Ragan Sutterfield believes watching T.V. while running defeats the purpose of the spirituality of running. What do you think?
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To run is to feel freedom, not confinement, but sometimes the cold or the heat or the rain moves us indoors and onto the lumbering whir of the machines in the gym, lined up in long sad rows. Tread-mill—the name says it all, recalling assembly lines and hamsters in their cages. It’s a metaphor for drudgery and no one’s first choice for a good time.
I relate this to say that I get it when the little screen pops up with the cable TV menu or the monitors overhead blast NCIS reruns. You want to watch, to tune out, and put your body on autopilot for the thirty mindless minutes recommended by the American Heart Association. You are getting your workout in, and for that you should get a pat on the back. But I want to suggest that there might be something dangerous about the treadmill and its screens, something that might hurt your soul as much as your body.
I’ve spent a lot of time on treadmills. As I relate in my book This is My Body (Convergent/Random House 2015) my path from being an out of shape smoker to Ironman competitor was one that involved lots of time dripping sweat onto the moving rubber belts. But that journey was also one of returning my body to its proper place in the whole of myself—flesh and spirit together.
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My worry about treadmill entertainment, a mix of TV screens and magazines, is that they reinforce the separation of body and soul. To run on a treadmill feels akin to vacuuming a car or changing the oil; it is a chore necessary to keep the machine running well. But our bodies are not machines, external and separate from ourselves. Our bodies are integral parts of a whole; there can be no self apart from our flesh.
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
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To be a human in the world is to be a body. As the philosopher Wittgenstein put it, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” By that he meant that it is through the body that we know and are known. It is how we love and are loved—it is the word without which we are silent. But it can be easy to ignore and escape our bodies. In the same way we act as though the created world is something different and apart from us, we act like our bodies are something separate from who we really are. This is the old temptation of Gnosticism.
Gnosticism was a Greek religious and philosophical movement that sought personal enlightenment and the liberation of the self. It was complex and varied, there were many different Gnostic schools, but they all tended to share a strong prejudice against the world of bodies. The soul was good; the body was the source of all evil. The literary critic Harold Bloom has said that Gnosticism is “the American religion.” It fits our understanding of personal liberation, but also of our tendency to escape inside our heads. The result is divided lives and the kinds of health statistics one would imagine—obesity, diabetes, and on and on.
“attention is…the faculty that pulls us out of our own head and joins us to the world. Attention, perhaps, is the antidote to narcissism.”
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The answer to this dividedness is wholeness—a sense of the self as a complete entity rather than a mind that only remembers its body when it hurts. One way to achieve this sense of wholeness is to simply pay attention. The philosopher Matthew Crawford recently remarked: “attention is…the faculty that pulls us out of our own head and joins us to the world. Attention, perhaps, is the antidote to narcissism.”
Attention is what is the issue when we run on the treadmill. When we run outside, we are forced into awareness of the world around us. We feel the changes in the direction of the wind, we watch our steps, we listen to the sounds of the street or the actual twitter of a bird in the park. We pay attention to the world and so we are drawn into it. But the treadmill tend when coupled with television screens tends to draw us into ourselves; it calls us to distraction. Running along with headphones, our eyes glued to cable news, we are distracted from our bodies and the world to which our bodies give us access.
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All this does not mean that we shouldn’t ever step onto the treadmill belt. Treadmills have their place, but for the sake of all that is good please don’t turn on the T.V. In my own training I use treadmills not for slogging through slow miles, but for intense, hard interval workouts that require my full attention. I run as hard as I can for a minute and a half and then walk for a minute and then run hard, cycling through until I feel like I can’t go again. It’s a kind of training that calls my body into better health (interval training has been shown to be superior to low-level aerobic exercise), but more than that it requires me to bring my whole self to the experience. Through a hard workout all of my attention is focused on staying on the belt, I can be nothing but body and soul together, drawn into the world. So I run on the treadmill and run hard, whole and aware.
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Photo: Flickr/Official U.S. Navy Page
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Hi Ragan Sutterfield !I’m appreciate what you are written in this post.In my opinion human can’t work two/three things all together,it’s hamper their body as well as their mind & health also.So in my point of view while you are doing something just do that with full concentration then you can take a great result with that.