Mindful running for ultramarathon distances
For Tom the journey of starting running started many years ago so he is not even sure when it was but it was around 20 years ago. The first few years he was running just to clear his mind after work, but in early 2016 he started to increase his training daily. He did it for his mental health. He was running 5 or 6 times a week for around an hour or sometimes 3 hours a day. In March 2018 he wanted to increase the speeds and increase his steps with the intentions of starting some big challenges. He saw a story of a man who swam around the whole of Britain, spent almost 200 days at sea and thought he could do some kind of crazy challenge too. So in 2019 he started his first challenge.
Tom struggles with anxiety and stress in his life and that’s why he decided to run. When he started running more it was a hard time in his life because he had stopped living with his two kids and he had lost his business. He wanted to improve his mental health and have challenges so he started looking for solutions to not be stressed all the time. Running was the sport he chose. It helped him, and that’s how he started to focus more on running.
When he was trying to change his life he learned that his anxieties and tensions were connected to some traumatic experiences that he had lived through. He found that if we don’t listen to those traumatic experiences, then we will actually pass those traumatic experiences on to the next generation. He was also looking for solutions to inspire his children to keep pursuing their dreams and fighting for the life they want to have and make his family’s cycle of trauma end with him. He didn’t know where all this was going to take him, but he wanted to push his limits. When he started running and did 5K he knew it was great and 10K was cooler and he wanted to keep increasing the miles.
He does self-supported running adventures. In 2019 his first big challenge was to do 5,000,000 steps. He started that challenge and really didn’t know what to expect from that first challenge. When he finished it he knew he could train for anything in his life because he went from doing 25,000 steps a day and in the start of his journey to doing over 100,000 steps a day which was a total of 14 hours of heavy exercise.
When he finished, he took a 3 week break and started the next challenge which was to run 11,000 kilometers on his own, with a backpack. Both of these challenges he did in Asia so the weather was quite hot and sometimes it was very difficult to find water along the way.
When he did his 11,000km challenge he started in Vietnam and ran through Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. But he got caught in a Covid lock-down in 2020 and got stuck on the beach next to the jungle. The first 3 weeks it was pretty tough because he was being harassed on the street by people and authorities thinking he was breaking the Covid quarantine. The police asked him to stay in the hotel room. There were only 2 people who spoke English, but he was able to finish his challenge despite being stuck there for 3 months.
Now Tom is running the circumference of the earth and running on every continent. It is a massive challenge that will take him 14 months. For this challenge he is starting with just his backpack so he is running from hotel to hotel. In late October or early November the support team will join him when he is in Florida.
In his backpack Tomasz carries his laptop, some food and water and some clothes. He plans his routes very well to buy things on the way and not have to carry a lot of things. He says there is often no place to hide when there is heavy rain or, as in Scotland, snow and strong winds. You just have to keep running because you have to get to the hotel you’ve booked for the night.
He practices what he calls mindful running because one time he was running worried about the future and not paying attention to the present and he almost stepped on a dangerous snake. And he worried about his life as well.
So he started to focus on the road ahead of him.
After that he realized that he was running like crazy and doing heavy physical exercise and he was enjoying it. And after running, he was able to sit at his laptop and work. He started searching and found out that he was actually reaching a flow state and started practicing active meditation. He began to teach about his flow state practice at universities.
When it comes to getting into the flow state, Tomasz says that your whole mind has to be in the present moment, in the here and now. Having a meditation practice can help you to create the conditions for full flow. For him the most productive way to do it is active meditation when running. He tries to focus on something specific. It can be a color like orange, and every time you run focus on that orange color. Just look around you and focus on the orange things and when you don’t see it look at other similar shades and you will be surprised that you can find little things of those colors. It’s a pretty simple activity to start practicing mindfulness. Another thing he does is to count his breaths. He says that anything that makes you focus on the present instead of letting all that cascade of thoughts that you know are coming like a swarm in your head will help you get into a flow state.
Bridge questions:
His most important piece is his laptop because even though he is running he has to work and organize everything along the way because even though he can knock on doors to tell what he is doing and see if people are willing to help him he can’t exist without his laptop.
The strangest thing he has ever seen was in the Philippines and it was the gap between the rich and the poor, children in extreme poverty sleeping under bridges, he was so amazed that he had to leave the Philippines because he could not mentally handle seeing those things.
The phrase or word that describes his philosophy of life is: that each one of us has the same opportunity to have the life we are proud to leave, regardless of our past experiences.
Connect with Tomasz
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