What happens when you ditch all the distractions and take running back to its purest form? That’s exactly what the ASICS Blackout track experiment – dropping runners onto a 150m pitch-dark track with nothing but white noise and their own thoughts for company – has been trying to find out. A few weeks back @asicseurope invited me down to this temporary track to give it a go. 🏃♂️🏃♂️ My immediate reaction was that I didn't think I'd enjoy running repetitive loops in dark isolation but to my surprise I found the whole thing really quite liberating. As a running tech writer I'm very much plugged into the matrix when I run and so having all of the trackers and monitors removed felt odd at first but I loved the metronomic loops and the way my thoughts changed mid-run as I started to accept that I didn't know when my time would be up, how many laps I'd done or what pace I was running. I settled into a rhythm that it can be hard to find when you're constantly on the watch. Or listening to European Dance Music at full volume. 🏃♂️🏃♂️ if you want to read more on what I learnt from running in the dark, and what the ASICS experiment revealed about distractions and performance, I've just put a post up on manvmiles.co.uk. #asicsblackout #mindfulrunning