What if what you believed about learning was wrong? How would that change the way you run?

Learning to listen is the most important skill in running. Practice paying attention without thinking.

The most popular general theory about learning I know is quite attractive. Initially described by a Noel Burch in the 1970's, it is intuitively appealing. It has a logic to it that at first makes a lot of sense. But in a fundamental way it is also wrong and unhelpful.

This standard model has four steps and is usually described using the example of learning to drive a car.

Step one: unconscious incompetence

At this stage you don't know how to drive a car. You don't even know the skills you will need to learn in order to drive a car.

Step Two: conscious incompetence

You still can't drive a car, but at least now you know what you don't know. You are aware of what you need to learn and practice. When you watch someone else drive you can see what he or she is doing, but you are not able to perform those skills yet.

Step Three: conscious competence

You can drive a car, but every action takes concentration. When you use the brake, you have to think about which pedal it is, guide your foot to it and tell it when and how hard to press down. When you indicate, you have to look down and find the indicator and tell yourself which way to flick it. You may catch yourself asking yourself questions like: "If I'm going left, do I flick the lever up or down?"

Step Four: unconscious competence

Actions happen without you consciously thinking about them. Your attention can be focused outside the car, on the road, and the act of driving seems to happen automatically. When you slow down to turn a corner the braking, changing gear, indicating and turning the steering wheel all happen as if in direct response to the needs of the situation. The passage of information from the outside world via your brain to the responses of your muscles seems almost effortless and invisible.

In this popular scheme, Step Four is considered the goal of learning. This stage of neurological efficiency is called "automaticity". When skills are so highly practiced that they become automatic, the brain circuits that fire to create that particular set of responses are far more efficient than those of a beginner. In neurological terms, the nerves have been wrapped in myelin. This means the speed, strength and accuracy of the neurological response has been increased dramatically. And by dramatically, we're talking in the order of 300 times quicker, stronger and more accurate.

In practical, or experiential, terms it means that you perform a skill faster, better and with less effort.

To go back to the example: I remember when driving was tiring. When I was a beginner, the simple act of driving (let alone dealing with other drivers, changing road conditions and bad weather) required so much mental energy that it was exhausting. Nowadays, I drive mostly without even thinking about it.

Automaticity has a dark side.

The problem with all of this is that "automaticity" doesn't mean mastery. What automaticity means is that a bit of knowledge has been locked down and is no longer available for development. Regardless of whether this bit of knowledge is the skill of walking, running, doing a yoga pose or something apparently more complex like a particular attitude towards a certain type of person or activity, knowledge that has become automatic is stuck. As the model says, it is knowledge that has become unconscious. Basic psychology tells us that if we are acting based on impulses or “thoughts” that are unconscious we are no longer fully in control of our own actions. And until we can make those thought-patterns conscious we will continue to make the same mistakes. We just won’t learn.

Surely that can’t be the aim of learning!? I can’t really be aspiring to get to a point of not learning, can I? Well, yes. That’s the short answer, but for those who want to get good at something it can be disposed of pretty quickly, because we won’t rest until we reach our own definition of mastery. If we’re practicing taking out the rubbish, then good enough may generally be good enough, but when it comes to a skill with depth, a good theory of learning has to have more to offer. There are two ways to go from here.

One way is to go back to the model and say that of course unconscious incompetence and unconscious competence are in some ways the same. At any level, you're not aware of the things you don't know. It's only when these things get pointed out to you that you switch from thinking that you were going okay (unconscious competence) to realising that you still have things to work on (conscious incompetence).

This can happen when someone points something out to you. "I think you're over-striding." 

Or you might notice something that flicks a switch in you. "Have you noticed how light on their feet the Kenyans are? Compared with that, I wonder what my stride is like!?!"

Or, finally, your environment might change and the feedback happens directly. This is like moving up a level in a computer game: the change in difficulty forces you to adapt and develop new skills or improve on ones you already possessed. If you move from a flat track to running cross-country up and down hills and over obstacles, or if you move from motion control sneakers to running in minimalist footwear, your body will become conscious of what it didn't know before.

In this scenario, learning is like a stepladder. Each step happens when you become conscious of something and levels off each time you develop unconscious competence in that area. Each step on this ladder involves a moment of automaticity on the way to the ultimate aim, which is mastery. Stepladders are practical things. Useful, too. However, in this case they highlight something about this process that suggests that there might be a better way to learn. The stepladder model suggests clearly that the stimulus for progress, and the moment when we experience the most significant learning, happens when we are conscious.

To be more precise: learning happens most often and most effectively in the area at the edge of perception, where knowledge is just coming into consciousness.

The other way to go, then, is to invert the model slightly, and say that the aim is to be conscious. NOT unconscious. It might be beneficial now to remind ourselves that the aim is not automaticity, it is mastery. And mastery will come more quickly and to a higher level if we are able to resist automaticity as much as possible, to push it further and further away.

The only thing we want to be automatic is this ability to remain conscious, to avoid slipping into a state of unconsciousness. This is what is meant by mindfulness.

