Running Flow

The ability to enter into a flow state of mind will help any runner overcome the psychological barriers associated with a race. With Running Flow, pioneering flow researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gives you tools and strategies for experiencing the power of flow.

Ask any serious runner and they’ll tell you that being mentally sound is vital to success in the sport. The ability to enter a flow state of mind is something that Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has devoted his entire career to understanding. In Running Flow, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi is joined by fellow psychologist Christine Weinkauff and running journalist and coach Philip Latter. This landmark work is the first book dedicated to helping runners achieve the state of flow in competitive and training environments. You’ll find comprehensive coverage of the phenomenon, unique practice exercises that stimulate its occurrence, and firsthand accounts from elite runners about their flow experiences. The psychological barriers associated with training and competition can be as demanding as the physical ones. Destined to become a running classic, Running Flow will open your mind not only to better performance but also to a better, healthier, and more enjoyable experience.

“Csikszentmihalyi arrives at an insight that many of us can intuitively grasp, despite our insistent (and culturally supported) denial of this truth. That is, it is not what happens to us that determines our happiness, but the manner in which we make sense of that reality. . . . The manner in which Csikszentmihalyi integrates research on consciousness, personal psychology and spirituality is illuminating.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The bestselling classic that holds the key to unlocking meaning, creativity, peak performance, and true happiness. Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi ("the leading researcher into ‘flow states’" —Newsweek) demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

With help from sports psychology researcher Jackson, Csikszentmihalyi (human behavior, U. of Chicago) pares down his now-famous concept of flow to basic explanations and self-assessment exercises. Emphasis is on achieving a balance between challenges and skills, setting goals, taking advantage of feedback, focusing on the present, controlling the controllables, and having fun. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From the best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms, WAOA 2011, held in Saarbrücken, Germany, in September 2011. The 21 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. The volume also contains an extended abstract of the invited talk of Prof. Klaus Jansen. The Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms for online and computationally hard problems. Both kinds of problems have a large number of applications in a wide variety of fields. Topics of interest for WAOA 2011 were: algorithmic game theory, approximation classes, coloring and partitioning, competitive analysis, computational finance, cuts and connectivity, geometric problems, inapproximability results, mechanism design, network design, packing and covering, paradigms for design and analysis of approximation and online algorithms, parameterized complexity, randomization techniques and scheduling problems.