconvenient, difficult, and painful?

• How does it help me navigate other life challenges?

• What can running teach me about time, fear, vulnerability, toughness, (on and on)?

• How does this activity fit into a broader search for meaning?

I’ve read ten or fifteen not-running books in 2024, and in most of them I can draw a line to the big questions. How? By recontextualizing the author’s intent in the most rudimentary way imaginable.

As passages speak to me, I simply replace key words with “running.”

In Practice

Have you ever had a run where thinking dissolves, your feet fairly vanish, and you feel pulled along on the lightest string by an unseen hand? Your pace quickens but the effort stays steady. You’re all at once connected to your body and free of it.

Bringing that run to mind, is there anything more fitting than this passage from Natalie Goldberg’s, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft, when we replace “writing” with “running?”

Writing Running practice lets out all your wild horses. This is good. You become connected with a much larger force field, one where you’re not in control. Suddenly your little will is not doing the writing running, but instead writing running does the writing running.

And likewise…

It is writing running practice when we touch the place where there are no feelings, no perceptions, there is no you, no person doing any writing running. In other words you disappear, you become one with your words shoes, not separate, and when you put your pen shoes down, the you who was writing running is gone.

When I see gems like the above, I’ll highlight (Kindle) or jot by hand (paper book) a simple notation: “RWR,” which stands for “Replace With Running.”

I once got so locked into RWR, I flagged twenty-some excerpts from Bec Evans’ and Chris Smith’s, Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts. On returning this tome to the library, I immediately ordered a copy, because it will help me write my own book on creating a lifelong running practice…

A writing running break we choose to take, especially when planned, takes less effort than a break we're forced to take.

Identify good things immediately after you write run. This gives the maximum reward "hit" of dopamine.

Accept that doubt, fear, and uncertainty are part of the process and will accompany you throughout. Over time, you will build up evidence that you can write run.

Looking for the right words to describe a distaste for the disingenuous? Bukowski can help with that. Here’s a “Replace With Running” substitution from, On Writing…

We seem to have lost the target. Writers Runners seem to write run to be known as writers runners. They don’t write run because something is driving them toward the edge.

RWR can also bridge our running with more ethereal ideas and practices. Here’s a take on presence from Cory Muscara’s, Stop Missing Your Life (as highlighted in my Kindle). Just replace “mindfulness meditation” with “running.”

You don’t have to be reading about the writer’s craft or present-moment mindfulness to find inspiration through RWR. Heck, I bet a book on DIY plumbing would turn up connections around problem solving under pressure, prevention vs. repair, and achieving flow state.

Get it? “Flow.” Never mind.

The Finish Line

It could be argued that learning about ourselves—and sharing that uncovered meaning and purpose with others—is about the closest we’ll get to solving the grand mystery. You’re here at the bottom of this article (thanks), so it seems likely, to help anchor you to that path of self-discovery… You read.

“We get a larger life by asking questions.”
- James Hollis, A Life of Meaning

If you believe running also plays a role in shaping the you you’re becoming, but it’s hard to put those feelings into words, try “Replace With Running.” You’ll see the sport in a more expansive light, and perhaps find a fuller expression of it in your life.

Run lightly,
-mike

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