The Joy of Movement

by Kelly McGonigal

  As the seasons pass, friendships grow, and Green Gym volunteers begin to witness the fruits of their collective labor. The knowledge that they are investing in the future of their communities is part of the appeal of Green Gym. One volunteer, a retired woman well into her seventies, was planting trees with Hutchings. When Hutchings remarked how nice it would be when the trees were grown, she said, “I’m not going to see that. I probably won’t be here. But I’m going to take pride in the fact that it will be here for my children and my grandchildren.” The volunteers know that what they do matters; by creating and caring for green spaces, they are contributing to the well-being of their communities. In cities as diverse as Delhi, London, and Milwaukee, living in a neighborhood with more green spaces—including parks and community gardens—is linked to greater life satisfaction and less psychological distress. When the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society turned over two hundred vacant lots in Philadelphia into green spaces by clearing debris and planting grass and trees, the incidence of depression among those who lived nearby dropped by 42 percent.

  After a Green Gym project has been going for two years, the organization identifies volunteers who have contributed to their local groups and trains them to become paid leaders. “Green Gym is about moving people to a different place forever,” Lister told me. “We changed their lives, and now they help change other people’s lives.” Eighty percent of current Green Gym employees started as volunteers, including the organization’s chief executive, who first volunteered twenty years ago. Pete Hutchings, who started working in a restaurant kitchen when he was thirteen, had no conservation skills or formal education in management when he first volunteered at that neglected North London park six years ago. Now he manages Green Gym projects as a full-time team leader. “I’ve had many people say the project saved their lives. For people who are struggling, having Green Gym can really pull you through,” he told me. “The benefit to people is not why I started, but it’s the biggest enjoyment I get out of my job.” Even as Hutchings tells me this, it’s clear that this part of his job still surprises him, that he is still catching up to his own transformation. “I don’t think of myself as a particularly caring person,” he said. “I just wanted to be a gardener.”

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  AS THOMAS O. PERRY EXPLAINS in “Tree Roots: Facts and Fallacies,” plant roots can grow anywhere. “Root growth is essentially opportunistic in its timing and its orientation. It takes place whenever and wherever the environment provides the water, oxygen, minerals, support, and warmth necessary for growth.” Humans have this instinct, too. What E. O. Wilson calls biophilia is not just a love of nature or the tendency to be charmed by birdsong. It is also the will to live, the impulse to grow, and the determination to thrive in whatever circumstances you find yourself in.

  Susan Heard, whose son David died from a neuroblastoma at the age of ten, started running outdoors as a way to crawl out of her depression. It has helped her move forward, even as she continues to live with the grief of losing a child. She is embracing life again, just as David wanted. That includes running with her daughter, Daisy, who is now fifteen. “One of the things that I felt the guiltiest about is, I was with David most of the time. She had to grow up a lot, and I wasn’t there,” Heard told me. “There’s a lot of regret, but you have to forgive yourself.” One day Daisy surprised her by saying, “I want to try running with you.” Heard found a local program called First Strides that coaches women to run a 5K. They completed the ten-week program of outdoor runs together last spring. During one group training session, Heard was at the front of the pack, and she overheard her daughter say with pride to one of the other runners, “That’s my mom.” Heard’s voice came alive as she shared this memory. “Having her with me has been one of the most joyful things.”

  Chapter 7

  HOW WE ENDURE

  Shawn Bearden, then forty-two, was running a 50K ultramarathon on Antelope Island near Salt Lake City, Utah. It was his third ultramarathon. The race course promised sightings of wild antelope, deer, coyotes, porcupines, and bighorn sheep. One year a pair of bison blocked the trail a quarter mile from the finish line. (“Go around the animals if you can, or just wait them out,” the website advises. “No, you don’t get time compensation for buffalo delays.”) Unlike some long races that take you through secluded and changing landscapes, the entire Antelope Island course is exposed. The sun beats down with no shade cover. For the second half of the run, you can see the finish line far off in the distance. As Bearden describes it, “It’s like that Monty Python movie, where you keep going and going and it’s never any closer.”

