Running and Minimalism

Something crossed my tiny mind at the gym the other night.

I found myself thinking that athletic exercise (running, cycling, rowing and so on) is a minimalist hobby.

I recall reading in a long-ago issue of Time that the core idea of minimalism was that the art it strive for should announce itself to the viewer's perception all at once, before their conscious mind had an opportunity to get in the way and interpret it.  By way of example, a person looking at something like The Ambassadors can only make sense of it by thinking through what a huge number of symbols and signs mean, and thinking through a great deal of one's own experience of the world (1).

The promise of minimalism is to strip away every element except the essentials, to show a person the thing represented in its critical, minimal details. Hence, The Voice of Fire reduces the image of flame to a single red stripe.

What does this have to do with athletics?  When we run hard, when we cycle or push ourselves to the limit physically, we strip our experience back to what we feel at that instant.  The more we push our limbs, the more we pull oxygen-carrying blood from our brains, so there is less capacity to process and interpret experience and sensation.  Running takes us back to nothing more than the fatigue in our legs, the rushing of air in the lungs, the sun on our shoulders, and the pounding of our feet.

What minimalism did for art, running does for the world: offers it to us unmediated, pared back, and all at once.  At its best, it stops us from getting in the way of experiencing the world.

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(1) Roland Barthes, La Bruissement de la Langue (1984), pp. 61-7.