TRANSCENDENTAL RUNNING
© Mike Spino demonstrates the Power Run at the Esalen Institute.
I have big plans for 2022. After a two-year race drought, I raffled myself into three springtime half-marathons in short succession, not ideal. I’ll run the grande dame in November, the New York City Marathon. That means vigorous training all year to make it through in one piece. Lacing up four to five times a week requires more than discipline. Only stealth creativity keeps me motivated, or else I get bored and fall into the same old routines.
I’d also grown vary of the dictatorship of insights most runners held on to so exuberantly, the metrics, apps, and opaque performance jargon. Abstract numbers illustrating my pace, VO2 max, or heart rate zone didn’t get me out of the door.
When most socially distanced holidays in 2021 –Hanukka, Christmas, and Kwanzaa–were canceled, thank you, Omicron, I dove into a rabbit hole of motion spirituality. Zen masters, Buddhist monks, yogis, and gurus have long questioned our environmental disconnect. But I found surprisingly little about what I imagined to be a kind of runner’s enlightenment until I stumbled upon Dr. Mike Spino's Beyond Jogging - the innerspaces of running (1976). Part analog training manual, artifact, and self-help, the slim paperback portrays a movement in the faultlines of Olympic doping czars and compassionate endurance meditators at a time when most innovators had canceled reality to drop in and drop out.
Out-of-print for over two decades, Coach Spino’s book still enjoys a devoted following, and the few well-thumbed issues are reverentially circulated among runners. The now 77-year-old is considered a pioneer of a holistic, multi-disciplinary training method. And penned it while he was Director of Physical Education at the Esalen Institute, the birthplace of the Human Potential Movement on California's wild coast in the 1960s. Esalen’s founders Michael Murphy (author of In The Zone)and Dick Price, canonized Psychic Karate alongside various nude disciplines. It became a progressive think-tank on alternative living and psychedelic experimentation. Joan Baez, Aldous Huxley, and Timothy Leary explored transcendence through oriental philosophy, science, and art in sought-after workshops at the institute.
Spino worked with visualization, breathing, and meditation techniques long before yoga became mainstream. He doped his runners with gestures evoking energy fields, pulled them up hills with imaginary ropes, trialed novel running styles, and breathed combustive fire. For Spino, the moving body is the cradle of the creative mind and vice versa. His outlet was poetry, and he’d published some them in the collection Poems of a Long-Distance Runner before joining Esalen. Meditation and poetry writing was essential to the training program. Rather than squeezing performance gels into their mouths in those sweet short breaks between exhaustion and ecstasy, Spino encouraged his team to pen rhymes trackside.
I can’t speak of the literary quality of the poems, but if Beyond Jogging’s unpretentious and elegant prose is any indication (much like the underappreciated non-fiction oeuvres by Murakami), you’re in for a treat. Plus, the book is illustrated with evocative photographs of Esalen’s running community. The unbridled energy, the 70s mustachioed masculinity, and the joy of movement remind me of my childhood on the sports fields, in gyms, at track and field competitions, and in locker rooms, often spiced with the aroma of chlorine from the nearby Olympic pool. Sadly, Esalen has now been hijacked by tech bros from neighboring Silicon Valley.
I wondered if Spino was still alive and a quick google search led me to his website. I dropped him a brief message on the website and left my phone number.
A few Usain Bolt's speed seconds later, my phone rang. Mike Spino’s sonorous voice electrified me with casual insights into the psychology of running and the mindset of the spiritual athlete. It was as if Spino joined me sleepwalking in my subconscious. Although I can’t remember a single quote, I felt a strange déjà vu, like I was speaking with a long-lost friend.
The conversation left me with the epiphany that leaning into the effort of running doesn’t have to be an act of masochism. I resolved to be more intuitive and reclaim my innocence. No more pumping playlists (with the exception of occasional Indian ragas), virtual trainers, or negative splits bluetoothed into my ear. It’d practice radical presence and sharpen my awareness of the world I was moving through. I vowed to witness sunrises, explore renegade thoughts, taste the air, and listen to the sigh of the wind and the city’s gasps. I’d make up a better mantra, manifest Martha Graham more often, dance intuitively, love harder, and breathe like the ocean.
I will drop into the south of my subconscious and tune into the dark. With time, I’ll be able to find my way.
Check out Dr. Mike Spino’s teachings on:
January 2022
