A Taste of Glory

I lived up to my own expectations and felt Maslow's peak experience.

When I woke up on the day of the Newport marathon, I hadn’t planned on running 26.2 miles in under four hours. In the five months of training, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind once. When I decided to go for it, it was an hour before the start of the race, and I was staring at a plate of scrambled eggs. If I could finish a marathon in less than four hours, I thought, maybe it would trigger something.

The truth is: I don’t run to get in shape. It’s not my escape or meditation. I run to pursue what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience,” a feeling of perfection. Time slows down during a peak experience. For that reason, it’s often associated with flow state, the feeling of being totally absorbed in an activity. Maslow sometimes referred to a peak experience as the “oceanic feeling.” Your consciousness expands. You feel interconnected. At peace. But, as Maslow discovered, these experiences are elusive. According to the psychologist, only two percent of the population …