There was silence and then my teammate said, “you know, we run to be surprised.”

He said this in an off-handed, semi-serious kind of way while reclining on the couch in our track house in Hanover, New Hampshire. We were student-athletes then and he threw out the idea the same way one might throw out an idea in a seminar.

In the intervening years, I’ve continued to run even though the familiar American scholastic guardrails of the sport are behind me. On occasion, I ask myself why.

II.

It was nearly dusk as I stepped down neatly from the terrace of the Hotel Zarmorc into the street. The air was warm but without edge in the way that often concludes a hot summer day. There would be a race tonight that began from the town square at the top of the hill.

I began to jog in the other direction shaking out the heaviness from the UK race and the little sleep and the jolting of the bus ride up from Ljbulina. I flexed and unflexed my hand to loosen the soft fleshy part which was sore from lugging my suitcase over the cobblestones.

People crossed the stone bridge ahead of me. I acknowledged them as I jogged past. Beneath us, a creek coursed heavy with cold water. I blinked and the soft light of the late summer afternoon became more pleasant. The nap had helped. I could feel the hot pit of excitement that proceeds racing building in my gut.

I ran between modest family homes on a narrow, serpentine street. Eventually, this gave way to the flat open road. I ran along the smooth black surface noting this would be a good place to extend a lead but not to attack. The attack should happen on less forgiving terrain where gaps can open up quickly. The road was a loop that brought me back across the stone bridge to the hotel where I had started. The next time I would be here would be around kilometer 7 of the 10-kilometer race. At that point, I would be in pain.

III.

Part of me thinks it’s about control. Getting good at running requires uncountable footfalls. Stack them up day-after-day week-after-week season-after-season and finally, you have something. It is hard to do that without being in control.

At the same time, the mode that makes one good at running training—the willingness to execute the same process over and over again regardless of circumstance—is anodyne to the other critical modes of competitive running: the recovery mode and the competition mode.

The recovery mode is parasympathetic. Rest and digest. It requires relinquishing control. Many competitive runners struggle to do this. Change requires energy. Paradoxically, recovery can, at least initially, present as a more tiring option than continuing to train.

The competition mode is sympathetic. Fight or flight. It requires summoning something not before seen, producing something greater than the sum of its parts. It is emotional and unrestricted. The energy-sapping demands of the training mode can make it difficult to crest from the necessary, solid foundation the training mode provides and touch the fragile, higher plane of the competition mode.

IV.

I paced back and forth. Slovenian families lined the corral. I smiled and waved at a little girl. She was holding her father’s hand. She looked at me like she couldn’t quite figure out who I was or what I was doing.

The race organizer called us to the starting line. I slotted in at the front and looked up at the sky. One deep breath. Starting lines smell of perspiration and fear. This one was no different. The gun went up and there was silence. Random shouts of preliminary encouragement echoed around the town square. Bang.

We broke at pace running with little control down a large hill like boys chasing each other into the night. A pace car led the way. Honking horns. Cowbells. Bravos. Clapping. The first kilometer was hot. I missed the split. At mile one, I saw 4:45. There was one man with me. The rest were behind us somewhere. I tried to relax. Running at these speeds for 10 kilometers requires it. Don’t touch the well, I thought. Autopilot. Get as deep as you can before touching the well and then when you touch it leave nothing to chance.

Children are full of wonder. It is one of their primary modes because so much is new to them. Children are unmired by the mental heuristics that adults have developed over time as a necessary shortcut to navigate this complicated world.

As an adult, fewer things are totally new, but it is still possible to relinquish the familiar and see again with new eyes. Art can make us wonder. Travel can too. Small differences can be enough to jog one from the default mental mode and into a state of wonder.

Running can do this, insofar as running brings one into contact with new people and places, and, importantly, breaks down the mental heuristics that structure our perception of the world.

VI.

I slotted in behind the other man. I could feel his pace in the splintering of my own calm concentration. Panic rose inside me. I tried to suppress it. Dig in and maintain. But I saw the next split on my watch and knew this was too fast for me. I untethered myself from him. It was now about running as fast as I could alone. If he were to falter, I could catch him later. For now, it was about taking the corners of the streets well and pressing to regain my pace up the hills.

VII.

