If routine has turned your workouts into a tedious “copy and paste,” maybe it’s time to reset everything and become a beginner again.
- The Routine Trap: Years of training can lead to boredom and a drop in motivation, causing you to lose the initial joy.
- What Is Shoshin: It’s a Zen concept meaning “beginner’s mind,” the art of approaching every experience with the curiosity and openness of the first time.
- Is Experience a Cage? Sometimes, yes. “Autopilot” and an obsession with data prevent us from enjoying the present moment.
- Change Your Route: Breaking away from your usual loops shatters monotony and forces your brain to stay alert, turning a run into an exploration.
- Run Without a Watch: Freeing yourself from the dictatorship of the GPS and the stopwatch allows you to listen to your body’s sensations again.
- Focus on One Detail: Concentrating only on your breath or your footstrike simplifies the experience and turns it into a form of moving meditation.
Do You Remember the Thrill of Your First Run? What if You Could Feel It Again?
Try to think back. Dust off your memories and return to that day. To those possibly wrong shoes, that cotton t-shirt that was already an artifact of industrial archeology after ten minutes, the breathlessness that felt like it would shatter your lungs. Do you remember the feeling at the end of the run? Not the time on your watch, which you probably didn’t even have, but that strange, intoxicating mix of exhaustion and omnipotence. The feeling of having done something new, of having pushed a small boundary.
Now, fast forward to this morning. Or yesterday. Or your last workout. Garmin on your wrist, Strava notifications ready to go, the route memorized down to the centimeter, a precise idea of the pace to maintain for that specific session. Everything perfect, scientific, optimized. Thrilling? That’s probably not the first word that comes to mind. And that’s normal, mind you. But what if I told you there’s a way to find that spark again, and it doesn’t require buying a new tech gadget?
Shoshin: The Zen Secret of the “Beginner’s Mind”
There’s a Japanese word, borrowed from Zen philosophy, that perfectly captures this idea: Shoshin. It literally means “beginner’s mind.” It’s a fascinating concept that invites us to approach any activity, even one in which we feel like experts, with the attitude and curiosity of someone doing it for the very first time. Free from preconceptions, expectations, and, above all, the heavy burden of “I already know how to do this.”
Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Think about it: when you’re a beginner, every run is a discovery. Every path is new, every sensation needs to be deciphered. When you become an expert, however, you already know everything. You know your pace, your heart’s response under stress, your crises, and your recoveries. You know how it’s going to end. And this knowledge, which you’ve painstakingly built, risks turning the adventure into a mere script to be recited.
Why Experience Can Sometimes Become a Cage
Experience is an asset, of course. It helps us avoid injuries, train better, and achieve our goals. But it can also build a gilded cage of habits and automatisms around us. The famous “autopilot” that engages as soon as we lace up our shoes. We run the same route, at the same time, thinking about the grocery list or that work meeting. The body moves, but the mind is elsewhere.
The arrogance of experience makes us believe we have nothing left to learn. We judge every workout based on an internal roadmap: “I was slow today,” “That interval didn’t go as planned.” We lose the ability to welcome what the day and our body offer us, whether good or bad, and we immediately pigeonhole it with a value judgment. The result? Frustration, boredom, and that creeping feeling of doing a duty rather than a pleasure.
3 Practical Ways to Cultivate a Beginner’s Mind in Your Next Workout
But Shoshin isn’t an abstract philosophy for monks on a cushion. It’s a practical approach, a mental exercise you can put into practice tomorrow.
Run a Route You’ve Never Taken Before
This is the simplest and most powerful method. Leave your house, and at the first intersection where you usually turn right, turn left this time. Get lost, explore unfamiliar streets. Not knowing what awaits you around the next corner forces your mind to stay present and attentive. The workout ceases to be an execution and becomes an exploration once again.
Leave Your Watch at Home
I know, it’s not easy; it almost feels like going out naked. Yet, running without the dictatorship of pace, rhythm, and distance is a liberating act. It forces you to use a different, much more sophisticated technology: your body. How are you breathing? How do your legs feel? Are you tired or do you still have energy? Run by feel, rediscovering a dialogue with yourself that data often silences.
Focus on Just One Thing (Your Breath, Your Footstrike)
Instead of thinking about a thousand variables, choose just one. For the next ten minutes, for example, concentrate solely on the sound of your feet hitting the ground. Try to make it lighter, quieter. Or focus on the air entering and leaving your lungs. This practice, similar to a moving meditation, clears the mind of background noise and roots you in the action you are performing. Nothing else.
In the Art of Running, We Are All Eternal Beginners
The truth is, no matter how expert we may become, every run is different. Our body is never the same as it was the day before, nor are the weather, the light, or our state of mind. Accepting that we are eternal beginners doesn’t mean regressing; it means opening ourselves up to infinite learning. It means giving ourselves permission to be surprised, to make mistakes, to feel joy in a detail we had never noticed before.
Perhaps the secret to a lifetime of running isn’t to get better and better, but to get better and better at rediscovering ourselves as beginners. Every single time.