  Several hours into the race, he hit a wall of exhaustion worse than anything he had ever experienced. He slowed to a walk. “Every part of me screamed to stop,” he remembers. “You feel like you can’t move, it’s not possible to continue to move, yet somehow you still can. Your muscles feel extremely heavy, like gravity is fifty times stronger than it usually is. That contrast between doing something you know is so simple, just taking another step, and getting all this feedback that this is the hardest thing in the world, leaves your head in a complete state of exhaustion. A helpless exhaustion.” Bearden made a deal with himself. He would try to jog for ten minutes. By the time he thought ten minutes had passed, he didn’t know if he could keep going, so he said to himself, If I’ve made it to seven minutes, I’ll force it. He looked at his watch. It had been one minute. Bearden stopped jogging and started walking again. “Honestly, I was just confused,” he recalls.

  Runners he had passed on the course were now passing him. Seeing him struggle, they said things like, “Good job, you’re going to make it.” That helped Bearden keep walking. About half an hour later, without thinking about it, he started to jog again. He had gone a couple of yards before he even realized he was running. The enormous effort it had taken to walk just one step evaporated, and he felt like a ball rolling down a hill. It didn’t even feel like he was trying to run; he was just doing it. The momentum carried him all the way to the finish line. “That’s when I realized, no matter how bad it gets, I will come through again. I will come back.”

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  Ultra-endurance events are commonly defined as those lasting at least six hours, although many are significantly longer. The Spartathalon in Greece requires athletes to run the equivalent of six marathons in thirty-six hours. The multiday four-thousand-mile Terra Australis Bike Epic takes cyclists down the entire eastern coast of the continent. Competitors in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, an ultramarathon that lasts up to thirty days, must walk, bike, or ski their way through blizzards and gale-force winds from Anchorage to Nome. In recent decades, worldwide participation in such events has exploded. In North America alone, the annual number of individuals who completed an ultramarathon jumped from 650 in 1980 to over 79,000 in 2017.

  The oldest official ultramarathon, the 90K Comrades Marathon in South Africa, was founded in 1921 by World War I veteran Vic Clapham to commemorate the hardships of war and the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers. One of the central questions of life is how humans endure the seemingly unendurable, something that, after the brutal Great War, was on Clapham’s mind when he founded the Comrades Marathon. According to the event’s official history, the annual race “reminds us that through adversity there is hope. Year after year the goodness in humanity comes to the fore.”

  Today, the ultra-endurance world—in which competitors push their bodies to the limits of what human physiology can withstand—continues to provide a window into both how and why we go on. In The Lure of Long Distances, Robin Harvie notes that the word athlete derives from a Greek word for “I struggle, I suffer.” Ultra-endurance athletes have a relationship to suffering that separates them from most recreational exercisers and that often resembles the wisdom of spiritual traditions. For many, the motivation is not just to complete fantastic feats, but to explore what it means, as one athlete I spoke
with puts it, to “suffer well.” Their experiences paint a portrait of how humans maintain hope and momentum in the darkest moments. We endure by taking it one step at a time, by making space for suffering and joy to coexist, and with the help of others.

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  I first reached out to Shawn Bearden, a professor of exercise physiology at Idaho State University, because he produces a popular podcast on the science of ultrarunning. (Ultrarunning is defined as any distance longer than a marathon, but there seems to be no upper limit to what people will try.) Bearden acknowledges that his reasons for getting into the sport might not have been entirely healthy. He has a competitive streak that can be destructive, and there’s often a voice in his head arguing that he’s not doing enough, something he attributes in part to growing up with a father who was an alcoholic. “I begged him to stop drinking,” he told me. “I felt he was choosing that over me.” The only thing that got his father’s attention was Bearden’s success in soccer. So he threw himself into being the best athlete he could be, convinced that if he became good enough, his father would choose him over alcohol. Trying to be the best became his default orientation. “I spent my life trying to be number one at whatever I seemed to have any aptitude at.”

