 You've probably heard the phrase running naked, that's not what this video is about, but running naked is the frankly ludicrous concept of leaving your watch at home, not recording your run and simply running for the experience itself for the joy of running. So rather than concentrating on time and pacing and heart rate and all the other metrics that help to make your run a disciplined and controlled process, you listen to the birds, and you watch the sun as it gently kisses the water as it laps up onto the shore. Furthermore, you don't spend hours trawling through data at the end of your run because it simply isn't there. Yes, I know, for many of us that might just be a step too far. I love nature as much as you do. I love the experience of just running, but I don't want to leave my watch at home because part of the enjoyment of running for me is looking at my stats after I finish, and it is logging that data over time. But do you know what? There is some merit in freeing yourself up from that psychological straight jacket of your watch. Let me explain. Recently I ran the Surrey Half Marathon, and it was a race like no other I've experienced before. Just done my warm-up, but I have to say I'm feeling really nervous. It's only a warm-up race for Paris, and I don't know, I just feel really nervous about it. I had my watch on my wrist as usual. It beeped every time a kilometer ticked over as usual, but this time I resisted the urge to look down at my watch every time it beeped to check my splits. I ran the whole race without looking at my watch, and you might legitimately ask, why? What was the point? Well, when you think about it, it's pretty obvious to say that there is a connection between your body and your mind. The two don't function independently. They are inextricably linked, but that is easy to forget sometimes. I'm trying not to look at the watch, so trying to do it by feel. We spend our running lives thinking about pacing. How fast can I run? What is the pace for a four-hour marathon? How many minutes per mile is that? And we train with those goal paces in mind, and if we're really disciplined, we lock into specific paces for threshold running, interval running, long run pace, and marathon pace. And then we check our heart rate zones when we're in those paces to make sure we're in the right zone. So zones one and two for your easy run, zone three for marathon pace, zone four for threshold running, zones four and five for interval training. If you glance down at your watch and you notice you're going too fast, suddenly your heart rate starts to go up, your legs start filling with lactic acid, and you get tired, or you tell yourself, I'm going too fast, I need to slow down. So we have to slow down to a different pace, which is not the pace that we may be accustomed to. And this is the straight jacket that we're putting ourselves in. By not looking at my watch during the sorry half marathon, I had almost no feedback on how fast or slow I was going. The only visual clue I had was that I knew I was ahead of the one hour 30 pacer. Other than that, I didn't know what my heart rate was. I didn't know what my kilometer splits were. I had no idea how fast I was going. Some people get very accomplished at running to feel. They can lock into exactly what a seven minute mile is. But this wasn't about that. This experiment wasn't about trying to run at exactly four minutes per kilometer. In fact, it was about freeing myself from that constraint altogether. The idea was to start fast and then settle in. Just run and enjoy the feeling of running fast. And deep down, I think I knew I was running fast. When I say fast, I mean faster than the controlled or constrained watch-tied runner that I would normally be. But because I didn't have any visual confirmation of my speed, I just kept going and didn't worry about it. By the way, just a quick note, if you are enjoying the video, if you're finding it useful, interesting, entertaining, then do please click that like button. And if you're not subscribed to the channel, why not consider doing that as well and hit that notifications bell. If you hate the video, click the dislike button. Thankfully, because I was wearing my watch and not running completely naked, I did have all the stats and all the data to pour over after the event. And looking back, it is clear that I didn't run an evenly paced run at all, partly due to the undulating course, but also some tentativeness on my part to fully go headlong into the experiment. There are clearly some sections where I slow down and some sections where I speed up. There are some sections where you can see I put the brakes on and some sections where I completely let rip with my speed. But interestingly, my effort level looks to be very even across the whole race. In terms of heart rate, it's very consistent. It just gradually rises slowly during the race and then a little bit more aggressively towards the end in the last two kilometers when I could smell that finish line. I ran unburdened by pace and finished in one hour, 24 minutes and 10 seconds. And that is faster than I thought I was going. When we got to five kilometers in the race, there was a 180 degree turn. And as I came back down, I saw the one minute 30 pace are coming back up and I couldn't resist doing some mental maths in my head. And I worked out I thought I was going to finish in around about one hour, 27. In reality, I was three minutes faster than that. A few weeks before, I'd run the Chichester 10K in 39 minutes and 55 seconds. My fastest 10K in seven years. But if you look at the Surrey Half Marathon, the final 10K of that race took me just 39 minutes and 36 seconds. Not only faster than Chichester, but faster than my official 10K PB of 39 minutes and 43 seconds. Now, I'm not saying that I couldn't have done this if I had looked at my watch. I am all for controlled, disciplined and efficient racing. But that does tend to lead to a more conservative approach. Vicious right wing populist. Don't be a hero. Don't go off too fast. Stick to the plan and don't go off script. But Surrey Half Marathon was completely off script and I absolutely loved it. Yes, the pacing might have been a little bit all over the place, but heart rate and effort level were spot on. I just relaxed as much as possible and enjoyed the feeling of running fast. I thoroughly enjoyed my Surrey Half Marathon experience and the experiment of running whilst not looking at my watch. I'm not quite zen enough to run completely naked, but by managing to not just lift my arm up and look at the splits when my watch beat, I was able to completely free myself of the shackles that we put on ourselves in terms of sticking to a pacing strategy and telling ourselves that we have to stick to x number of minutes per kilometer or the world will come crashing down around us. So I'm not asking you to throw your Garmin watch away. I know you won't and I'm not going to either. But if you feel you can, why not try doing a hard effort without looking at your watch? Maybe a 5k, a parkrun or a race if you can and see what you can achieve? You never know. By freeing yourself up from that thing on your wrist, you might do something that you didn't think you were capable of doing. If you'd like to watch the Chichester 10k that I did, then click that link right there. And if you haven't subscribed to the channel, I'd really appreciate it if you could do that now and click the bell notification icon so you know every time we upload a new video. Thank you very much for watching. We'll see you on the start line next time.