MORE THAN A FEELING

Tapping into your intuition can bring out your best performance, says Kiera Carter

- Kiera Carter

INTUITION MAY SEEM TO BE AN ABSTRACT THOUGHT PROCESS, but recently, experts have linked it to more tangible experiences. Dietitians talk about ‘intuitive eating’, and trainers talk about ‘intuitive fitness’. Is intuitive running next? I put the practice to the test recently by trusting my own intuition, which led to me running my fastest (and happiest) half marathon in 12 years. And experts confirm that using this gut feeling to guide your training and racing decisions could indeed help you run better.

Defining intuition

“Intuition is the productive use of unconscious information to make better decisions or actions,” says Joel Pearson, a neuroscientist and founder of the Future Minds Lab at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “We can feel information even though it’s unconscious; people often describe feelings in their gut, stomachs or back of the throat. Our brains take in an immense amount of information each day, but we’re only conscious of a tiny tip of the iceberg,” he says. “The bulk of the associations we make are below the surface, things that we mostly ignore in order to go about our lives.”

So when you have a hunch about something, it could be based on information you aren’t consciously aware of – say, the connection your brain has made between mild levels of humidity and your performance. The humidity is up slightly and you think, maybe this isn’t my day to go hard, even if you don’t consciously acknowledge the sticky air.