Running

Accepting All of It

03/09/2018 by John Leave a Comment

I was running up Greybeard Mountain when I reached a state of total acceptance. I accepted the pain and fatigue in my legs along with the beauty of the snow and ice-covered trail. I accepted the thoughts that questioned why I was doing this and the lessons of humility and perseverance that running teaches me. I accepted the difficult conditions of the day: the steepness of the trail, the slippery surfaces that caused each footfall to slide a little bit backward, and the growing fatigue in my body as I neared the top of my second ascent of the mountain. To try and fight these things would be futile. Acceptance was the only answer.

With acceptance comes gratitude. I was filled with a sense of gratitude towards the mountain that had stood there for eons and would remain there long after I have left this world. It had no malice towards me, merely indifference. It was not there to be conquered, only experienced, accepted as it was.

Acceptance is not easy. Sometimes it takes moments of physical or emotional stress to force us to let down our guard and reach that state where we can fully experience all that is happening around and inside us and to just say yes to all of it.

We spend so much of our time battling the things we find difficult or unpleasant, trying with all our might to push them away, to pretend that they don’t exist. But those dark spaces remain in our periphery, tainting everything else we see until we come to the point of accepting them. We have trouble accepting even the good things in life. We wish that they were somehow better or that there were more of them instead of accepting and being grateful for what already is. In the end, we waste our time either pushing things away or pulling things towards us instead of merely accepting what is already right in front of us.

A funny thing happens when we allow ourselves to accept everything: we get a glimpse of completeness. At last, after feeling so torn and tattered we can feel whole again. If we could just accept everything as it is, how differently would we view our lives?

Based on a journal entry from 2.23.15

The Resistance

12/08/2017 by John Leave a Comment

It’s Saturday morning and I’m supposed to do a long run, but the resistance is whispering loudly in my ears this morning. It would be so easy to just get comfortable on the couch with a warm beverage and a glowing screen that promises hours of mindless distraction. What’s harder is remembering why I want/need to go running when I’m not even getting ready for anything in particular. I know the answer is that I need to be consistent in “getting ready to get ready”, but that doesn’t make it any easier to actually do it.

It’s wet out there and I wish the trails were closer. But these are just excuses. I could do it tomorrow, but that’s just putting it off. It is all about my resistance to doing what I know is best for me, the resistance against doing what is difficult or uncomfortable. I resisted getting out of bed this morning. I resisted the idea of meditating for a full 30 minutes, and now I’m resisting going out for more than a short jog around the block. What is easy for me is rarely the right thing for me to be doing.

Today, it’s a long run I am avoiding. Tomorrow it might be starting work on redesigning my website. The resistance is relentless. It halts me in my tracks and won’t let go. Unless I push back. Unless I remind myself that although resistance wants me to be comfortable, that does not make it my friend. On the contrary, whatever resistance tells me I should not be doing is probably exactly what I should do.

I guess it’s time to put on my shoes and go for that run.

Based on the ideas of Steven Pressfield as articulated in his book Do The Work

Don’t Forget the Long Run

11/03/2017 by John Leave a Comment

Last weekend, I did a 14-mile run, and by the end of it, I was crying for mercy. About a month ago, I ran 16 miles through Forest Park in Portland and I felt as if I had just finished a 50K; I found myself couch-bound for most of the rest of the day. Yup, my conditioning has fallen off a cliff since running the Bryce 100 back in 2015, but I’ve been running consistently the last several months, usually doing multiple days a week of 5 to 8 miles, with some 10-mile runs thrown in there as well. What my recent 14 and 16-mile runs have taught me is that, no matter how many short runs I may put in, when it comes to training for distance, there is no substitute for the weekly long run.

I should have known this already. Back when I lived in Asheville and regularly ran the 40-mile Mount Mitchell Challenge, I used to marvel at my running partner’s training plan, or lack of one. He would not run at all during the week due to a busy life of work and children, but every weekend, he’d get out on the trails and go long. Come race start day in February, he was always ready, even without putting in all the weekly miles that I had. The long runs were all he needed to get his body and mind ready.

I think this example probably holds true for other aspects of life as well. If you truly want to improve at something, sustained, hard efforts are necessary to make progress. So though I don’t plan on foregoing my shorter runs throughout the week, I’m going to try each week to go out and do a long run.

Are there areas in your life that you would like to improve? Are you scheduling in “long runs” in order to do so?