We are taught from an early age to be diligent workers. We go to school, and then sometime later, most of us go to work, and all along the way we measure our output, be that in grades or widgets or dollars. In running, too, we measure our output—miles run and seconds saved. It’s an improvement curve.

A critical aspect of going from the training mode to the competition mode is surrendering control. This can be hard to do. In addition to being taught from a young age to be diligent workers, we are taught that being in control of ourselves is a good thing. Particularly in America, we are taught to be self-made men and women, able to exert such control over ourselves as individuals that pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps is possible.

VIII.

I passed the finish line for the first 5k loop. A fast time was on. I kept pressing, out onto the road where I had warmed up. I felt the instinctual bodily rejection of effort that came with the latter minutes of racing. The burning in my legs. The fuzzing of vision and the blurring of thought—the world was nothing but one foot in front of the other. There was nothing left inside me to contend with the difference between myself and everything that was not myself. In this way, engaged in an activity I knew so well, I experienced a sense of wonder.

XI.

Flow is a well-documented phenomenon and typically occurs when a task with a high degree of difficulty is undertaken with a high degree of mastery. In such a state, the practitioner loses track of time and becomes enmeshed in the task.

The wonder state is similar to the flow state, but crucially, it has the characteristic of seeing something again for the first time, of experiencing the surprise of perception change, having been jogged from the default mental mode into something else entirely.

The cheers and bells and clapping were an indistinguishable tunnel of noise. I saw countless faces as I ran up the road to the final turn without any of them really registering. I sprinted through the un-focus of the final moments of racing. There was the line. The clock above it ticked close to 31 minutes. I raised my arms, streaming into the town square on the top of that hill blinking to myself as I sputtered to stop. A few deep heaves and then I came back to myself. The same crowd was there that had watched me start 30 minutes and 57 seconds earlier.

Rising from my crouch, I shook the hand of the man who had beaten me. He was the Slovenian National Champion and a 2012 Olympian. We jogged down together in the cool evening air. The distant, percussive sound of music dissipated as we moved slowly and with appreciation away from the finish line. He was a kind man and invited me to join him at the Slovenian National Trials the next weekend. I politely declined as I needed to be in Paris that weekend. He offered me another option: a 10k in Croatia.

XI.

It’s a particularly modern phenomenon to be obsessed with measurement. The conventional saying goes: “What gets measured, gets managed.” One implication of this statement is that copious measurements are resulting in better management—better cultivation of resources. Another implication of this statement is that we choose to manage (i.e., to focus on) the things which we can measure in the first place—discreet, countable things, as opposed to fleeting sensations or complex experiences. In either case, it is our desire for control that drives us to measure and manage.

We run to be surprised at least in part because it is one of the few domains where a habitual, socially-normalized activity of control allows us to surrender to something beyond our control. I would think this is true of other pursuits of mastery, like ballet, violin, chess, or painting. The person executing the task must be painfully familiar with the banality of the movements, executed time and time again, and yet, on occasion, something clicks, and that which was so rigorously scrutinized yields something deep and transcendent that cannot be measured in the terms that produced it.

XII.

I would go to the race in Croatia three days later. Getting there would require taking a train from Ljubljana through Pragersko and eventually onto Ormoz. In Ormoz I would need to hitchhike across the border to Čakovec, Croatia. The man who would give me a ride was from Ormoz and would tell me much about his life and his town before dropping me off. Have a good life, he would say. You must win the race now. Then he would drive off.

I would win the race in a new course record, a single second faster than in Slovenia. Cooling down in the dark neighborhoods of this city, where the trees looked like large foreign things, I had the distinct feeling of entering a new chapter of my life, of being ready to move on. Overcome with relief and acceptance, I would cry.

Later, I would go to the award ceremony at a nicely lit outdoor cafe and drink beer with people from the race. My photo would be in the paper and I would spend the next two days at a spa—the prize for winning the race. From there I would go to Paris, where I would have the best weekend of my young life with the girl who would become my girlfriend, Sophie.

I could not have known the full extent of these branching offshoots of wonder. Not then, cooling down at night in that Slovenian castle town, as the winner and I jogged back towards the finish line, and the music grew louder and the air smelled of smoke from the cevapi race volunteers grilled for the after-party.