As we all know at this stage, one's enjoyment of running depends crucially on one's inner attitude. However, many people just surrender to whatever mood they happen to be in on the day and let the race turn out accordingly. With a greater awareness of their inner attitude they might just be able to turn the "race from hell" into an experience to be grateful for. Sounds difficult, but it can be done!

Our feelings and attitude in running (and in life!) come out of the interplay between three main parts of our inner being - the mind, the emotions and the heart. Our mind is possibly the part we are most commonly aware of whilst running - it generally swings between one extreme and another, telling us how great we are when things are going good but then filling our heads with doubt and fears when things are going bad!

We possibly don't notice how much our emotions affect us as much - mainly because we tend not to associate them to any part of that body. In fact, many Eastern cultures would associate the navel region with the stomach area, just around the solar plexus. In Indian philosophy this areas is commonly called the vital region, and if you have even a little experience in searching inside yourself and seeing what part of you does what, you can really feel that this area is the engine of our being - it drives our enthusiasm and dynamism when we are happy but is also driving our frustration, aggression and lethargy when we are not happy. Many martial arts such as t'ai chi explicitly seek to gain mastery over this region so they can use the energy more purposefully. However we also have some knowledge about this in Western culture - we speak of a 'gut feeling' or a 'bowling ball' in our stomach when we are apprehensive.

So when things are going bad during running, what is happening? Well, first our mind is busy pointing out all the places we are starting to ache in, or how long it is until the finish, or some other reason why we should just slow down or walk. Accompanied by this we can also feel a very heavy sensation in the solar plexus corresponding to the emotional area somehow sitting on top of our energy source and making it very difficult to move your body at the speed you want to - in fact, the more you try to push, the more this part of your being just doesn't seem to want to cooperate. So how does one begin to turn around this state of affairs?

Well let's look at what we can change - our thoughts. But as we know, it can be very hard to turn around the flow of negativity. Many people who have run a lot of races are able to use their experiences of running - they know from the past that these bad feelings can be quite transient, and can change quite abruptly during a race, for example when you suddenly realise you will be able to finish it after all. So they are able to tell themselves based on their past experiences that what their mind is telling them has no basis in reality and just push on. Another thing you can use to help you is to remember that the mind can be easily fooled. Sri Chinmoy, athlete and founder of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team has a very useful tip: when running a long race, try to imagine that you are only running half or quarter that distance. For example, if you are running a marathon, you can start out feeling that you are only running a half-marathon or 10k race: this makes it much easier on the mind. Another thing you can do is consciously try to bring about a more positive attitude. Find something inspiring to focus your attention on, some nice scenery, the vastness of the sky. Try to feel grateful that you are lucky enough to be out here, experiencing the outdoors, when many people are stuck inside - you can then consciosly try to locate this gratitude inside of you and expand it. One thing that actually does help is to smile, even if you don't mean it - if you smile, some of the heaviness in your emotional being begins to lift and you can actually feel your pace picking up. If you don't believe it, try it out and see for yourself!

Long term, it becomes much easier to push aside these negative feelings during running when one learns to run from the heart. What we mean by this is that instead of letting your attention wander to your suffering body or your despairing thoughts, you can instead bring your focus into the middle of the chest, that place where you can feel the essence of your being - indeed, many students of meditation practice focusing on this area on a daily basis. It is also a place where we feel the joy of existence, a place we have all been in during our most joyful and peaceful moments. Learning to place your awareness here helps to relieve mental worries and immerse ourselves the sheer joy of running - when you look at children, you can see they are definitely in the heart - they run here, there and everywhere without caring about anything!

Most importantly, when we are in the heart we can feel the 'real' part of ourselves, and we come to recognise these mental worries and emotional heaviness that were formerly plaguing us as something that actually had very little basis in reality. This helps us enormously in future races; when bad times are on the horizon, we can recall our past experiences of the heart and remember how to pull ourselves out the bad patch we are currently going through.

However, pulling yourself away from the mind means breaking the habit of a lifetime, so it is very useful to have a practice like meditation where you practice being in the heart for a few minutes each day. Even just five minutes a day can pay untold dividends in terms of your ability to stay cheerful and overcome bad patches - both in your running and in your life. Many athletes have used meditation to help them achieve the mental balance needed to shut out the pressure - for example nine time Olympic gold medal winner Carl Lewis, Guiness World Record holder Ashrita Furman, or the legendary Cuban amateur boxing teams which regularly sweep the gold medals at every Olympics. There are a number of great meditation sites like meditationworkshop.org to get you started and explain some basic techniques. You'll soon find, that in terms of finding out about yourself, meditation and running can complement each other very nicely indeed.

(Arent these photos great? They're taken by Prabhakar Street, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team's discus champion, who recently travelled to Mongolia: more in Prabhakar's album on Sri Chinmoy Centre Galleries)