Mindful Running: Elinor Fish Interview

Originally from British Columbia, Canada, Elinor Fish is a writer, speaker, educator and competitive runner who’s dedicated her 20-year career to teaching others the physical and mental benefits of Mindful Running. Through her writings, workshops and retreats, she has helped thousands of runners learn and implement the practice of Mindful Running to manage and mitigate stress in all areas of their lives, improving their overall health, self-confidence and relationships.

What is Mindful Running — and what is the opposite?

Mindfulness and running are beautifully complementary practices that when done together, not only improve your running, but also serve as a powerful, sustainable, enjoyable practice that enhances all areas of your life. Running mindfully offers a better way to manage your energy, stress and fitness. 

The thing is, running can be a good stress (builds stronger muscles, endurance and cardiovascular fitness), or it can be a bad stress (causes fatigue, inflammation, mental stress or injury). When you run mindfully, you become very attuned to how your body responds and what it needs to keep performing at its best.  

When you run mindfully, you better manage your energy, prevent injury and achieve better results while experiencing the most enjoyment and satisfaction from running.  Best of all, it's easier to run sustainably, meaning it fits into your life style and is easy to maintain even as other aspects of your life shift and evolve.  

The opposite of running mindfully is to disregard what your body is telling you – in the form of injury, soreness, fatigue, whatever and continuing to run the same way or with the same intensity even when it's not serving you (as in, building fitness). And a lot of runners end up in this place, where they are so focused on the desired outcome – say reaching a certain speed or finishing a race – that they keep pushing themselves until they're in a deep pit of exhaustion or laid up with an injury that takes months or more heal.

How do runners overcome performance plateaus in your way of thinking?

The thing is, if you want to find out why your running performance is stagnating, you need to look at more than just your running routine to find answers. Your body responds to all types of stress – no matter the source – with the same set of physiological responses, collectively called "the stress response." When the body is constantly overloaded with stress, it's nearly impossible to build fitness. Instead, running more just makes you more tired and more broken. 

You may already understand the value of scheduling training days and rest days, knowing that you need to take days off in order to stay healthy. The challenge is that for many runners, their rest days are still filled with other stressors that prevent them from actually getting the rest they need. We can suffer chronic stress from things like sleep quality, diet, environmental quality, work pressures and personal relationships.

Mindful running is the practice of tuning in to how all these stressors affect you and then taking steps to mitigate their impact on the body and mind. Being mindful shifts your mental focus to a deep present-moment awareness, which is key to mentally shutting off the stress response and activating the relaxation response.

The body best recovers and heals when in a relaxed state, so if you make that your priority, you'll regain the energy, motivation and health you need to resume building fitness.

The process of how to make this shift in your running is what we teach at all of our live and virtual retreats.

What’s the craziest place you’ve ever run?

I'd have to say that the craziest place I've ever run is Iceland. In fact, I'm heading back there in a couple of weeks for the Iceland Trail Running + Wellness Retreat for women. Iceland is one of the most stunning and wild places I've ever visited. 

And the running there is so crazy, first because of where it can take you, such as Thorsmork, where we run through a deep river valley flanked on both sides by huge glaciers. The second reason it's so crazy is because if there's not water falling from the sky, it's bubbling up from underground, shooting straight in a geyser, plunging down a giant waterfall or enveloping you in a cloud of steam. But no matter what, Iceland is wet. I think it makes the place feel alive, pulsing with energy and vibrancy. I can't wait to go back! 

You can see more about our retreats here.