Part II: On Play
When’s the last time you played? Like really played – not out of obligation or as part of a plan to achieve some goal – but just played, for the joy of it?
If you’re like most adults, I suspect that answer is somewhere between “forever ago” and “I don’t remember.”
I get it - I mean, who has time for playing around these days? We have work, families, social obligations, school, training schedules and general life obligations that take priority. Play doesn’t pay the bills. In the triad of work-play-rest, “play” is often considered the least important - considered to be a reward, or luxury, to be squeezed in if, and only if, there are a few extra hours in the week.
Which of course, there are never any “extra” hours in the week.
We’re passing along this mentality to our kids too, we send them to school for 7 hours of work, “interrupted” by 30 minutes of recess, then often send them home with hours of additional “homework.” We enroll them in sports and after school activities often to bolster their college applications or create budding athletic champions. We do all this, likely, to prepare them for adulthood – in which play always comes last.
We do this in training too. In running we have a concept of “junk miles,” or miles that don’t contribute to a training plan, miles that are unstructured and therefore considered a waste of time, or even counterproductive in achieving our goals. Each workout becomes carefully crafted to achieve some physical progression towards a goal. We do speed work, tempo runs, stride outs, and long runs at prescribed paces. We measure our performance through mileage totals, heart rate zones, and our VO2 max. We compare our performance this week with last and carefully time our cutback weeks of rest and active recovery for maximum growth. All of these things are great, they give us insight and knowledge into our performance and help us prepare for our goals.
But that’s not how we learned to run.
We learned to run through play. We picked up our steps when Mom or Dad started chasing us, or when we wanted the ball. We didn’t start our GPS with our first steps, we didn’t know what a pace chart was. We didn’t even run in a straight line.
We played. We ran as fast as we could while giggling, gulping the fresh air into our lungs hungrily, without any ideas of lactate thresholds or podium finishes.
We played - for no reason other than we wanted to.
Where did we stop that? And why?
I suspect at some point we were told that play was for kids, that it was a reward for hard work, or worse - a waste of time. It was for the rich or spoiled, an indulgence that those with work ethic and big goals could not afford.
But that’s bullshit.
Play is essential to endurance, health, and frankly life.
The benefits of play are well-documented - and growing. It stimulates our brains and increases our motivation. It sparks curiosity and develops our problem-solving skills. Ultimately, like rest, it’s not a reward for work, it’s a complement. It doesn’t distract us from our goals, it pushes us towards them, usually more efficiently than binary cycles of work and rest.
That’s because that fun middle ground – it can be rest or work. A pickup soccer game improves our speed, agility, and cardiovascular health. A mid-afternoon dance party can be just the period of recovery we need to attack our evening training run.
Play also helps avoid burnout. Google “avoid burnout in sports” and you’ll get a dozen hits about avoiding burning in young athletes - but burnout is a major problem among adult, even elite, athletes too. This works because play speaks to intrinsic motivation, that is play is the reward in and of itself, and while extrinsic motivation (medals, awards, praise) is a common and effective tool to motivate athletes, some studies and writers suggest that intrinsic motivation has more endurance - promoting long-term change and success better than extrinsic motivation alone.
Perhaps the strongest case for injecting play simpler than that. It just feels good.
Runners know how to suffer, we find that Type II “fun” enjoyable. Or at least we find meaning in it. We’ve even managed to make recovery painful with our ice baths, foam rollers, and deep tissue massages that leave us more sore walking out of the spa than we were walking in.
But again, we didn’t start running because it hurt. We did it because it felt good and we can’t discount the health benefits, or the pure joy of doing something purely because it feels good. Especially when it comes to recovery. Christie Aschwanden, in her book Good to Go looks at a host of recovery approaches, using the science to determine what actually leads to faster, more reliable recovery. In addition to some standard principles, she advocates for relaxation - the data showing that what relaxes us, renews us. Play tamps down the adrenaline, which while useful on race day or in the middle of a hard training run, can zap us of energy and mood-boosting hormones like oxytocin and increase our cortisol, or stress hormone, production. Play, on the other hand, releases oxytocin and serotonin - feel good, “happiness” endorphins.
All that science is basically summed up into a simple idea, one we intrinsically understand. Play is fun, it feels good, and sometimes feeling good is exactly what our training, our health, our lives need. Play not only makes the days more joyful, but they make our nights, our recovery days, more restful. Parents of young children know this. The surest way to make sure my toddler happily sleeps through the night? A full day of play.
No where more than in our play can we examine ourselves, our world, and the connection between the two. Play keeps us laughing, keeps us coming back to work harder, recover faster, and stick around for the long run - and it’s time we start respecting the power of play.