Before we start today’s blog, just recall your favorite running route. What comes to mind? The start line? The car park? Or some landmark along the way? And by the way, how precisely do you remember the route? I will tell you where this is heading but first a big THANK YOU for visiting this BLOG.
Yes welcome. Before we start:
Have you visited our YouTube channel? You don’t have to, just asking whther you woud be interested in some videos on there. HOWEVER: If you are looking for the best shoes to buy wrong no advice on that best drinking bottles again wrong.
But if you are looking at topics that reveal a little more about brain training, strengthening resilience, or building endurance.
Then that’s the place for you.
So why don’t I talk about running socks, sunglasses, nutrition? Well, there are enough specialists that cover these products. Plus, I guess most runners have their favorite pair of running shoes anyway. I mean seriously, if my running shoes have a tear, you know where the toenail is strange how the expensive brand name (that I am a fan of) cannot seem to fix that issue anyway, different topic, different blog So when the day comes that I need new running shoes, I usually buy the same brand anyway.
For nutrition, I have two runners’ whom advice I somehow agree with and enjoy their suggestion, that’s Scott Jurek, and Brenda Brazier.
And training plans Yes, I do offer that, but only if we work together in a one-to-one environment. See, I prefer to really get to know you, see you run, and get a real picture of how you are as a runner. Not that there is something wrong with downloading a plan from the internet. Nope it is just something I don’t offer.
What I specialize in is developing mental tools.
All for runners’ of course. And did I mention the content be it on this blog or in our live seminars it is for the type of runner who wants to improve.
Who doesn’t want to get slower as the birthday numbers become higher and higher? You are closer to three digits than single. LOL.
If you have pets, kids, parents you know what I am talking about. You still recall how they were learning to walk, your kids of course taking those first baby steps or how you drove them to school and now they drive you somewhere. Or how your parents taught you something and now you are teaching them AMAZON. LOL.
What I want to say is time passes so quickly. We relate to time differently as we ourselves grow older.
And maybe you can relate to this. For me: So many races I took part in, and events I ran in or participated in and it feels like it just happened yesterday, or a few weeks ago.
And those races where I really trained hard for. Where I had invested a lot of time, studied the course beforehand, read up about it, you know those races I took seriously. Where I had achieved a good result, for me a good result. Those I remember very clearly. And it is pretty obvious that the more clearly you remember a route, the better you will or should be able to perform.
There is a race in the south of Germany, well in the days before we all wore masks and I had signed up aware that it was 70 gravel, and 30 tar. OK, but it was a last-minute sign up, more I didn’t know, except I noticed that last year’s winner had a finish time of 2:46. Now the top runner usually has a much faster marathon finish time means there is a lot of climbing involved.
Well that particular race whow I actually went back and ran some of the sections a few weeks thereafter, just to compare and see where I could make up time, or which hill I wasted time by being too slow, or could have run faster you know because thereafter was a long downhill section.
But what I want to get into is the route. And how well we have the ability to recall landmarks, long stretches, hills, difficult corners. Just think and you might remember a particular first corner of a favorite race, all elbows, bumping, juggling for space, careful not to stumble.
This capability of our brain to store such memories, everything from childhood friends to shopping lists, gives us the ability to learn from past experiences. So that particular memory is a piece of information that is stored in your brain.
But, the time of storage seems to often have an effect on the quality of how the information is recalled.
According to scientists the information can be stored in different areas. Depending what it is. So, a specific memory is split up into different regions.
If it is a particular landmark, you recall that favorite run I asked you to recall, maybe that was what came up in your mind’s eye. A tree where you park your car, or a building that is your finish line. Well this involves sight, so that visual trave is stored in a region that involves sight perception
Navigation is based on this. Visual clues send or release a trigger and set a series of thoughts of a route that you once ran. Those triggers allow you to judge when what turn needs to be taken. This happens through an electrical discharge which releases neurons. Now just bear with me here for a second. Those neurons release chemicals and these chemicals well it depends how many or how much has been released, when, and what duration of activation.
Researchers have looked at this, and the way I understood this is that there are people who have something called topographical disorientation. Basically, it means you can’t navigate. Means some people have difficulty in learning new things, yes, but that’s now what I am referring to here.
There is something else that I found, and it is Retrograde topographical disorientation. Means this person will not be able to recognize previously known scenes. Rooms, or streets they lived in.
