I am very excited to introduce a new series & co-host to the RoP podcast. Over the summer I found a podcast created by a Belgian runner & coach, Kobe Blondeel, that addressed topics that I felt resonated the essential shift in consciousness that was undergoing around running as a spiritual practice. Kobe hosts In The Zone & his early episodes were a mix of solo discussions around his experiences as an athlete & coach around deep philosophical & spiritual modes of being a runner with his travelogue of running across Belgium. Suffice it to say, I had a bit of envy around the courage & insightfulness Kobe brought to these discussions. I highly recommend listening to episodes #11, #12 & #28 as introductions to his inimitable style. So I reached out to Kobe to see if he would consider a collaboration. I was planning the reboot of this podcast. I was committed to a mix of solo, co-hosted & interview type content & felt that Kobe - if he was game - would be a really valuable conversation partner. I think my initial Instagram message to him gave him some pause, however. Who is this crazy old dude vibing on his weird content? But thankfully he respectfully responded that perhaps we could meet to explore common ground & potential collaboration. Our first conversation can be found on on his In The Zone podcast under the title, Steve Sisson: running as a spiritual path & I highly recommend you give it a listen if you want a little more background & how we worked out what we were even trying to accomplish with our conversations.
That episode went well enough for us to commit to an ongoing collaboration/co-hosting of our discussions on each of our podcast platforms. What follows here is us beginning to work out the details on what we think we can unfold & offer the running community that hasn't ever been done before. I mean this...I believe we are doing something novel in the space of running podcasts; we are stating emphatically that running is a path with heart, a spiritual practice that can be & mined for deep inner wisdom & practical benefit to our experience of moving through space. I'll let you decide if this is your particular cup of tea.
In this episode we introduce the series & discuss our point of views; setting the stage for a deeper dive into our argument framing Belief as the essential starting point for our conversations. As Kobe summarizes in this episode: we have conscious & subconscious beliefs, most of them subconscious, & a belief actually runs as a sub pattern in our physiology, it’s something that we observe in our inner experience. These patterns show up in our lives, both negatively & positively, & are the programs we operate on to help us filter for the good shit we want in our life, & filter out the bad shit.
So running has the opportunity to become a testing ground of these beliefs & how they serve us.
I provide a specific method for assessing & managing challenging feeling states, using the prompt “Is this real?” to help with decisionmaking in a training or racing environment. I also delve into what he calls “the natural state” as our foundational & fundamental birthright, which needs to be claimed for any truly skillful approach to these challenging feeling states.
The first hour unpacks the concept but in the last half hour Kobe & I both explore the practices of meditation, contemplation & prayer as core practices for deepening & expanding our running experiences.
So much good stuff buried in this episode. I hope you enjoy this conversation & join us for the future ones coming up in this series I call the Innerwork Dialogues: Belief as Container & Fuel for Sensemaking
Godspeed, my friends, Godspeed.