  Entering midlife, Bearden found himself physically out of shape and judging himself for not staying fit. “I started looking around, thinking, What can I do? It’s got to be something that other people are going to ooh and aah over.” He saw an announcement about an upcoming trail race near where he lived in Pocatello, Idaho. The race had 35K, 60K, and 100K options. He thought, I’ve read and heard that only really tough people can survive this. “So of course I sign up for the 100K, and I had never even run trails before.”

  He threw himself into training for the event, and when he crossed the finish line, his wife asked, “How do you feel?” “My first word was happy,” Bearden told me. “It was more like redeemed.” He signed up for another race and soon realized how much he enjoyed it—not just the events themselves, but especially the commitment to training that they require. “Twice this week I burst into tears while running,” he wrote me in an email. “It’s an overwhelming sense of joy that fills me and manifests as happy tears.” Later he said, “I’ve thought a lot about whether I’ve tried to be the best athlete I can be for reasons that are ultimately negative, or whether I’m doing it for me, because I love it. I’m not one hundred percent sure. But it’s in those moments where I break down and feel so happy while I’m running that I realize for sure there is some aspect of this that is for me, that is a healthy and good thing.”

  Bearden now dedicates much of his free time to helping others prepare for ultramarathons, coaching runners and producing his podcast. “People say a lot of what you learn from ultrarunning can be translated to everyday life, and I’ve struggled with that,” he told me. “Ultrarunning can take you to a place where you strip away everything, and there is nothing left but the essence of you and one thing to do. Keep moving. I’m not sure it has always applied so much to my everyday life. In everyday life, I don’t get to a place where the next second is everything I can possibly do,” he said. “Except depression. I apply it to my depression.”

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  Bearden has struggled with depression as far back as he can remember. He was only seven years old the first time he thought seriously about killing himself. “I had a plan for it,” he explained, then stopped himself from sharing the details. “Well, anyway, it was never going to work.” The depression got worse in his teens, and the suicidal thinking stalked him into adulthood. As is the case for many people who struggle with recurrent mental health challenges, the depression—which Bearden describes as “everything feels meaningless, life is pointless, nothing matters”—comes and goes at different periods of his life. He recognizes that he may never be fully free of it. “Depression is a condition that’s going to be with me. Coming to accept that is a big step for me,” he says. “It’s part of who I am, but it doesn’t define me.”

  He describes the onset of an episode as “going dark,” explaining, “When it comes, it feels like if you are outside on a nice day and suddenly giant black thunderclouds roll over. You become terrified that the universe has just sat on you, is descending hatred on you. The emptiness is coming in. In those dark moments when the clouds roll in, that funnels quickly into planning suicide.” In the past, Bearden would try to outthink the darkness and convince himself that life was worth living. But the more he tried to argue with the worst thoughts, the more logical they seemed. Running, especially outdoors, gives him a way to get out of his head. He calls it “clearing the clouds.”

  In addition to the mood-stabilizing benefits of training, persisting through an ultra-endurance event holds particular meaning for surviving depression. The perception of time dragging out when you are near physical exhaustion is not unlike what unfolds during depression or grief, when the pain is so bad and the path forward so unclear that you can hardly believe how many moments of suffering a minute can hold. When researchers at the University of Cologne, Germany, asked individuals with depression to talk about their experience of time, they described feeling that “everyone is passing me by” and “I am slower than everyone else.” The most typical account, according to the researchers, was that “the passage of time turned into a dragging, inexorable, and viscous continuance.” These words echo the slowing of time Bearden experienced in the Antelope Island 50K, where other runners passed him, one minute felt like ten, gravity seemed fifty times stronger, and it became nearly impossible to move forward. In a study of ultramarathoners competing in a 100-mile race, the runners reported “distortions in time . . . and a feeling that the race was ‘never ending.’” Ultrarunner Robin Harvie remembers reaching the eighty-fifth mile of the Spartathalon in Greece, when “It was not just that I was slowing down; time itself seemed to have expanded, opening itself up to scrutiny at the atomic level.” He describes the pain of the ultra-endurance athlete as “the agony of grief that words can no longer express.” Learning to carry on in such a state is something that stays with you. Jennifer Pharr Davis, who in 2011 set the fastest known time for hiking the Appalachian Trail (46 days, 11 hours, and 20 minutes), writes in The Pursuit of Endurance that one of the most important things she’s learned is, “You don’t have to get rid of the pain to move forward. The hurt we experience in life might never fully go away; it could ebb and flow for an eternity. You can make progress and appreciate the times when life isn’t as much of a struggle. And you can pray, and cry, and wrestle through the rest.”

