<em>Frederic Remington, “The Parley”</em>
When we arrived in the U.S. in 1945, we spent a month in a rundown motel in Lindsay, California. My Dad, who had completed a three-year contract as a mining engineer in Chile, soon found work as a city engineer in his hometown of Exeter (pop. 1100), 10 miles away.
While we stayed at the motel, someone gave me a 78 RPM LP record It was a song titled“Blood on the Saddle.” And it was music that no three-year-old should be exposed to. When my mother realized what it was saying, she threw it away.
It was a country-western ditty with deliberately grotesque lyrics, delivered in lugubrious tones by Tex Ritter. You can hear him sing it or watch him perform it in the 1937 film, Hittin’ the Trail.
There was blood on the saddle
And blood all around
And a great big puddle
Of blood on the ground
A cowboy lay in it
All covered with gore
And he never will ride
Any broncos no more
Oh, pity the cowboy
All bloody and red
For the bronco fell on him
And bashed in his head
No doubt, Mom knew what she was up to. Toddlers or grown-ups, there’s a built-in instinct that tells us it’s a bad idea to allow just any old influences to enter our consciousness. (Still and all, now that I’m 82 and senile, I do find it appropriate to relish absurdity in the arts, viz., by chortling to “Canyons of Your Mind” as sung by Vivian Stanshall and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.)
Nevertheless, there’s a legend that the emperors in ancient China would judge the well-being of their realm by sending envoys to the provinces to listen to the music. If it was harmonious, expressing vibrations of sweetness and contentment, the emperors knew that the land was in good shape.
What would they think of today’s music? I’m guessing they’d be horrified. Even today, jetting back from places where the music is innocent, the inescapable sounds of gangsta rap are an assault on the natural love of the heart.
I’m fascinated by how music influences us. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how, during the California International Marathon in the early 1990s, I was impressed by how powerfully my spirits were lifted by high school bands playing alongside the course.
External influences affect us by a process known as entrainment. They set up a kindred vibration in our bodies and minds. I latched on to the idea of entrainment when I came across an article about Christian Huygens, a seventeenth-century Dutch physicist who wrote about the phenomenon. On February 26, 1665, Huygens scribbled in his diary:
“I have noted an impressive effect which no one has yet been able to explain. This is that two clocks, hanging side by side and separated by one or two feet, keep between them a consonance so exact that the two pendula always strike together, never varying.”
Scientists have since identified many instances where separate entities will entrain their frequencies. A now-famous example is how female college roommates may find their periods synchronizing.
In The Joyful Athlete, I describe how scientists at the Institute of Heartmath charted the effects of positive and negative feelings on our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Positive feelings such as love and compassion are so powerful that the IHM researchers have given their effects a special name: “physiological coherence.” In plain English: good vibes harmonize our bodies, hearts, and minds. They are good medicine.
The IHM scientists explain that the heart rate continually changes, speeding up and slowing down. In the presence of calm, expansive feelings such as kindness, compassion, etc., the speed-changes are regular and steady – when charted, they make a smooth sine-wave pattern. Hence the term coherence. But when we’re angry, resentful, vengeful, or feel hurt or despondent, our hearts beat with a chaotic, random rhythm.
Positive feelings enable the physical heart to work more efficiently at any heart rate. Thus, if you want to run fast with less effort, it’s a good idea to harmonize your feelings, and not just your legs and lungs.
As I said, I’m interested in music as a way to lift my heart and improve my sports performance. My interest isn’t passive – for several years in my seventies, I sang with two small groups and a choir. At 82 I sing in a music studio for 20 minutes to an hour most mornings.
Our groups sang pieces from a repertoire of 400 songs composed by my spiritual teacher. You can hear examples on the Ananda Garden YouTube channel, and at www.anandamusic.org. My teacher said that he had never written a note that wasn’t received from a higher source. I believe this, because I feel it when I sing.
While I was learning the music, I would sing a part for up to an hour and a half while driving the country roads of the San Francisco Peninsula. I would sing a song until I could grasp its meaning and sing the hard parts with ease.
Frank Sinatra knew the value of getting to know a song before he performed it. Before he began to practice a new piece, he would read the lyrics at least 200 times.
My singing profoundly affected my running. It created a place within me where vibrations of harmony seemed a natural part of my makeup, and where I found an enjoyment that was often trimmed with bliss.
Singing the music was a healthy thing to do. So my attention was drawn to an article by Manuel Varlet, The secret to Usain Bolt’s speed may lie in synchronicity.
Varlet cites a report of a study by Michael J. Richardson, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance that suggests Bolt synchronized his steps with those of his competitors.
