till I should jump peninsulas

Could I but ride indefinite
 (...)
And dwell a little everywhere,
(...)
Or better run away
With no police to follow,
Or chase me if they do,

Till I should jump peninsulas
— Emily Dickinson, XX

Today it snowed. Tomorrow I begin marathon training, and thanks to help from kind folks at the Runner's World forum, picked a plan. It sounds so competent to write that: "pick a plan".
I remember this time last year, jumping into a Higdon plan late, amping up its miles, and all the winter runs with the funny encounters typical of where I live now: the most frequent being misted greetings exchanged with a certain kind of pensioner who goes out in inclement weather, usually so glad to see someone else outside. Then, at the tip of spring, the marathon came, and although no Pheidippides, on completing it I felt like all those miles actually built a distance between me and what was ailing me. Like I'd loosened a noose.
All those constricting, suffocating situations have nothing on me when I am accumulating miles, day in and day out.


When I began running again a year and a half ago, it was a way to deal with PhD frustration - all the waiting, never instruction or opportunity, just waiting. And as an underpaid lecturer, I had no money to get out of the city that summer, so I took to running out of it.
And this year, I feel constricted again for other reasons, in part yet again to do with the fact that I have so much I need to overcome and get done if I am going to continue on the path I'm on. Every single day, I run short of time - it's been like this since the end of last summer. I can't see the end. Also, there is no guarrantee of where I'm going. I "shake the hand of doubt". Could I but ride the indefinite Or better run away.
And run indefinitely...
The soul knows: who needs a road.
Leave the maps unwound.
The quote above, and the one about dout, is by Cape Town's Signpost Sound, for a beautifully atmospheric African Attachment Salomon video featuring suspenseful shots of ultra stars.
The song reminds me of when I used to go out to Ping Chau Island in my former life as a journalist just to hike the huge slabs of shale - medicine for the eyes after staring at a computer screen for hours on end. The shale was totally untouched by manmade paths, just a flat expanse where I could hike in any which way, uninformed by suggested direction, like Dickinson writes,
And row in nowhere all day long, 
And anchor off the bar

Brush: Ewansim via DeviantArt.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

pursues you in your flight

Image
This will be a brief post because during this unusual window of recreational off-time, I have decided to keep up with the WS100 updates. Like, I feel life is like a race now, so it's therapeutic to watch a race, just like once upon a time, in the midst of giving too many exams, I felt cured by watching "judge shows", specifically "Chopped", which depersonalised my understanding that assessment can verge on the arbitrary. But let's talk about races. Specifically, the feeling of where the good old college try in the race is foiled by sudden changes to the course, different from what was trained for. This is all figurative - but two running-based passages got me back on track in my losing 'race', which is why I thought I would write about it on this blog. First, were parts of AJW's WSJ100 speech , which inspired my will to continue with relentless forward motion. He says things like: "I want you to go into the race confident, resilient, and f
Keep reading

The Squite Workout

Image
The idea of speeding up is less appealing to me than stretching runs into the far distance. Sometimes I look at the gathering of trees in the hills that I run to and recognize where I'd once stored thoughts of what had been ailing me and am reminded of how enormous nature is, capable of absorbing so much thought and still go far beyond it, when those same thoughts, when trapped inside my mind, become unwieldy. Once in the forest, they blend in and gradually disappear: replaced with an almost inert snail on the path, syrupy summer air, the call of fighting jays. They beckon the mind out of itself and into the intricacies of creatures, plants, wind, weather. A unity is achieved, a balance restored. I occasionally speed up when I feel like it though, like to chase or pass the occasional other runner I encounter. But this month, I got a new training partner. It was after the rain. I was slogging up the steep, barely-a-trail that cuts straight up through the more tangled trees to the
Keep reading

vampire moths!

Image
I am still trying to shake off that unwanted running buddy of midsection kilograms - and marvel at how I have less of an issue showing off my running-induced blue toes in sandals than coping with the war trophy of the end-of-term stomach (induced by sleepless nights writing, marking, or invigilating). The blog post I had been composing was supposed to be about the pleasure of running far enough to see swans puff themselves out like cumuli on hot days, or the pheasant I found that lives in a park; the indescribable pleasure of feeling the weather and its hourly changes as opposed to intellectually understanding what it says in an app. But what finally prompted me to open this Compose page were the two vampire moth bites I sustained - which frightened me so much, that I now prefer to do regular 17 mile runs on a totally different route in order to avoid the chance of seeing these insects again, for a time. One day, I was running along, minding my own business, when I felt something on
Keep reading