  The strategies that ultra-endurance athletes use to withstand the lowest points of a race are a window into how humans endure hardship. Researcher Karen Weekes followed ten athletes at the Ironman World Championship in Monterrey, Mexico, as they attempted to complete ten triathlons in ten days—a total of 24 miles of swimming, 1,120 miles of biking, and 262 miles of running—to learn how they dealt with the pain, self-doubt, and exhaustion. Their answers, taken out of context, resemble a list one might generate by speaking to survivors of trauma or loss, or to patients undergoing difficult medical treatment, or to individuals struggling to stay sober. The athletes learned to focus on the present moment. They didn’t let themselves get overwhelmed by thinking too far ahead. When the totality of what they faced overwhelmed them, they committed to finishing just one more lap, one more mile, or one more step.

  To tap into positive emotions that could sustain them, they listened to music and replayed treasured memories in their minds. They gave themselves permission to cry, rage, or rest when they needed to. Almost all of the athletes took strength from thinking about loved ones. One found the will to keep going by recalling an email his youngest son had sent him, saying how proud he was of his dad. Another held entire conversations with family and friends in her mind. Two imagined being with deceased loved ones—a child and a husband—and found that this connection helped
them tap into a reserve of energy that took them beyond their usual capacity to carry on. Several talked to God, praying, asking for support, and offering gratitude. Others found that they could overcome their pain and fatigue by dedicating their efforts to others, thinking about a loved one who was struggling or remembering the cause they were raising funds for by racing.

  Many focused on the impermanence of their present pain. As one athlete told herself, “Sooner or later, the last lap will be done.” This mentality wasn’t simply about imagining a pain-free future. It was also about savoring a present moment that included both pleasure and pain. One athlete pretended that whatever lap he was swimming or mile he was biking was the last he would ever do in his life. This mindset brought out an anticipatory nostalgia and a fierce desire to enjoy the moment fully, even with the pain it contained.

  To an outside observer, it might seem as though these psychological strategies are a means to an end, mental skills you need to perform the task of physical endurance. But when you listen to athletes, it’s not at all clear that’s how they perceive things. Many seem to take the reverse perspective: The physical hardship is the means to cultivating the mental strengths. When I spoke with Christina Torres, a thirty-year-old English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii, about long-distance running, she mentioned the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul”—quite a departure from the songs runners commonly cite for inspiration, such as the themes from Rocky or Chariots of Fire. The lyrics were written in 1873 by Horatio Spafford shortly after the ocean liner his wife and children had been traveling on, the SS Ville du Havre, hit another ship and sank. His wife was rescued, unconscious, from the Atlantic Ocean, but all four of their daughters drowned. When Spafford got word by telegraph, he boarded a ship to meet his grieving wife in Europe. That ship’s captain, aware of Spafford’s loss, informed him when they reached the latitude and longitude where his children had drowned. There Spafford wrote the lines that would become a comfort to many: “When sorrows like sea billows roll; / Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say, / It is well, it is well, with my soul.” With its message about maintaining faith in trying circumstances, the song is a popular choice at funerals.