I doubt any runner who has ever trained in a group will doubt this. I remember long runs in the 1970s with my friend Robin Nowinski that ended on a wonderful 5-mile stretch of swooping downhill two-lane mountain road with glorious views of the Pacific and the Bay. We ran in silence, strides locked-in and synced. I could swear that our consciousness melded in some subtle fashion, our auras drifting together in silent communion.
The Bolt study employed video analysis to determine that 30 percent of Bolt’s strides were precisely synchronized with Tyson Gay’s in the 100-meter final at the 2009 World Championships, where Gay finished second, running in the lane next to Bolt’s.
The researchers concluded that the synchronization was not accidental. “Instead, it seems that there was an active process of synchronisation between Bolt and Gay during the final, perhaps coupled by visual and/or auditory information, which led to more coordinated strides.”
To explain the process, the researchers harkened back to the synchronizing pendulums that Christian Huygens noticed 350 years ago. They cited the many instances of entrainment that science has identified, including complex systems that affect the universe, the lighting of brain neurons, and the flickering of fireflies.
The movements of two or more people interacting together tend to spontaneously entrain to each other. Without specific intention or instructions, their movements can become perfectly synchronised simply due to the exchange of visual and auditory information. The steps of two family members can entrain to each other when walking side-by-side. The rhythmic applause of a crowd in a concert hall can become spontaneously synchronised after a short time.
The scientists wondered if entraining ourselves to the other people can have beneficial effects.
Previous research has shown that interpersonal synchronisation can facilitate successful social interactions. Synchronisation can enhance feelings such as affiliation or connectedness of people interacting and the occurrence of pro-social behaviours, even the efficiency of their communication….
In Love and Survival, Dean Ornish, M.D. reviews dozens of studies indicating that people who live in cultures where extended families are the norm are healthier than in cultures marked by widespread isolation, as a result of entraining themselves to those who support and encourage them.
Running in sync with Robin 40 years ago, I wasn’t looking to improve my social ties, or my race performances or my health. I was an untalented plodder with lingering spasticity and numbness in his legs from a three-year paralysis and two major surgeries. I was more interested in running as a path to simplicity, serenity, self-integration, and joy.
Regardless, the scientists who studied Usain believe that entrainment may have significant benefits for the competitive runner.
Some recent research has shown that running performances can be enhanced when listening to auditory rhythms such as the beats of simple metronomes or music. Music with a prominent and consistent beat can also help to maintain optimal movement tempo and facilitate running efficiency….
It is likely Bolt didn’t even know he was synchronising his steps with Gay. But his doing so may have contributed to his world-record performance. One might wonder: how fast Bolt would have run had Gay not been there – or if Gay had run at an even higher tempo?
The Heartmath researchers found that when people stand at distances up to 5-6 feet apart, their heartbeats tend to synchronize.
After a Joyful Athlete workshop years ago, a female attendee who was in the Army said that she loved running to a cadence with her fellow troopers because it engendered feelings of closeness and unity.
Forgive me if I go all third-world irrational and intuitive, but I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt that training together is good for us, so long as we aren’t trying to entrain ourselves to athletes vastly more talented than we are, and so long as the group conforms to what Stanford management science professor Robert Sutton has called the “No Asshole Rule.”
The most powerful performance boost identified by the IHM researchers occurred when the heart was permeated by feelings of love, compassion, kindness, et al. IHM sells recordings of music and sounds designed to harmonize the heart and improve mental and physical performance. You can be sure it isn’t thug life or Blood on the Saddle.
At any rate, there’s real-world evidence that entrainment works for runners. America’s distance runners have enjoyed their best successes when they trained together, whether they drifted together as friends or to train under an elite coach.
The examples are abundant: Frank Shorter’s pre-Olympic training with the Florida Track Club; Bill Rodgers’ sometimes-training with the Boston Athletic Association, Steve Prefontaine’s training with Bill Bowerman’s tight band at the University of Oregon; and industry-sponsored clubs, including Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project and the Brooks-Hanson and Nike Bowerman groups. It was unquestionably a factor in Arthur Lydiard’s successes that his athletes trained together and were pals. The same is true of the Kenyans.
This is peripheral, but I believe one of the best ways to get to know the core values and character of a person is by feeling the vibes they emanate.
It’s a reason I believe the allegations that Alberto Salazar drugged his athletes are false. As a writer on positive values in sports, I felt duty-bound to read Salazar’s long rebuttal of the charges. Aside from the convincing, well-documented case he makes, I felt while reading it a positive vibration of righteousness and goodness emanating from the consciousness of the man. I could say more about this, with a particular focus on the questionable morals of the working press, with a special focus on the UK. But for now, enough.