Most running treats the world underfoot as distance to be got through. The alternative is not mystical and it costs nothing to try.
You can cover ground as distance, or you can move through a place. The first is what most running is: the route is a quantity, the surface is a variable affecting pace, and the interesting information is on the watch.
The second treats the ground as somewhere in particular — this stretch of river, these trees at this point in the year, the way the light does that thing in October.
Kimmerer, a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about this at length and she is the right person to read on it rather than me. Her argument is not sentimental: it is that treating the living world as a collection of objects is an epistemological choice with consequences, and that the alternative is a different and defensible way of knowing.
What I can add is narrower and practical. The switch is free, it is available on any run, and most people have never deliberately tried it.
This is an area where the popular claims run well ahead of the findings.
Time in natural environments is associated with improvements in mood and some measures of cognitive performance, and reviews find the effects real but modest and heterogeneous.6 Attention restoration theory is the usual explanation and it has mixed empirical support — the phenomenon is better established than the mechanism.
The connectedness-to-nature research finds an association between feeling connected to the natural world and wellbeing, which is interesting and is correlational and self-report throughout.5
So: moving outdoors is probably somewhat better for your head than moving indoors, on average, by an amount that would not change anyone’s life on its own. That is the honest size of it, and it is enough of a reason to take the trail when the trail is available.
The switch is free and most people have never deliberately tried it.
The treadmill-versus-trail sermon is one of running writing’s most reliable genres and it ignores who is running where.
People run indoors because it is dark at the only hour they have, because the roads near them are not safe to run on, because childcare means twenty minutes and no travel, because the weather where they live is genuinely dangerous for part of the year. Access to pleasant green space is distributed along the same lines as most other goods, which is to say unevenly and predictably.
The stance is available anywhere, which is the part worth keeping. A city street is a place. So is a car park at six in the morning with the light coming up behind the buildings. The argument here is about attention rather than scenery, and the scenery version is a way of turning a free practice into something that requires a postcode.
Note — who has a trail
People run indoors because of hours, safety, childcare and weather. The stance this essay describes is about attention rather than scenery, and the scenery version turns a free practice into one that requires a postcode.
Small, and almost entirely about where the eyes go.
This series discusses running practices belonging to specific Indigenous nations of the Americas. Where a practice belongs to a named people, it is named; where a source is an Indigenous author, runner or organization speaking publicly about their own tradition, that is said. Ceremonial and religious specifics that those nations have not made public are not discussed here and are not the author’s to convert into technique. General claims about running physiology and psychology are cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.
You can cover ground as distance or move through a place, and the switch costs nothing and is rarely tried.
The nature research is real and modest — enough reason to take the trail, not enough for the sermon. And access to green space is distributed like everything else, so the version of this that requires scenery is the wrong version.