A Case for Intense Physical Exertion
There is something unique about intense physical exertion, not just any physical exertion, in that it requires you to pay attention.
I ran a half marathon last Sunday. Within that half marathon, I ran two different races: one was a physical race, and one was a mental race. Because I was running for a particular time, my coach told me to pace myself like this: Mile 1-6 go easy. Mile 7-9 pick it up a bit. Mile 10, she said, is where your race really begins. Obviously the race physically started at the starting line. She was referring to the mental race.
What I experienced wasn’t surprising or new, but because it happened over the course of a longer run, it became distinctly clear: the physical race and the mental race had an almost inverse relationship. The easier the running was, the more my mind wandered. The harder the running, the less it wandered. The first 6 miles were pretty breezy because I was going at the pace I’d trained in for many miles up until now. I could breathe in and out of my nose, and nothing felt urgent. My mind wandered all over the place because the physical demand was low enough to allow it. Miles 7-9, I started to run a bit faster. What I found was that even though it wasn’t that physically challenging yet, it was wildly mentally challenging. My pace in that middle section was too fast to be able to chill out but too slow to force me to focus. I found myself bound between a strong push and pull between trying to stay focused on my run but having my mind pull away to a myriad of other things. Then I hit mile 10, and everything changed. I knew this was “where the race begins,” that this is where my pace increases significantly bit by bit. That I had to be really strategic about managing my energy. There was no room for error and my mind had to be singularly focused. Mile 10 to the finish was the hardest physically. Because of that, it required my complete mental attention. There was a singularity to my focus that made it interesting, doable, streamlined, and powerful. In this odd way, it was mentally easier than any of the 9 miles before it.
I totally understand that most people have zero interest in running, much less running hard. And if you’re like many of the people I work with daily, you’re not looking for any experience of intense physical exertion for fun. But I’d like to argue that intense physical exertion has an extremely important place in the scope of our movement health and is so much more than just chasing a sweat and basking in the ensuing endorphins.
We live in a world of disconnection from our bodies (even if you exercise regularly, you can still be wildly disconnected), and within a medical system that tends to treat the body and not the person. We live in a society where a distracted mental state is the norm. We live in a culture that believes aging is the end all be all of the human body, so the older we get, the less we think we can do and the less we try to do. We live amidst a pandemic of heart disease where people die at twice the rate of those who died from Covid during its peak.
Moving intensely, once a week, even for just a few minutes, can have the power to positively affect all of those “standards of living” in which we find ourselves. A stronger connection to our body, a discovery that our physical capacity stretches way beyond what we think, an increase in our social confidence and sense of self efficacy, and an increase in metabolic health— all of which have research supported positive impacts on the way we age, the way we manage pain, the way we socialize, and the way we handle stress and anxiety.
But maybe the real selling point here is, move intensely to focus your attention, pin your mind to the present moment and enjoy the momentary reprieve from a scattered brain, an unpleasant emotional state, or a chronic pain.
disclaimer: anything can be done to an extreme, and exercising intensely in an obsessive or addictive manner as a coping mechanism for other areas of life is obviously not recommended.
keep moving.