The Psychology of Effort

I've argued previously against the idea that our runs have somehow to be intellectual or personally productive, or even a supplementary restorative to leisure--a Derridean dangerous supplement with a salt crusted face and Bodyglide protected thighs if there ever was one.  That is to say, leisure has to be about leisure.  As restoration, it's still bedevilled by, still dwelling in the shadow of, the work it's trying to escape, the work it ultimately aims to make more productive.  Granted, I prattle on about all this as a man without a real job and with the flexible schedule of a PhD student.  If there's such thing as flex time in PhD world, it's measured not in days or weeks or even months but years and years, such that a PhD program sometimes has a Ruplestilksin or Castaway-starring-Tom-Hanks-type vibe about it: You settle into a corner of the library, gleefully piling up the books beside you, then step out into the light solidly in your 30s with creeping crows' feet and sprouting ear hairs and realize that they have since invented Facebook and iPads and that the juniors were born the year Nevermind was released and view themselves with far less irony than the obsolete sensibility of their natal decade would advise. 

But I digress, divagate, essay.  Indeed, I understand as well as anyone how running can be productive for thought and in my life it often is.  Not for the precise kinds of thinking that academic writing demands, but for letting large ideas bubble up in the brain, for unfettering yourself from the inhibitions that sometimes keep us from our best thoughts.  A run is the only hour or so in the waking day when I'm not dealing with written language of some kind, it's the time when I come to be most present to myself, mediated only by myself and myself alone.  Sadly, it may be the only time in the day when I'm not trying to multitask, not distracted but rather fully attentive.  Wordsworth composed walking in the woods, images of walking about in Heidegger's writings, and the more I run the more I take his talk about pathways literally.  Though has rhythm and motion.  And if poets were always attuned to the kinetic character of thought, late 19c psychologists began to try to understand what it was. 

In "The Psychology of Effort," one of the earlier essays of his long career, Dewey tries to settle the question of how easy perceptions, like reading a billboard, differ from perceptions that require effort (like wading through Dewey's prose).  What exactly, he asks, is the sensation of effort?  Dewey says that the sensation of effort is frustrated movement.  We go through much of our lives automatically, pulled along by habit, but then, situations arise for which we're unprepared, novelties arise to which we have to adapt and adjust.  Our everyday activities, even thought, involve physical movement--furrowing the brow when we read, shifting in our chairs when we write email.  (Dewey never lets his readers forget that the mind and body are not separate entities but instead are one, that though is indeed embodied, and that in a real sense one thinks through the body.)  The sense of effort comes when the physical movement of thought becomes inadequate its task.  Effort, he writes, is "tension between means and ends in action" and the sense of effort is awareness of this tension.  "Sensations of the bodily state report to us this conflict and readjustment."

The essay pertains to endurance sports in two ways.  First, Dewey gives as an example of conflict and readjustment learning to ride a bike.  "Take the alternation of ridiculous excess of effort, with total collapse of effort in learning to ride a bicycle.  Before one mounts one has perhaps a pretty definite visual image of himself in balance and in motion.  This image persists as a desirability.  On the other hand, there comes into play at once the consciousness of the familiar motor adjustments,--for the most part, related to walking.  The two sets of sensations refuse to coincide, and the result is an amount of stress and strain relevant to the most serious problems of the universe."

Another has to do with repetitive activity--which can be applied to running: "If a monotonous physical movement be indefinitely repeated, it will generally be found that as long as 'activity' is put forth, and accomplishes something objectively...there is little sense of effort.  Let the effort be exhausted and action practically cease, then the sense of effort will be at its maximum."  Yup -- I agree.  The end of a race, when effort is almost exhausted, is definitely the hardest part.  Running is a repetitive, habitual motion -- but the body's own depleting resources eventually mount an obstacle to that motion, an obstacle to which we adapt through training and adjust to through effort.

Speaking of fatigue, I've been waking up about before my alarm clock for the last ten days and have been getting about six and a half hours of sleep to my usual seven or seven and a half.  It's been nice for running, because instead of getting up at six like usually I've been up at quarter to six or even 5:30 and out the door.  The days are getting longer and it's lighter earlier and it's great to be on the road as the sun rises.  I woke up at around 5:10 this morning, tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't so I got out of bed at 5:25 and was out the door twenty minutes later, and back at 7:02 -- about 11 mi, 7min pace.