One of my most hated aspects of school was being made to run all the way around the athletic track. As an unfit, poorly coordinated and totally non-sporty teenager, I really struggled and quickly reverted to walking – only to be shouted at by an unsympathetic teacher to ‘get running’ again. From then on I’ve never run, apart from for an occasional bus.

Since coming to the Alexander Technique my attitude to physical activity has gradually shifted, as my balance and coordination have improved. I began enjoying trying out different activities – happy that I didn’t need to ‘try and get it right’ but instead just playing with my Alexander thinking and enjoying having a go, safe in the knowledge that I now knew how to look after myself better in any activity. My latest venture is paddle boarding, which I’ve found can be harder than it looks on the sea off Portobello beach.

Despite my new-found enthusiasm for trying out ‘sporty type’ activities, my long-standing hatred of running remained…until a couple of weeks ago when I was introduced to some new ideas. Malcolm Balk, Alexander teacher, running coach and author was coming over from Canada to give a workshop in Edinburgh and I decided it was too good an opportunity to miss. So I got in touch to ask if he would consider giving a second running workshop for Alexander teachers – not least to help us better tailor our Alexander teaching for our clients who run.

On a gloriously sunny Edinburgh day, I gathered with eight of my Alexander teacher colleagues for a morning’s workshop with Malcolm. After some warm-up exercises, he filmed each of us in turn as we ran a short distance. We then decamped back to base to view the results. How enlightening being able to clearly see one’s habits all played out in slow motion! Perhaps not surprisingly, as Alexander Technique teachers we all ‘passed the first test’ being pretty good at looking after our head/neck/back relationship, so we weren’t introducing a whole load of unnecessary tension in our necks (phew). But we were all doing various extraneous things not conducive to easy running – what on earth was I doing with my arms, did I need to be moving them quite as much as I was? We all had our own individual idiosyncrasies but on top of this we shared a tendency to a greater or lesser extent to ‘run with our legs’ rather than ‘on them’. In other words, the leading leg was coming right out in front of the rest of the body, such that the centre of mass then had to be ‘heaved’ over the top of it, rather than the legs being more underneath and behind the head/torso to allow propulsion forwards with a great deal less effort.

Having seen all this we then went back outside and Malcolm invited us to have a go at running in our usual way to get a sense of the unnecessary habits that he’d (in a very kind and helpful way) pointed out to us. This gave us a great opportunity to gain a better appreciation of what we were actually doing, by matching it up with what we’d seen. Knowing what it is that we’re doing that we don’t want to do is the first step in the process of change.

We then went on to the next stage which was introducing, one-by-one, some very simple thoughts together with a few basic instructions. Most approaches in life encourage us to try and work out what we need to do and we often end up trying to micromanage ourselves. The Alexander Technique is different and recognises that we work as a whole system. We’re much more complex than a machine, so we can’t possibly consciously decide what we need to do with each ‘bit of our body’ to carry out an action. Through the Alexander Technique we learn to use our conscious thinking to prevent or reduce unhelpful habits that are interfering with our natural movement coordination, poise and balance, as well as to create the best conditions we can for ourselves – that way or inherent neuromuscular processes can take care of what needs to happen to carry out any action. As Alexander himself put it, ‘If you stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing does itself’.

So, armed with a few simple thoughts, I began to trot off across the field and was amazed at the experience of how effortless it was. I had been making a lot of totally unproductive effort in trying to run and I now knew how to let this go. After a short while I heard Malcolm call out ‘Great, that’s it, you can stop now’ but I just kept on going – I was actually enjoying it!