How Using Your Imagination Helps Others Endure Challenges
“Perhaps, if the creative ones among us can use our gifts to grant some of our less creative counterparts access to the worlds we imagine, we could help them endure their next challenge(s) with a little more brightness and a lightness to their step.”
Photo by Janelle Pol
In the few years prior to the pandemic, my running coach position at a local gym evolved into a position of leadership within my running community. But the pre-pandemic leadership position I found myself in was due in part to the series of classes I created for members at Cadence, the gym I work for. When gyms closed last year, I pivoted to teaching virtual classes through the gym’s running Facebook group that I manage.
While this pivot felt more like it was done out of necessity, it inspired me to become much more focused on creativity, particularly in my role as a creative person in both a community and profession that might not seem characteristically creative. Don’t get me wrong: part of the reason I adore runners is because I tend to find kindred creative spirits in many of them. Whether we’re right-brained or left, running and run coaching can tend to fill (or dare I say clutter) the mind with pace calculations, mileage counts, heart rate zones and percentiles, and other more technical thoughts, leaving very little space for the imagination to run with us (pun, of course, intended).
IMAGINATION AS A GIFT
As far as imagination goes, I tend to love a good game of make-believe, and long runs have proved to be the perfect place for it. I’ll pretend I’m a fairy, my feet barely touching the ground during a multi-mile flight, and that I have magical powers that allow me to transfer the cadence of a woodpecker’s beak through my tired legs in order to propel them to fly faster. And while it might not be particularly encouraging for me to yell, “pretend you’re fairies” to a group of runners (though I have done this), what I found through coaching virtual running sessions was that in addition to form, effort, pace, and technique, runners could benefit from some imagination coaching. To my delight, my new virtual platform and creative experience were perfect for this.
“You have a gift,” one of my runners said to me. “You can literally stand there for an hour and talk nonstop to no one” I laughed envisioning how behind-the-scenes virtual coaching would reveal me clapping, cheering, and screaming “Catch that person in front of you” at my coffee-coaster-propped up phone. Technically, I wasn’t talking to no one, as I could either see runners joining the class live or envision the ones I knew took the class later. But I suppose my imagination was at work in such a way that I could dissociate from the reality that I was physically alone. And while I’m sure I responded in a self-deprecating way at the time, thinking about it now, perhaps my ability to do so is a gift.
AN EFFECTIVE TOOL
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Steven R. Covey credits the imagination as being one of our greatest effectiveness tools. In fact, there’s an entire “habit” devoted to it in a chapter entitled “Begin and End with the Mind.” “Through imagination,” Covey writes, “we can visualize the uncredited worlds of potential that lie within us.” Covey, of course, doesn’t mean that only right-brained people can utilize this habit, but perhaps those of us for whom it does come a little more naturally can share some of our tricks to tapping into our imaginations with those for whom it doesn’t.
Through coaching running virtually, I realized that there is a lot more dead air space that in-person coaching addresses through chats between runners or calling out form cues based on inefficiencies as we see them. During virtual sessions when I can’t actually see runners, I’d end up repeating the same cues over and over without knowing if they were relevant. And, while some silence isn’t a bad thing, many of my runners were forgoing their usual playlists or podcasts to hear me coach, so I couldn’t just let it slide.
OFFERING VISUALIZATION TRICKS
Creativity was my creative solution. I’d share my kookier fairy and woodpecker visuals (my virtual Boston Marathon “unicorn chasing” class was one of my favorites to coach), but I’d also try to inspire runners’ imaginations by offering them visualization tricks. Here are a few: “assign a color, texture, taste, or smell to the oxygen that’s circulating through your blood as you run at this difficult intensity,” “imagine your feet are springs,” or “pretend you’re in a video game, the ground is falling away behind you, and you have to pull your feet up and over as fast as possible to keep from falling into an increasingly large abyss opening up behind you.” I knew that not everything I’d say would resonate with everyone, but if one thing did help a runner, then my job as their virtual coach felt worthwhile.
Endurance running can take the mind to and through some challenging places; this is true of any sport, event, project, or period of time that requires endurance. For me personally, imagination has helped me through some darker times. Perhaps, if the creative ones among us can use our gifts to grant some of our less creative counterparts access to the worlds we imagine, we could help them endure their next challenge(s) with a little more brightness and a lightness to their step.
Though she currently resides in Troy, Michigan, Maria lived in NYC for eight years, training and working as an actor before pursuing her master's in creative writing from Fordham University. Beyond acting and writing, Maria finds joy in running, coaching runners, strong black coffee, and the hoppiest of craft beers. Follow her on IG - @run_hoppy