For most runners however you don’t suffer from this. And you have the ability to find your way around terrain. No not referring to Bear Grylls type of adventure but rather your running route. The one you thought of in the beginning of the blog where you are now aas you recall it? Still at the same part or you mentally moved along the route? Ok, this navigation relies on so called myriad skills, and of course knowledge by learning to put information gathered together. Information such as hills, pavements, landmarks and street layouts.
What surprised me most was that apparently, well maybe you know this Brain imaging studies have identified hippocampal activation in London taxi drivers as they employ learned maps of the city to navigate and these experiments have distinguished the activation of the hippocampus in wayfinding by survey navigation as they are in complex maze learning in rats.
These studies suggest the human hippocampus is preferentially involved in survey navigation. However, more detailed examination of the role of the hippocampus in survey navigation has revealed that the hippocampus is primarily engaged during the building and updating of cognitive maps rather than the expression of well-learned maps Also, in an investigation of hippocampal activation over the detailed course of navigating a well-learned environment in humans, the hippocampus was not continuously engaged, but rather is engaged only briefly during the planning of routes to a new destination or altering an already specified route.
These findings indicate that human navigation involves the building of a complex knowledge space and learning how to use tools to read it, and after learning, the role of the hippocampus is to support remembering prior experiences in the space as a guide to planning navigational decisions (Brown et al. 2016). Navigation in humans can be aptly characterized as a highly complex memory task supported by the hippocampal system.
Point I am getting at is, that this sport of ours running, did you ever think about all these things going on under your skull? I mean there’s more info. There are millions of inputs with each scene that we take in. everything coordinated somehow on autopilot.
There is something special about using that power. Perhaps you had this sometime during your everyday life. You got upset at something someone. And the next few hours are spent with recurring images in our mind about how you should have reacted to what you should have said. Or shouldn’t’ (that’s usually my case, lol).
Well these memories sometimes don’t get processed, what I want to say is. The healthy mind needs a lot of power sort of like the CPU of your computer. It needs to do multiple things at the same time so that you can listen to this blog.
And the “occurrences” well they get processed. Usually. It’s an automatic process of our brains. But sometimes we get stuck. You know, like that uncle who only blogs at Thanksgiving and then recalls how when he visited France someone apparently swore at him and since that day 28 years ago, all French things including French Fries are disgusting.
Or the
Now just imagine you have such an event. And it is really bugging the living daylights out of you. I mean you already called your sister, brother, or friend, explained the injustice or stupidity and enforced how right, or how thoughtful or whatever it may be. You enforced it. Built up emotional support.
Wasted your and their time to recreate and justify a moment in time that actually wouldn’t shouldn’t even matter.
Now rather than doing that. How about if you took that wonderful mind and went on a run. But not your usual run. This time perhaps use google maps, or a real life map remember those? Those no matter how hard you tried you could never ever get them folded back to the original position.
route you have never been on. Just running according to your instincts. To your
Despite these shortcomings, the above-reviewed research supports some general conclusions about the role of the hippocampal system in navigation:
The hippocampus is essential to survey navigation, which is most often engaged in tasks where there is high demand for remembering goals and recent experiences, for integrating multiple paths into an organization of places that compose a survey map, and for flexible expression of navigation guided by the map. Correspondingly, in these situations, even when survey mapping is not required, hippocampal networks map environments by parsing locations into place fields and can predict paths through these maps as reflected in sequences of place cell firings.
At the same time, the hippocampus is also necessary for a broad range of memory tasks that do not involve survey mapping but do involve the organization and flexible expression of memories. Correspondingly, hippocampal networks map many nonsurvey spatial and nonspatial organizations, including mapping of multiple intersecting routes (e.g., the continuous alternation task), distinct spatial mappings for different cognitive operations in the same environment (e.g., delayed vs. continuous alternation), mapping of temporal organizations (e.g., remembering the order of events in episodes), and abstract relations between events that form a continuity of associations (e.g., hierarchical organizations, social space)
Yup, clever isn’t it? Your 365 Day Run Streak, one whole year of running Why who or what would you want to do that? And if your first thought is “I couldn’t do that” then definitely you should get the book. The link to the video you know what.. just go to youtube, enter “heiko stribl” and concentrate or you will get sidetracked and end up somewhere you don’t want to be.
To change the way you act, change the way you think Ephesians 4: Let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes.
Many thanks for joining me on today’s blog.
My name is Heiko, God Bless You and remember to take it easy.
