Uncover your inner athlete!

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten.. Each morning in Africa a lion awakes - it knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve.


No matter if you are the lion or the gazelle, when the sun comes up you had better be running!



Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Happiness Vs Being Good

Being someone who is incredibly fascinated by the relationship between feelings and activities, I was talking to a friend the other day about how people appear when they exercise. I often find myself out and about for a run on my own and happen to randomly chat to or greet other runners as I am running. Most of the time I am running while smiling and enjoying the experience as Roger Bannister described it ‘Man’s greatest freedom’, however all too many people that I encounter either bare a scowl or look to be visibly in pain.

Now I understand that not everyone loves to exercise to the same degree, however I think that we in the western world have somewhere along the line lost touch with linking exercise to fun.

If one looks at East Africans, who are consistently among the best long distance runners (up to the marathon), they seem to treat running and training as more like play. To watch them running as a group is to view a unique social setting. Young and old, male and female all run together regularly ensuring that the community unit becomes tighter and that bonds are formed between old and young and learning is shared. These folks prefer to go for a run at the end of the day, whereas we come home from a day of work and sit down in front of the television.

I don’t think that there is any coincidence that in these communities heart disease and obesity is almost nonexistent. I also think that there must be some correlation between their attitude to running (treating it as play) and the fact that they regularly win many long distance running medals at major international athletics competitions.

Now if happiness means success, then we have to ask the question as to whether they are happy because they are good at running, or are they good at running because they are first happy and content?

The closest that we in the west have come to replicating this has been through the creation of the running clubs that blossomed following the first marathoning boom in the 1970s. These new bodies created solid units of people who enjoyed running and training together. They ran not for the sums of money that are now on offer, but for the sheer beauty of the run.

Sadly many of these clubs have now collapsed and improvements in marathon times by those in the west have flattened out and rates of obesity and mental illness has grown.

Take the family out for walk or run this evening and buck the trend. Teach the youth that there is another way and that way is activity and fun! – Sean Muller

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