Mindful running requires the ability to be single minded. "Single minded" doesn't mean "driven"; it means able to just do one thing at a time. Having a single point of focus at each moment is not easy. It takes practice and attention. And in part, the problem for most people is boredom.

Running is repetitive. Stride after stride, session after session, same after same. Of course, the weather changes a bit. Some mornings there's a lovely sunrise; sometimes I run a different track, one I enjoy more than the others. Once in a while I see something noteworthy: a wild animal or a car crash. But on the whole, running itself isn't that interesting… Ho hum.

This attitude is the real challenge. Being interested in each step is the aim. Cultivating this interest is the art and practice of mindful running. Being curious. For example, how often are you curious about your breathing? About how it feels, what it does when you run harder or slower, with your chin up or down or forward or back, how it is affected by your shoulders or your hip movement…? Can you relax it even when you're under stress? And can your mind and your legs be relaxed even when your breathing is stressed?

Being curious and interested are ways of relating to events that bring higher and higher levels of awareness into consciousness. They strive to retain what the Zen Buddhists call "beginner's mind".

The practices that seem to appear over and over in texts on mindfulness are all boring or mundane: brushing your teeth, doing the dishes. It is precisely the mundane and boring that can teach us the most about how to cultivate the ability to do one thing at a time and to be infinitely curious and interested in that one thing. The art of running, then, is the same. The mindfulness running coach starts with this: be interested. Pay attention. Don't think that the great runners have forgotten how to run - that for them it is automatic. Great runners are curious and are still learning how to run, all the time. Their learning and their curiosity might be operating at a higher level and perhaps asking more subtle questions, but the process is the same: it is still based on interest.

This is a bit counter-intuitive, but what might be the "normal" way of thinking about great runners has some seriously negative side effects. The idea that "it's not supposed to be like this!" - that I'm not supposed to struggle, that it's easy for the great ones, that they never make mistakes or have bad runs - are all destructive versions of the same idea: that mastery means getting to a point where things happen without effort or attention.

The subtle twist on this, which sometimes tends to prolong the confusion, is that great runners don't see bad runs as bad runs. If you are curious about a bad run, it ceases to be simply "a bad run" and instead becomes an opportunity to understand something. Approaching "mistakes", "struggles", and "bad runs" with the same curiosity and interest that they approach great, fast, flowing, apparently effortless runs means that every run becomes a source of growth and inspiration, and possibly even joy. Struggling is not a sign of weakness or a cause of hopelessness. Rather, struggling is exactly where you want to be. Struggling = learning. Struggling is smack in the middle of your zone of maximal learning.

A fine point I need to add here is that "struggling" doesn't always mean huffing and puffing. When you pay attention, the notion of perfection hovers alongside every stride and your endless curiosity allows you to become aware of the tiny improvements that are always possible. It may be a change of attitude or perfection of balance that you are striving for, not just a personal best on your seventh hill rep.

So: whereas the traditional model of learning has a kind of disposable element to it - the aim is to acquire knowledge and forget about it - a new, mindful paradigm of learning is very conservative. One of the aims of mindfulness is to keep knowledge alive and available so that you can keep learning, growing and improving. (The fact that this also keeps you attentive, humble, calm, forgiving, patient and compassionate towards yourself and others are some of the other benefits of mindfulness.) As soon as you lose interest in an activity, the moment you become unconscious, learning stops. The knowledge becomes rigid and dead. To keep vitality in your running and your development, you have to cultivate conscious awareness, and the path toward this is through being interested.

How does this change the way you train?

If the idea that the aim of learning is consciousness (which leads to mastery) rather than automaticity (which leads simply to unconsciousness), what difference does this make?

In one sense this idea changes everything. In another, it changes hardly anything. When a Zen Buddhist washes the dishes, the dishes still get cleaned. He still picks them up, uses soapy water and a brush and puts them on the rack to dry. But there are fundamental differences in what is happening before, during and after he has done the dishes, both in his mind and in the sensations in his body. But all of this is an expansion on and movement beyond the point of this article, which was simply to encourage you to cultivate single pointed attention and a calm, curious interest in the thing you are doing right now. When that thing that you are doing right now is running, see what difference it makes if you really pay attention - if you really are curious and interested.

Through this practice you become your own coach. Despite the fact that there are now industries in every field set up to serve you but also to remind you that you don't know enough and need assistance and direction, you are ultimately your own best teacher: you and the act of running. What you need to be is a good student as well: one who is curious and attentive, who turns up every day and is willing to be patient and persistent in the search for answers. You know where the zone of proximal development is for you: that place where new knowledge exists and is in the process of coming into being in your own consciousness. Run there as often as you can. Just remember that you get there not just by running hard but by paying attention. Old runs can teach you very new and interesting tricks.

Post script:

One question that comes up is: how can I run and be conscious of everything without being exhausted by it? Is going back to “beginners mind” the same as going back to being conscious of every little thing I had to do when learning to drive?

This question is really about how a person is carries their awareness when running. Calm abiding. Buddha had a name for this: he called it "bare awareness". It's light, easy, not a hindrance. More later.