Experiment: Running With Your Eyes Closed

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Running With Your Eyes Closed

Photo courtesy auspices

Before you say, “this one’s got disaster written all over it“, it‘s actually quite fun (and scary, but did I mention fun?). However, YMMV. I got a taste of running on trails without seeing much when I ran the Night Sweats Trail Marathon. With the headlamp on (and I turned it off completely for a few seconds every now and then) the world around me disappeared. Especially on the uphills, I couldn’t actually tell how far up I was heading. This had the most wonderful feedback loop in that I immediately stopped thinking about making it to the top of the hill.

Instead, I found a rhythm and a pace and just took the natural time to get to the summits.

Running With Your Eyes Closed

I also recently read somewhere that Kilian Jornet apparently memorizes the trails on the way up and then runs down eyes closed. He does this in order to increase proprioception and not having the conscious mind think about the footfalls. Dunno how true this story is, but you have to admit that it’s kinda epic. I was doing hill repeats at the Stanford Dish (see my Strava activity) yesterday and I was on my 3rd lap and figured, what the heck. YOLO and all that and I decided to give the ‘running with your eyes closed’ experiment a try.

If you haven’t run the Dish, it’s a paved path, but there’s a narrow dirt trail that hugs the asphalt. I was running in the middle of the asphalt on the way up and I closed my eyes ever so briefly. It lasted one stride before my eyes opened involuntarily. Suddenly I felt vulnerable and yet the entire focus came back to my posture, the pitter-patter, feeling the path ahead of me and listening to the sounds around me. I could feel the slightest camber on the trails, while going uphill. Pretty neat. The intense focus also completely zapped my brain from thinking about the steep climb. I slowly tried two strides and then three and by the 5th lap, I was able to get to about 7 strides before I would freak out. Seriously though? It was a neat experiment and definitely made the hill repeats go by quicker.

BTW, I just learned that there’s actually a Blindfold Run 10K in UK which also acts as a fundraiser.

Have you ever tried running with your eyes closed? How far did you make it?

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12 thoughts on “Experiment: Running With Your Eyes Closed”

  1. Great experiment! I recently befriended a “sight impared” runner on Strava that ran the Victoria marathon and qualified for Boston. There is even a full division for blind runners at CIM. Generally they run side by side with someone holding the other end of a tether that paces them and helps handle direction and obstacles. You may have also seen this, which kind of blows my mind… http://trailrunnermag.com/people/video/1549-how-a-blind-athlete-ran-the-grand-canyon-double-traverse

  4. Back in the days I had a coach who made us row with eyes closed. It’s actually pretty easy as long as you know that someone is there to make sure you won’t crash into anything. But yeah I can’t imagine closing my eyes for more than one second on any of my usual running routes.

  5. I’ve definitely done this on some of my longer runs. It feels rather meditative and introspective. I’m no longer thinking about the distance of my run, but simply my own body and how I run. Especially k
    useful when you’re tired and notice yourself losing form.

  9. Running barefoot at dusk or dawn or night is a great way to learn to trust your feet and get over fear of gravel. Running without contacts in is a great way to become roadkill.

  10. lol, i am just imagining a load of barefoots in a race suddenly closing their eyes. ‘Look,we dont need shoes or sight’ followed by DONK ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh’ BUMP’Ahhhhhhhhh’. I have tried closing my eyes,ok and i do run in the dark,ok .But i now have my feet senses,eyes,hearing etc 🙂

  12. Forgot my head torch the other day and the sun went down and I was 5 miles from home running through some really dodgy “trails” around some fields – the ruts the tractor wheels create made it scary, but I survived at speed unscathed (4:30/km pace). There’s no way it would have been nearly as straightforward had I been a heel striker though – the forefoot landing first and feeling around let me know when I was about to fall off into a rut or hole. Landing on the heel would have been high risk of broken ankles. In fact this is the first time I’ve noticed this, but when I was 20, I broke my ankle playing 5-a-side football (tendon detached from the bone when I rolled on the ankle) – for years as a heel striker, it would (very) often collapse on to the side on uneven surfaces – I got very good at bending at the knee quickly to save it. This hasn’t happened a single time since I changed to forefoot a couple of years ago.